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This chapter looks at the impact of the growing multiracial college student population on college campuses and how campus environments influence them. It describes the importance of campus racial climate for multiracial students and how they navigate potentially hostile structures and interactions on college campuses, including having to deal with microaggressions and monoracism. The chapter concludes with recommendations related to recommendations on service delivery programming for students, institution-level policies, and system-wide policies that impact multiracial students.

This chapter examines how the sometimes subtle, sometimes overt moments of hostility between Latino and non-Latino residents of Lafayette emerged in the immigration debate of 2006. It considers the lived moments of conflict and confrontation as well as the social borders and boundaries set up throughout Lafayette. It analyzes the responses of Latinas and Latinos regarding gendered differences that manifested in multiple microaggressions, as well as Walmart's role as a space of interaction in the perceptions of Latinos and non-Latinos regarding their daily routines. It also discusses the experiences of second-generation Latinos who were targeted with slurs, negative interactions, and traumatic moments of denied belonging.

Campuses have long had unwritten rules about what can and can’t be said. But in recent years, social media have emerged as a powerful tool in academia both for direct censorship and for strengthening the incentives for self-censorship. Much of contemporary academic discourse is based on three foundational beliefs that are enforced in part through social media. The beliefs are grounded in good intentions and reflect understandable responses to historical and continuing societal wrongs. But when they are enforced in absolutist and uncompromising terms, they can unreasonably constrain discourse on issues that in fact merit more nuanced analysis.

The culture on many campuses centers around competing claims of harm. Relatedly, accusations of bias are one of the most potent and commonly deployed weapons used to attack anyone viewed as asserting opinions that run afoul of any of the three beliefs. In some respects, being a member of a campus community—whether as a student, adjunct or full-time faculty member, or staff member—is like living in an authoritarian country. People in campus communities learn to filter their speech to avoid saying or presenting anything that might be viewed as upsetting and lead to complaints and perhaps to formal disciplinary proceedings. People who are accused of transgressions engage in ritualized apologies to avoid permanent banishment.

An important facet of the story of the poetics of everyday life this book has traced is increasing commitment to enhancing our attentiveness to the daily. Recent everyday-life poets have set out to explore and stretch the boundaries of poetry and aesthetic form to make visible the operations of gender, race, sexuality, and capitalism in daily life. As an example of this development, the chapter provides a brief discussion of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Reminding us that the everyday is always an embodied, situated phenomenon, Rankine’s book powerfully evokes the traumatic experience of “everyday racism,” documenting microaggressions that continuously interrupt and punctuate daily life for people of color.

This chapter addresses the charge, implicit in justice-based arguments for intellectual “safe spaces” on college campuses, that protecting academic freedom undermines equality of educational opportunity for students targeted by harmful expression. The discussion clarifies this argument’s central concepts and assumptions, including the concepts of expressive harm, psychological trauma, and “triggers”; the notions of microaggression and implicit bias; and the idea (articulated in the work of Jeremy Waldron) that there is a connection between a community’s “aesthetics” and its capacity to assure its members of respectful consideration. It is argued that limiting or eliminating academic freedom would stifle the critical reflection and robust debate most likely to promote justice in the face of contemporary challenges. A university that is safe for robust debate about justice cannot provide the comforts of “home.”

One popular line of thought in the media holds that academic freedom of speech is under threat from politically correct students and universities. In this chapter, it is argued that this debate is enhanced by enriching our range of concepts for thinking about freedom of speech. While silencing is an important concept, it’s a crude tool for thinking through these complex issues. Several new categories are introduced, presenting uncontroversial instances of each before working through how they apply to the more controversial instances that are the main focus. Using this new framework, it is argued that content warnings and the calling out of microaggressions do not present a significant threat to academic freedom of speech. However, there is a legitimate reason that they may appear to do so: the increasingly insecure employment structure of academia means that a wide variety of student preferences can have a damaging effect on pedagogical freedom.

Free speech and academic freedom are vitally important values. According to growing media reports, however, they are under attack and they are under attack in the exact place where they ought to be most protected: in our institutions of higher learning. This chapter explores two phenomena alleged to silence people on academic campuses: politically correct culture and microaggressions. These sorts of silencing involve a person deciding against speaking and deciding this because of the speaker’s beliefs about how the audience would respond to her speaking. As this chapter will show, not all cases of choosing to remain silent are on a par; the issues are complex but each sort of these two sorts of academic silencing is a real possibility.

The introduction of Degrees of Difference argues that while there exists research on women of color professors and women of color in the STEM fields, work on women of color in graduate school, particularly scholarship that places women across disciplines and geographical borders in conversation with each other is rare. Yet women of color in graduate school often encounter similar struggles and roadblocks to success, whether it is an external issue such as racism and a lack of support from a department or institution, or an internal struggle with alienation and imposter syndrome felt by many women of color in higher education. The introduction engages with the concept of the feminist killjoy to explain the raw, unapologetic narratives featured within the book as well as the feminist killjoy’s ability to be transformative by bringing hidden, hard truths to light in order to create change.

This chapter proposes the appropriation of pervasive gendered pejoratives, such as sett bmit ragel, conjuring their inherent power not only to raise the awareness of the agencies often inadvertently participating in microaggressions in U.S. academy, but also to dismantle the patriarchal systems of oppression that might be perpetuated by the continuous use of such pejoratives. To expose instances of interpersonal and systematic microaggressions that the author experienced as an Arab Muslim woman of color in academia, four vignettes are presented and grounded in current scholarship. The chapter concludes with a call to the academy, suggesting how it might cultivate spaces for Arab women to gain the courage to share our own experiences with microaggressions.

This chapter features a critical race counterstory from an Asian American womxn of color about her doctoral education and graduate school socialization. Framed within critical race theory, the author chronicles racial microaggressions she endured as a first-year higher education doctoral student. The author describes the ways in which the model minority myth is wielded as a tool of white supremacy and how the pervasive stereotype overlaps with the imposter syndrome to manifest in a unique oppression targeting Asian American graduate students. The author draws inspiration from Asian American activist Grace Lee Boggs, which helps her resist the intersectional oppression of white supremacy and patriarchy present within academia. The chapter concludes with recommendations to support womxn of color graduate students.

Weaving together the chapters in Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color and Indigenous Women on Graduate School is a commitment to demonstrate how women of color cultivate community and a sense of self, while simultaneously resisting oppression and microaggression in order to survive and thrive in a space that was never meant for them to succeed. The Epilogue calls attention to how the contributors exist in conversation with one another, unleashing their inner feminist killjoy as they speak to the sense of alienation experienced as a result of lack of understanding faced within cohorts, departments, and families. At the same time, these women reveal the mechanisms that allowed them to find support in friends, colleagues, and mentors in order to negotiate imposter syndrome and develop a sense of belonging in the academy. The conclusion illuminates strategies that women of color employ as they resist attempts of further marginalization within the academy.