Abstract
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are both often assumed to offer students of color a safer environment for learning than their primarily white institutional counterparts while also facing harsh suspicion in terms of their educational quality and cultural value. Interrogating these readings, this study uses the critical interpersonal and family communication (CIFC) framework and relational dialectics theory (RDT) 2.0 to identify competing discourses emergent within meaning-making processes of Black students attending rural iterations of such institutions. By interviewing twenty Black students currently enrolled in a rural HBCU, this work spotlights unique, power-laden interconnections across the competing discourses of rural whiteness, as marked by rugged individualism, conservative political ideology, and perceived hostility towards Black epistemologies, and the urban Blackness of students now occupying such spaces. This project identifies the dominant discourse that HBCUs are inferior, as well as two competing discourses students draw upon as they construct meaning of the rural HBCU: the discourse that these institutions celebrate Blackness, and the discourse that they problematically draw race into relief. This work uncloaks the themes constituting each of the two discourses, and highlights various forms of discursive interplay participants use to negotiate the meaning of these institutions, including entertaining, countering, negating, naturalization, and pacification.
Keywords
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have a significant history in U.S. higher education. Developed in response to systemic barriers imposed on Black citizens, HBCUs have provided pathways toward educational liberation in a society partially constituted by that community’s subjugation. HBCUs generally have cheaper tuition rates (Clark, 2009), an appealing feature given that 70% of their students are low income (Quinton, 2014). This accessibility has been instrumental for producing Black graduates (Richards & Awokoya, 2012), including Black scholars, lawyers, and doctors (Gasman, 2013). However, HBCUs are often regarded as inferior compared to primarily white institutions (PWI) (Sav, 2010) and continue to be underfunded (Arroyo & Gasman, 2014). The tides may be turning for these institutions, though. Forbes coined 2020 “The Year of the HBCU,” and cited the Presidential election, contemporary racial justice movements, a record-breaking year for private monetary gifts to HBCUs, and a year of historical racial firsts for doing so (Nietzel, 2021). While it is heartening to witness HBCUs receive the recognition they deserve, it is crucial to remain mindful of the unique challenges faced by these institutions and their students.
Although HBCUs promote academic success and social mobility (Hardy et al., 2019), it is important to avoid making assumptions about them simply because they are Black-serving organizations, as doing so positions them as static and, subsequently, thwarts organizational progress. As Arroyo and Gasman (2014) write of HBCUs, “we know significant differences separate them” (p. 62). This study interrogates one overlooked yet influential element informing student sensemaking processes: geo-cultural environments and the discourses constituting them. Most research on HBCU student experience assumes these institutions are in locations conducive to Black success, such as urban cities (i.e., Palmer et al., 2010). However, many HBCUs reside in rural states and away from metropolitan areas (HBCU Lifestyle, 2021) typically associated with progressive politics (Pew Research Center, 2014) helpful for enabling Black achievement.
Centering the HBCU as the semantic object (Baxter, 2011), this project investigates the meaning/s of the HBCU that circulate in talk of students of color attending rural iterations of these institutions, revealing how such meanings are contested and up for debate at the cultural level. More specifically, this work has two primary research questions: RQ 1: What competing discourses, if any, shape and establish meaning for Black students attending rural HBCUs? RQ 2: What forms of discursive interplay constitute experiences with and understanding of a rural HBCU?
HBCUs have “always navigated the balance between identity and participation in education African American students for engagement and success in the wider context of American society,” (Foster, 2001, p. 616) indicating these institutions are constituted by, in part, dialogic friction within and across discourses of race, autonomy, assimilation, and ideology.
To further explore HBCUs as discursively constructed tension-centered organizations, this project turns to critical interpersonal and family communication (CIFC) broadly, and relational dialectics theory (RDT) 2.0, specifically, to explore the ways power-laden discursive competition is intrinsic to HBCUs and the sensemaking processes of their students. Because it recognizes that “meaning of some phenomenon emerges in the moment through the interplay or struggle of competing possibilities of meaning” (Baxter et al., 2021, p. 7), RDT 2.0 offers a productive analytic to explore the study’s RQs. Moreover, this project’s commitment to intersectional social equity makes RDT 2.0 an especially useful framework given that, as Dennis Mumby (1996) writes, “if subjectivity is the effect of various discursive practices, then discourse can be analyzed in terms of the various ways in which it both privileges and marginalizes different social groups” (p. 266). To best capture potential discourses in/forming their experiences, the study utilizes qualitative interviews with twenty students enrolled in a rural HBCU.
HBCUs, Rurality, and Contested Meaning
Dominant discourses of anti-Blackness in the U.S. (Dumas, 2016) produce low academic expectations of Black students (Gershenson et al., 2016). Racist ideologies, as Duncan (2003) writes, boil down to an emphasis on Otherness, noting that “with the Self in this case referring to the in-group/‘own race’, and the Other referring to the out-group(s)/‘other race(s)’—that racism is reproduced and justified” (p. 139). But self and other do not operate independently. As Miles (1989) argues, racism ‘‘has a dialectical character insofar as the representation of the Other serves simultaneously to refract a representation of the Self’’ (p. 79), with such intertwined contradiction also speaking to characteristics of HBCUs. The value of HBCUs has historically been disputed. Necessitated by racist ideologies and legislation (Albritton, 2012), HBCUs were established in response to the specific needs of Black people in the nineteenth century, mostly after the Civil War (Albritton, 2012). Since their inception, the educational quality offered by HBCUs has remained a relatively consistent point of inquiry.
These challenges have included matters related to course offerings (Allen et al., 2007), accreditation (Allen & Jewell, 2002), and funding (Albritton, 2012), among others, resulting in unfair comparisons to PWIs (Bracey, 2017). HBCUs’ supposed inferiority is likely shaped by rhetorics, discourses, and ideologies upholding social constructions of racial difference (Fanon, 2016). Creating an educational avenue for Black people at a time when they were either legally barred from or only recently permitted to learn to read and write would inevitably present challenges. When coupled with consistent erasure among white-targeted media, HBCUs are constructed not only as symbolic of Blackness, writ large, but as contradictory to PWIs and, by extension, whiteness, marking these institutions as a major discursive constituent for racial Otherness within U.S cultural and educational frameworks.
Contrasting dominant discourses manufactured by primarily white demographics in and beyond the field of education (Bracey, 2017), research shows HBCUs provide superior learning environments than PWIs for Black students (Nichols & Evans-Bell, 2017), especially men (Palmer et al., 2010). These environments enhance leadership skills and opportunities (Hotchkins, 2017) and contribute to regional economies (Hotchkins, 2017). HBCUs also offer increased diversity in academic programs like STEM (Winkle-Wagner & McCoy, 2018), support for student athletes (Cooper et al., 2017), and increased graduation outcomes (Wilson, 2007). Although they impact “the future of life and activity in the nation’s urban centers” [emphasis added here] (Foster, 2001, p. 613), a disproportionate number of HBCUs, however, especially public and land-granting institutions, are in the rural south (Mykerezi & Mills, 2004), no doubt because of the region’s historied draconian attitudes about and treatment of non-white bodies. And while extant research spotlights struggles faced by Black students attending PWIs (Payne & Suddler, 2014), little work examines the difficulties faced by Black students attending HBCUs in white-dominated areas.
Many states hosting HBCUs are marked by conservative Red-State politics and rural racism (Han et al., 2020), likely a “reflection of deep-seated religiosity and the lack of direct exposure to urban ideas, values, and institutions” (Lichter & Brown, 2011, p. 570). These logics cyclically draw from and contribute to broader discourses in which “the terms rural and urban often take on racially coded meanings, with rural implying white and urban signifying not-white” Sierk (2017), p. 344). To make matters more complex, HBCUs now face increasing white enrollment and faculty (Shorette & Arroyo, 2015), prompting unique considerations concerning future development. This remains especially pressing when recognizing that, racially, HBCUs’ power structure is an inversion of broader society’s (Louis, 2015). To ensure their survival, many rural HBCUs must market themselves not only to urban Black students, but to local, often low-income, first-generation white students (Butrymowicz, 2014). And, given that racism negatively impacts mental health and academic achievements (Brody et al., 2006), it is sensical to deduce that Black students enrolled at Black institutions within predominantly white, conservative spaces may experience contradiction when identifying coherent meanings of these schools.
CIFC and RDT 2.0
To best identify competing discourses vying for meaning(s) in structuring of rural HBCUs, a critical approach to relating and sensemaking is necessary. Responding to overwhelmingly positivistic paradigms in interpersonal and family communication (IFC) research (Braithwaite et al., 2015), critical IFC (CIFC) offers a disciplinary turn galvanized by an emphasis on power, stronger connections between discourse and structure, and an openness to critique and transformation (Suter & Norwood, 2017). CIFC calls attention to social structures of inequality and the ways relationships (re)produce and are produced by those systems (Moore & Manning, 2019) and is invested in connections between individual practices and systemic injustice (Brewer, 2019). CIFC embraces a social approach to communication in which relationships are socially constructed and historically situated (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1995), and treats communication as constitutive (Manning, 2014), pairing well with dialogic approaches to relating and discourse, which also advocate a constitutive rather than representational view of communication (Baxter, 2011).
A contemporary iteration of one of IFC’s most enduring frameworks, RDT, embraces an explicitly critical, postmodern turn through the development of RDT 2.0 (Baxter, 2011). This adaptation aligns itself with criticality by giving focus to the “dynamic push–pull of dominant and subordinate communicative codes that struggle to enunciate themselves through relational communication” (Rudick & Golsan, 2014, p. 268) and collapsing the public-private divide (Baxter, 2011). Baxter et al. (2021) argue that RDT 2.0 departs from its theoretical predecessor by giving greater attention to (1) competing discourses, (2) the utterance chain, (3) interplay of discourses beyond those concerning autonomy, openness, and predictability, (4) the “recognition that discourses likely do not hold equal power in their capacity to determine meaning” (pp. 8–9), and (5) contrapuntal analysis as a useful research method.
Discursive Interplay
Following Bakhtin’s (1981) belief that “every utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal, as well as centripetal forces, are brought to bear” (p. 272), 2.0 is driven by three assumptions. First, meaning is constructed through the interplay of competing discourses. This calls upon scholars to abandon RDT’s original objective of identifying dialectics, and, instead, focus on how specific discourses are either prioritized (centripetal) or marginalized (centrifugal) during talk (Suter & Norwood, 2017), which “constitute hegemonic assumptions” (Hintz & Brown, 2020, p. 5). “Discourse” is understood as a “system of meaning or ideology that circulates within a culture at large” (Wolfe & Scharp, 2022, p. 5). Centripetal discourses signify those at the center and remain “dominant and legitimated, and constitute what is perceived as culturally or relationally normal or natural” (Sahlstein Parcell & Baker, 2018, p. 4). Centrifugal discourses mark those cast towards the periphery, perceived as deviant (Suter, 2018), and treated as irregular.
Second, every utterance exists within a larger chain where statements are tethered to prior and future utterances (Baxter & Norwood, 2015). As Baxter (2011) writes, there is “nothing autonomous about a speaker’s utterance” (p. 12). Four types of “links” are cast along two axes: distal (cultural) and proximal (relational), with both structured temporally (already vs. not-yet-spoken) (Baxter, 2011). Distal links concern broader discourses that “already exist within the larger culture or society and animate, directly or indirectly, individuals’ talk” (Brummett, 2016, p. 774), while proximal links denote idiosyncratic relationships and their history. Both links draw from what has been previously uttered, i.e., already spoken links “present in the discourse (or conversation) that is happening at the time” (Simmons et al., 2013, p. 378), and anticipate future responses, i.e., those not-yet-spoken (Baxter, 2011).
Third, because they struggle to create meaning, discourses are in perpetual change on a spectrum characterized by the competing poles of monologic versus dialogic talk (Wolfe & Scharp, 2022). Monologue recognizes a singular discourse present in an utterance, foreclosing alternatives (Baxter, 2011). Dialogic contraction (Baxter, 2011) shuts down alternatives and includes disqualification, naturalization, pacification, neutralization, topic avoidance, and subjectification. Disqualification means that an utterance is ignored because its speaker is perceived to lack expertise of or experience with the topic. Naturalization occurs when an “utterance is voiced as the way things are” (Wolfe & Scharp, 2022, p. 7), with pacification perceiving difference as impossible to resolve, neutralization positioning utterances as objective, and subjectification suggesting that centrifugal discourses are merely an option, thus concretizing their status as marginal rather than neutral or natural.
For dialogically expansive utterances (Wolfe & Scharp, 2022), both dominant and minority discourses interact to create meaning through discursive interplay. Called diachronic separation, this can occur temporally with the privileged discourse changing across time, situation (Wenzel & Poynter, 2014), or setting (Baxter, 2011). Alternatively, synchronic interplay (Baxter, 2011) involves the “mixing of and struggle between multiple discourses at a given point in time” (Wenzel & Poynter, 2014, p. 151–2). Interplay can take various forms including negating (eschewing a discourse), entertaining (multiple truths acknowledged), countering (certain elements of a discourse are legitimized yet one’s own discourse is prioritized), or transformation and discursive hybridity (Scharp & Thomas, 2017), when competing discourses “combine to make new meanings related to those discourses” (Baxter et al., 2021).
It is therefore surmised that its emphasis on (1) difference, (2) hierarchical stratification (3) coalescing cultural ideologies and relational sensitizing, and (4) discursive interplay makes RDT 2.0 a productive framework for approaching this project’s primary RQs: RQ1: What competing discourses, if any, shape and establish meaning for Black students attending rural HBCUs? RQ 2: What forms of discursive interplay constitute experiences with and understanding of a rural HBCU?
Methods
Positionality Statement
As the leader of a project informed by social justice and equity, it is important to first offer readers a brief description of my positionality as it potentially informs the research, including data collection and analysis. I am an early career Caucasian cis male who identifies as gay and am an Assistant Professor of communication studies at a smaller HBCU situated in the Midwest.
Participant Information
Following IRB approval, I sought individual interviews with students enrolled at an HBCU in a state often categorized as both Midwestern and southern (Official City Sites, 2017). The university is small, with roughly 2,400 students comprised of 59.6% women and 40.4% men. The school is 59.6% Black/African American, 27.1% white, and 13.3% ‘other’ (College Factual, 2021). I use the term ‘rural’ to connote areas with 75,000 or less residents and/or located one or more hours from a metropolitan city (Bowen et al., 2004). The HBCU’s home state is 83% white and 11.8% Black, with the university’s residential county being 83.7% white (United States Census Bureau, 2021). Interestingly—and importantly to note—the host state, which houses two HBCUs, was placed on a travel advisory list by the NAACP in 2017. The organization states that Black visitors may have their civil rights violated due to a “string of troubling events” statewide, including a State Attorney General report finding that “African Americans were stopped by traffic officers 75% more often than Caucasian drivers, and at a rate disproportionate to their makeup in the state’s population” (Talkoff, 2017). The advisory is still in effect at the time of this study’s publication.
Participants had to be (1) currently enrolled in a rural HBCU and (2) identify as Black, African American, or African. 20 interviews were conducted. All participants attended the researcher’s institution at the time of the interviews. The participant pool is as follows: 14 (n = 70%) women and 6 (n = 30%) men. Nine (n = 45%) self-identified as “Black/African American,” eight (n = 40%) as “African American,” and one participant (n = 5%) each identified as Asian, Black, and African, respectively. 1 Average participant age was 20.9, with a median of 20.16 (n = 80%). participants identified as middle class, while three (n = 15%) identified as working or lower class, and one (n = 5%) identified as upper-middle class. All but one participant (n = 95%) were from a city with a population of 300,000 or more. 10 participants (n = 50%) were first-generation college students.
Data Collection
Participation was promoted by both the primary researcher and the institution’s internal marketing email list serving faculty, staff, and students. Participation was voluntary and no financial compensation was provided. Participants were also obtained through snowball sampling (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). Participants were given a consent form detailing the mission and protocols of the study prior to the interview, which were then conducted via Zoom. An interview guide was created to offer a list of topics and questions (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). The study utilized a semi-structured approach to interviewing (Maxwell, 2013), providing access to narratives and personal sensemaking accounts (Tracy et al., 2006). Interviews also focused on significant moments in the participants’ lives, as narratives about turning points can yield talk atypical in everyday experiences (Sahlstein Parcell, 2013). Interviews lasted between 35 minutes and one hour. The researcher transcribed all interviews following data collection. Participants were assigned pseudonyms, all identifiers were altered, and both the video and audio files were deleted following transcription.
Contrapuntal Analysis
The study utilized contrapuntal analysis (CA) to render more intelligible the semantic object via discursive interplay. An intertextual approach to discourse analysis, CA targets individual sensitizing practices by illustrating how a given text holds more than two interpretations, or discourses, relevant to a specific semantic object. Influenced by Bakhtin’s (1984) notion of double-voiced discourses, CA examines the discursive competition between dominant and marginalized discourses (Baxter, 2011; Suter, 2018) and is, as such, the primary method associated with RDT 2.0 (Baxter, 2011). CA is characteristic of more critically oriented research, both marking a “scholarly attendance to counter points that exist alongside and in response to other counterpoints, or understandings” (p. 1) while acknowledging that “dialectical tensions are rarely constituted on an equal discursive playing field” (Baxter & Scharp, 2015, p. 4).
CA is a three-step process (Baxter, 2011). The first step involves the researcher(s) independently selecting texts, which are the “constitutive elements of discourses” (Baxter et al., 2012, p. 60), and subsequently identifying data themes within them. During this initial phase I carefully read and analyzed all participant transcript data, which required an initial familiarity with the data followed by identifying emergent themes, creating initial coding categories, reviewing themes, naming themes, and identifying exemplars (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Baxter (2011) argues researchers should use a “variety of methods to understand both the culture and the relational history in which a given textual utterance is embedded” (p. 159), meaning that there is an almost infinite bank from which researchers may draw when detecting and crystalizing data themes. Coding was informed by researcher personal experience and scholarly knowledge, motivated by the study’s RQs, and invested in deciphering “how the semantic object [the HBCU] is being constructed—in a given moment” (p. 2). Coding was also driven by a desire to capture phenomena that “reproduce power and inequalities in society” (Perakyla & Ruusuvuori, 2011, p. 531). For example, I was attentive to moments of talk that either overtly or covertly implied hierarchical practices, such as disidentification or alteration, and how that talk suggested allegiance to and/or awareness of dominant cultural and discursive phenomena.
During coding, theoretical memos (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011) were created to evaluate categorical and thematic developments. The researcher employed the constant-comparative method (CCM), allowing thematic categories to emerge and be re/defined by a sole researcher (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011) via multiple readings (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). CCM acknowledges the subjective nature of qualitative research and is focused more on internal validity and contextual understanding than objective generalizability (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Thematic saturation was achieved once reemergence of themes was identified and no additional modifications were made to existing categories (Baxter, et al., 2012).
CA’s second step is locating competing discourses among identified emergent themes (Baxter, 2011). This can be accomplished by either examining discourse markers (Baxter, 2011) like “at the same time” or “yet,” which imply contrast within meaning-making contexts, or by showing how discourses typically compete with one another in the broader culture (Baxter, 2011). For example, the previously discussed discourses associating rurality with whiteness. Excerpts implying contradiction underwent additional coding and categorizing to detect emergent discursive polarities in participant narratives (Merriam, 2009). Those moments were then used to identify master or meta discourses within the text (those that are likely already familiar to individuals due to their taken-for-granted-ness), determine which and how discourses interplay with one another, and identify which discourses are dominant and which are subordinate (Sahlstein Parcell & Baker, 2018).
Following “discourse identification” (Wolfe & Scharp, 2022, p. 7), efforts were made to then discern discursive interplay within those struggles—the third and final component of CA. To identify interplay, I was similarly attentive to the ways multiple discourses were potentially present in a singular utterance, as evidenced through discursive markers illustrating contrast or tension, (Baxter, 2011). For example, synchronic interplay, as typically evidenced through the markers of entertaining, countering, or negating, was identified when utterances either acknowledged the possibility of multiple discourses, replaced another discourse through phrases such as “but” or “even,” or when the centrifugal discourse outright rejects the centripetal discourse (Baxter et al., 2021). Contraction appears in various forms including disqualification, naturalization, topic avoidance, subjectification, and pacification (Baxter, 2011), and is identified, for example, when utterances are either disregarded or voiced as the way things are.
This concluding stage involves reviewing overarching themes, constructing typologies, and specifying their constituents (Manning & Kunkel, 2013), always cognizant of the ways identified discourses clash with one another to create meaning. Communicators co-construct a symbolic plane of sorts (RDT 2.0’s utterance chain) in which meaning-making is negotiated and, as Brummett (2016) writes, discourses representing such meanings “fall along a continuum between monologue and true dialogue, with polemic interplay occupying a place on the continuum where discourses tend to aggregate” (p. 776). It is within that continuum in which two or more meanings are present, and CA’s final objective is to discern what negotiation strategies individuals use to make meaning and which discourse/s operate at the center.
Results
Contrapuntal analysis identified three interrelated discourses, producing an unusual form of triadic interplay in the construction of rural HBCUs. Analysis reveals that the dominant discourse creating meaning for the rural HBCU among Black students is the Discourse of HBCUs as Inferior (DI). Moreover, results also detected two marginal discourses that compete with the dominant discourse, further establishing—and uncloaking the contested—meanings of the rural HBCU: the Discourse of Rural HBCUs as Celebrating Blackness (DCB) and the Discourse of Rural HBCUs as Drawing Race into Relief (DRR), with both fused through three themes.
Discourse of HBCUs as Inferior
The analytical process of unfolding reveals that the dominant discourse surrounding meaning construction for HBCUs is that such institutions are inferior to their PWI counterparts. While participants did not explicitly make such claims, their utterances regarding meaning-making about these institutions suggest, through unfolding, a cognitive recognition of distal already-spoken discourses laden with racist ideology and the ways such ideology permeates assessment of Black-affiliated organizations. Unfolding, which allows researchers to analyze what participants acknowledge in their statements (Wolfe & Scharp, 2022, p. 10), is an “idiosyncratic (to the particular corpus) process whereby authors seek to understand the distal already-spoken and not-yet-spoken links of the utterance chain” (Scharp & Thomas, 2020, p. 7). Accordingly, unfolding situated participant utterances “within a larger conversation and imagining them as part of an utterance chain that responds to both previous and anticipated utterances” (Brummett, 2016, p. 6), and asked “What could have been said in the ‘prior utterance’ (the ‘already spoken’) to make this particular utterance intelligible?” (Baxter et al., 2012, p. 62).
Participants spoke of HBCUs in ways that cast light on broader, distal discourses constructed not only through racial difference, but hierarchical racial hegemony. Many participant utterances were underpinned by a notable need to defend and rationalize these institutions, echoing the intrapsychic, political, cultural, and relational labor demanded of many Black U.S. Americans in pursuit of individual, political, and systemic legitimacy and recognition. In this way, the HBCU, as semantic object, symbolically functions as a foil not only within an educational context in relation to PWIs, but within the broader cultural nexus juxtaposed against dominant discourses of whiteness and white supremacy. Indeed, the dominant discourse of HBCU inferiority positions these institutions as a powerful, and, perhaps, threating, immersion of Blackness into a context historically constructed via and preserved through centripetal discourses of white domination. Participant utterances suggest a keen awareness of such dominant distal discourses of racial hegemony, and meanings of the HBCU are unable to be constructed autonomously from those governing discursive ideologies. In response to the dominant discourse contending the inferiority of Black-affiliated organizations, results reveal two competing, marginal discourses taken up by Black students that function as centrifugal discursive counterpoints, with both upholding an unfolded, complex sense of discontent and insecurity inflicted by and inflected through the authoritative discourse.
Discourse of Rural HBCUs as Celebrating Blackness
The rural HBCU is a celebration of Blackness. This Discourse is constituted in three ways: (1) the HBCU means home, (2) the HBCU means authenticity, and (3) the HBCU means education. When combined, these themes form a coherent meaning of HBCUs shaped by broader distal discourses of racial harmony and apoliticism.
The Rural HBCU Means Home
Multiple participants spoke of the rural HBCU as a vital hub for creating not just a physical space to live and learn, but feelings of home as they now lived and studied away from their places of origin. This orientation to “home,” as gestured by the rural HBCU, is one protecting and celebrating Blackness in an environment that may otherwise leave it precarious and vulnerable. This folds into the DCB a component positioning the HBCU as an object of connection, comfort, and inclusion. Janese noted, “it [the HBCU] just felt like home [when she first arrived]. I’m around a lot of people that look like me, talk like me. We have similar backgrounds. Just being on campus, it feels really homey.” This account simultaneously recognizes the distal cultural backdrop in which the rural HBCU is situated while subtly implying, through statements like “look like me,” the interpersonal and social upheavals associated with those realities and the rural HBCU operating as a balm for such conditions.
The Rural HBCU Means Authenticity
The second emergent theme in the DCB is that participants interpret rural HBCUs as sites where they can be their most authentic selves. Jessica elaborated that, when at school:
I don’t have to turn my switch on. I can just be myself. It’s not a thing where I have to go back and forth. That’s really refreshing, especially for young Black African Americans, because there’s not a lot of places where you can actually do that.
This theme is established through the recognition that many areas, including rural and white-dominated ones, can be hostile to identities not locally considered “normal.” Accordingly, the rural HBCU operates as an organization welcoming to those identities and performances. This, in turn, structures the university not only as a temporary space to obtain an education, but a critical component in the process of developing a strong self-concept in a culture that may otherwise discourage such.
The Rural HBCU Means Unique Educational Contexts
This final theme constructing the DCB positions rural HBCUs not only as unique in their geographic placement, but as affording students educational diversity and opportunities not found elsewhere. For example, Adasha said that “some of the white students in class don’t know about the topics [that may be more Black-centered], so it’s a great way to get them to learn about our culture. They [faculty] teach us more about our color and teach white students more about our culture as well.” This interpretation of the rural HBCU establishes its meaning as an educational hub defined by unique educational-cultural contexts.
Discourse of Rural HBCUs as Drawing Race into Relief
The centrifugal discourse was characterized by three themes: The rural HBCU means (1) incompatible cultural fusion, (2) disparate public performances of self, and (3) conditional mobility. While attitudes and themes affiliated with the DCB were generally more celebratory of cultural differences, the DRR was more suspicious and critical of them, positioning them as adversities to be overcome. Participant Zekial, for example, acknowledged that rural HBCUs are helpful for empowering marginalized identities. However, rather than praising the university for its hospitality, Zekial shifted attention by critiquing the distal cultural conditions necessitating such a pronounced invitational spirit: “We celebrate our Blackness on campus and only on campus. We don’t have events off campus or anything. It’s like, all here. Even our parties are here. We keep it all here,” echoing sentiments of many participants. This spotlights an important double-bind unique to rural HBCUs: while they do elevate Black visibility in racially homogeneous areas, presence is conditional and demands complex student negotiations.
The Rural HBCU Means Incompatible Cultural Fusion
The DRR’s first theme is the perceived incompatibility of the HBCU and the rural, white-dominated area in which it is embedded. Participants spoke of rurally situated Blackness in ways that suggest it functions not as its own autonomous discourse constituted through independent elements, but rather as one which relies upon centripetal discourses of whiteness to structure its own existence. When discussing communicative differences across regional and racial lines, Kelly said, “People who come from city schools that are all Black, they don’t know how to even talk to a white person [laughing]. Or even communicate with them because they [white students] don’t know our slang or anything.” The shift from their more metropolitan origins of place to a region dominated by cascading corn fields and white bodies presents a kind of “shock” for participants. Aiden suggested that localized distal, centripetal discourses of a specific modality of conservative, rural Whiteness were created and that, subsequently, those discourses impacted proximal interaction and subjectivity: I see a lot of signs on people’s cars and stuff. ‘Don’t try anything’ or ‘I’m carrying.’ And that’s like…when we live in the city, we don’t have a lot of those signs out there. Seeing all these flags and Trump…this or that…when I see all this Trump stuff and the signs about guns on their cars, it makes me feel like…would they like me? Are they also racist?
Aiden’s inability to untether Trump iconography from racist ideologies both signifies the pervasiveness of those already-spoken discourses and the ways they seamlessly traverse the micro-macro, cultural-relational divide, invoking fear in those who interpret those symbols as not just oppositional, but as threatening, in turn highly affecting the future not-yet-spoken student utterances.
The Rural HBCU Means Disparate Public Performances of Self
For many, bodily presence in spaces discursively produced through the logics of whiteness and rural sensibilities rendered the rural HBCU experience stressful. Whereas some participants interpreted—and lauded—HBCUs as homes for authentic selfhood, others shifted focus to the areas outside of campus requiring institutions to present themselves as such. Students draw from distal, already spoken discourses (Baxter, 2011) signifying “respectable” (white) identities, and, once off campus, modify behaviors in anticipation of future utterances, hoping that performatively curtailing Blackness permits greater footing in the public sphere. When discussing off-campus behavior, Jenelle, for instance, said “I feel like I’m toning down my Blackness, if that makes sense.” When asked to elaborate on how one tones down a racial identity, since that denotes a specific set of characteristics associated with that identity, Jenelle opined: I act a bit more proper. I would say ‘proper.’ And when I go out and I know that…Like I got stopped by the cops one time when I was on the way to school from where I’m from. And I knew I had to turn on a certain ‘properness’ when talking to him.
Jenelle reveals the labor required of students of color receiving an education in an area identified much less by Blackness and urbanism than it is whiteness and rurality. Jenelle’s insight also illuminates the role of broader social scripts and distal centripetal discourses at the intersection of race, gender, and class being invoked during proximal interactions, with coded terms such as “proper” connoting ‘appropriate’ stylized performances informed by stereotypes surrounding both white femininity and Black womanhood (Collins, 2009).
The Rural HBCU Means Conditional Mobility
The DRR’s final theme is the perception that rural HBCUs foster limited, conditional forms of individual autonomy, most notably in the form of physical mobility. This interpretation treats rural HBCUs as contradictory to their surroundings, forcing students to navigate meaning and movement across campus borders. Participants spoke about feelings of unwelcomeness off campus, a hostility curated by both an absence of Black bodies and a repetitive mistreatment of those entering such spaces. Speaking on Black absence beyond campus, Connor noted, “when you go off campus, say for instance if you just go somewhere simple like Walmart or the mall. You can see population color just…change. Like, I can be in my dorm hall right now and it’s all Black. If I leave to go to Walmart, it’s gonna be all white.” Similarly, Adasha remarked I tend to stay on campus as much as I can. I don’t go off campus unless I have to. I just doesn’t feel like home here [the surrounding area]. The people here can be really…aggressive or, you know, intimidating, because they don’t speak or smile. They come off as rude to me. So, I just stay on campus, around my people.
Adasha acknowledges considerations faced by students of color attending rural institutions. When stating “my people,” Adasha is clearly coding students and friends who are like her along racial categories among axes of identity, illustrating how they must often choose between remaining on campus to feel safe and validated, versus exiting its borders for entertainment, personal needs, and other motivations.
Discursive Interplay
Based on the data, both the dialogically (1) expansive processes of (a) diachronic separation and (b) synchronic interplay in the form of countering, negating, and entertaining, and (2) contractive practices of (a) naturalization and (b) pacification emerged as primary forms of discursive interplay. While the DCB drew from and reinforced dominant beliefs about the meanings of the rural HBCU, the DRR presented a counter-reading to better reflect student experiences, in turn challenging dominantly articulated constituents of these institutions.
Diachronic Separation
Diachronic separation occurs when an utterance drew from both the dominant and marginalized discourse over time and various settings (Baxter, 2011). For the present data set, diachronic separation occurred in two related, yet inverted ways, with the arrival to the institution functioning as a catalyst for both discursive shifts. For some participants, such as Jessica, arriving at and immersion in institutional culture inaugurated a shift from the DRR to the DCB. Jessica stated: I used to think that the idea of an HBCU out…in the country, if you will…was kind of strange. Right? I mean, I mostly think of barns and cows and stuff like that. Not a lot of people of color. So, I was nervous coming here, to be honest. But after being here almost a full year, I see the benefit of having it [the school] here. It increases Black people’s visibility, which I think is good for the white locals, but it also requires us to get out of our comfort zone.
It was not until her active participation in both university and local culture that Jessica experienced a discursive slippage in which her uncertainties regarding racial Otherness were (re)constructed as unique opportunities for learning by both white and students/locals of color.
Connor also transitioned from one discourse to another upon his entrance to school. Connor’s discursive adaptation, interestingly, offers an inversed teleology to Jessica’s in that it was the arrival at the university which sparked a shift from the DCB to the DRR: For me, there are times where I feel like being here [the rural HBCU] is really great because I get to be surrounded by not just Black people, but lots of different types of Black people, which you don’t get at most universities. I really love that, especially when I first got here. I do also like having white people around, too though, even if a lot of them can be more…country than what I’m used to, coming from the city. But then other times I think about how there seem to be limits on what kind of Black people the city accepts, which then makes me rethink how good of a fit this kind of school is for people like me.
Connor notes that time spent at the university required him to question complexities of rural HBCUs more deeply. Whereas Jessica’s experiences lent a reassessment of centrifugal discourses concerning incompatibility and visibility, Connor’s created the need to reconsider his fidelity to centripetal discourses informing his initial decision to attend the university.
Countering
Countering occurs when a discursive position replaces an alternative discourse, emergent through markers like “even,”, “just,” or “however,” in which a singular utterance reveals contested meaning (Baxter, 2011). Various participants uttered statements revealing complex discursive dimensions of the rural HBCU, specifically as they are constructed around notions of racial heterogeneity, educational value, and the proliferation of Black epistemologies in and out of the classroom. Referencing campus culture writ large, Jada offered: It’s an HBCU, right? So, it should be a little more…Black than white. But it seems like, sometimes, there’s a majority of whites on campus. I can honestly say it feels more white. But at the same time, I feel like we all flow together. In my opinion, color doesn’t matter. As long as we get along, and no one is showing racism to others.
Jada indicates a discursive emphasis on Black representation at rural HBCUs, with frustration over the perception that such is now being compromised. Here, Jada draws from the DCB, in which racial identity authentication is encouraged—and expected—to flourish at the HBCU. However, Jada’s subsequent utterance acknowledges (and seemingly accepts) an increase in white bodies and gestures a hope for social compatibility in the face of potential cultural division. In so doing, Jada diminishes the forcefulness of the DCB by offering an alternative view of the rural HBCU by downplaying the significance of a coherent Black identity and its role in campus politics, instead prioritizing racial harmony. Shandra detailed a discursive tension specific to white faculty at rural HBCUs: A lot of time professors are using our culture to teach us, so that’s good. But I can say that a lot of times the culture they’re using is our negative culture. For example, like certain things we’ll read or have to watch always have the same storyline: (A) there’s a Black woman struggling, (B) there’s a Black man struggling, (C) there’s some racism there. Ya know, it’s never the positive things that our culture has to offer.
Shandra speaks to the double-bind of attending a university committed to Black visibility (DCB) in predominantly white areas with white faculty. By acknowledging that courses regularly focus on Black situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988), Shandra constructs the rural HBCU through discourses valorizing representation, unique educational contexts, and authenticity. However, in disclosing that pedagogical lessons are often conditional or rendered intelligible only through the lenses/discourses of and associated with whiteness, specifically their cyclical emphasis on Black pain and trauma, Shandra highlights how students of color attending HBCUs can be (re)subjugated based on their constructed racial difference in a multitude of ways, thus drawing from the DRR.
Negating
Negating is a direct refutation of a given discourse (Baxter, 2011). Negating occurred when students drew from and proffered a discursive position explicitly countering the DCB by framing rural culture and the HBCU as adversarial. As Cedric stated, “I don’t feel like an HBCU should be in a rural area,” foreclosing symbiotic possibilities between the two phenomena. Another example of negating occurred in a conversation with Shandra about the local community’s perception of the HBCU. When asked what she believes the community thinks, she said: The student body was destructive, that it [the university] brought the city down. When, in reality, there are actually good things going on here. We’re graduating students. And if it was the state school [proximally close to the HBCU’s host city]—if a Black student graduated from there—then it’s ‘good job,’ but if they graduated from here, because of the stereotype the school has—well, not even the school has, but the stereotype people put on us—it was not necessarily positive.
Shandra’s discursive position unfolded to reveal distal already-spoken discourses informing her current discursive positioning. Unfolding occurs when a researcher asks, “What prior utterances might this utterance be a response to?” and “What subsequent responses are invited by this utterance?” (Baxter, 2011, p. 161), and is useful when discursive competition is not uttered in a singular statement. Shandra’s positioning of the school as deferential to local, competing discourses makes it difficult for the institution to succeed on its terms. This moment of unfolding illustrates how individuals draw from already-spoken discourses to shape present opinion and anticipate future, not-yet-spoken utterances at both the proximal (interactions with students from neighboring schools, residents, etc.) and distal levels, curating a DRR in which the rural HBCU’s racial emphasis disadvantages students.
Entertaining
Entertaining occurs when one discourse “acknowledges the possibility of another despite the authority of the dominant discourse” (Wolfe & Scharp, 2022, p. 7) and indicates that “a given discursive position is but one possibility among alternative discursive positions” (Baxter, 2011, p. 168). Entertaining took place in responses acknowledging both the potentially hostile surroundings enveloping the rural HBCU and the benefits of the institutions despite or perhaps because of those settings. Bailey said: I’m constantly sort of subconsciously making sure I don’t do anything to trigger these [local] conservatives. Because after watching the news and all these videos [of white violence and anti-BLM protests] I feel like if I make them mad or say something wrong or do something they don’t like it’s gonna trigger them and something bad might happen. If I’m in a group with all my friends and we’re surrounded by people in MAGA hats and shirts, giving me looks, and I feel like I’m being observed and watched, and I have to be careful with every move I make. But on campus, I feel free to show up in pjs, for example, and no one’s gonna give me a second look.
Although Bailey acknowledges hardships for Black students (DRR) she also ranks the university as a hub for expressing authenticity and generating feelings of home, as evidenced through the mentioning of wearing pajamas around campus (DCB).
Naturalization
Naturalization occurs when a “discourse is positioned as a given in nature and talked of as if it is a transparent representation of the way things are” (Baxter, 2011, p. 171). Naturalization reified the DCB by framing systemic racism and interpersonal racist behaviors as inevitable, necessitating the importance of rural HBCUs. For example, Rodney elaborated: The thing is, there’s gonna be racists everywhere, no matter if it’s a city or town or whatever. I mean, sure it’s gonna be worse in some parts than others, like here, maybe. Regardless, HBCUs, no matter where, should champion students of color, specifically. Just because somewhere has more racist people doesn’t mean a school like ours shouldn’t be there. In fact, it’s probably more important that we’re here for that reason. HBCUs are becoming more important now. Not only for the Black scholars or doctors, lawyers, future professors. But also, the activists who want to go here.
In speaking in an authoritative voice designed to capture objective “realities” of the world, Rodney positions the discursive, rhetorical, and ideological force of racism as a given, making alternative discourses less forceful. Describing how this naturalized discourse is maintained and shared across contexts, Kelly offered: I was raised by a single Black mother, and she always taught us to be alert. No matter what situation or where you are—just always be alert. That’s why I don’t have any issue with having to code-switch. It’s just embedded in me.
By drawing from proximal already-spoken utterances no doubt constructed through the recognition of dominant distal already-spoken discursive practices, Kelly paints a portrait of racist discourses as a guaranteed reality that, in turn, legitimizes the rural HBCUs’ role within broader society. Robin Boylorn (2013) writes that “as a black woman who was raised in the South in a working class and matrifocal family, sayin’s were meaningful lessons in my childhood that served as reminders and warnings” (p. 174, emphasis added here). The sayin’s of Kelly’s mother are centered as a meaningful discursive force in her current process of naturalizing racist discourses. Kelly also underscores a gendered component of the discourse in which specific lessons offered by her mother structure an “appropriate” and necessary Black female subjectivity necessitating self-surveillance, malleability, and modification.
Pacification
The contractive process of pacification occurs when differences are trivialized or positioned as futile to resolve, leaving competing discourses “discursively stripped of their force” (Baxter, 2011, p. 172). Various students engaged in pacification by recognizing and accepting racial differences in ways that muted counter-discourses valuing things like racial harmony or cultural symbioses. Bailey offered: If they [white people/locals] see an African American out, with their pants sagging or listening to music too loud, they feel their lives are in danger because society has labeled a lot of African Americans as dangerous thugs, Black women as, like, loud and ghetto or whatnot. Likes to fight. Society has already painted a label on that community and other communities as well, so, people, instead of actually taking the time to talk to someone or educate themselves, they put themselves first and feel that threat of an African American walking on the same side of the street as them.
This utterance uncloaks how whiteness is discursively structured through, organized around, and affixed to discourses of both individualism and irrationality (Baxter, 2011) marking certain thematic components of the DCB, such as community building and embracing difference in service of educational opportunity, impossible to obtain.
Discussion
This project was driven by two primary research questions: What competing discourses, if any, shape and establish meaning for Black students attending rural HBCUs, and what forms of discursive interplay do Black students utilize to best constitute their own experiences with and understanding of a rural HBCU? This study illuminates how rural HBCUs are discursively constructed through the organizing principle of contradiction, whereby “two tendencies or forces are interdependent (the dialectical principle of unity) yet mutually negate one another (the dialectical principle of negation)” (Baxter, 1990, p. 70). This reading draws from and problematizes centripetal discourses characterizing the HBCU as a material and rhetorical site of Black support, revealing strategies attendees activate through various forms of discursive interplay to make sense of both their university and their relationship to it. Rural HBCUs are often tucked away in predominantly white regions typified by traditional values that leave permeable boundaries closed and permit little toleration for variability (Kimmel, 1995), and as Black students navigate dusty roads lined with billboards championing conservative politics and local karaoke bars riddled with folks drunkenly slurring the words to country music songs—a genre repeatedly hostile to Black artists despite its Black origins—they must adopt strategies ensuring both safety and the meeting of educational needs.
Drawing from Bakhtin’s (1984) heteroglossia, Baxter (2011) proffers that there are innumerable cultural discourses prominent in any given setting, ranging from discourses of privacy and romanticism to community and rationality. The current study spotlights how tensions between discourses (and the ideological trappings thereof) affiliated with both white rurality and Black urbanism oscillate between governing discourses of individualism, which presumes individuals have full choice, and community, which emphasizes a larger group where agency is compromised (Baxter, 2011). The study unmasks how rural HBCUs are discursively positioned within these dialogic pulls, specifically as it concerns notions of expression, independence, and choice. On one hand, these universities benefit from community outreach and networking—an alliance assuming (and requiring) both parties support one another via implicit appreciation of one another. Here, parties are assumed to be able to authentically express themselves, a component of the discursive construction of community in which “interests of the other party are given priority in making sense of action” (Baxter, 2011, p. 82).
But as this project indicates, for Black students operating within a discursive site often regarded as antithetical to their own, self-expression—including independence and agency—is a luxury many cannot afford. This means that students are also confronting tensions between choice and constraint, voluntary and involuntary (inter)dependence with others, and the interests of self and others (Baxter, 2011). And, as Baxter (2011) opines, the community-individualism cultural dialectic also means that sensemaking “plays out emotionally with separation and integration framed, respectively, in terms of emotional distance and closeness between relating parties” (p. 67). This project underscores this interplay by showcasing how Black students attending rural HBCUs grapple with creating a home in a place of homelessness and activating connection in a space of antipathy.
A continuous feature of authoritative discourses of whiteness has been to, as Stuart Hall (1997) writes, racialize the other (p. 239) through, in part, binary oppositions conflating whiteness with civility and Blackness with its foil. It comes as little surprise, then, that Black students attending Black-centered universities in rural, majority white areas experience an ongoing series of discursive gymnastics as they make sense of and structure a coherent meaning of these institutions. Black students negotiate performances of race and gender against a backdrop of authoritative logics and respectability politics mediated through the invasive lens of whiteness, a distal discourse that circulates “in the larger culture that serve to define and discipline” (Suter & Norwood, 2017, p. 297). Students responded to the discursive struggle between—and constituting—the Black-centric university and its whitewashed surroundings by engaging in various forms of interplay, challenging and reinscribing some of the normative fixtures of rurality, urbanism, whiteness, and Blackness, womanhood, and masculinity, among others.
Racial profiling is certainly not unique to Black students attending rural HBCUs (Schreer et al., 2009), but the contextual dynamic of Black students feeling pressured to choose between remaining on a campus associated with home, authenticity, and educational opportunities or venturing into the community is. The discursive structuring of and subsequent interplay between competing meanings of the rural HBCU shapes student relationships with one another and the community, behavior, and academic success. This is an important recognition for institutions designed to champion the success of racially and economically marginalized students (Arroyo & Gasman, 2014), especially considering that social support is instrumental to such success (Palmer & Gasman, 2008). Dialectical tensions “manifest as interdependent, mutually exclusive ideas reflecting the both/and nature of different perspectives rather than either/or thinking” (Dumlao & Janke, 2012, p. 154), meaning that Black empowerment is, for many, discursively defined in relation/contrast to whiteness.
Discourses of whiteness require students to determine when, where, and how Blackness is appropriate. The discursive struggle between the DRR’s core principle that rural HBCUs require public performances of self and the DCB’s articulation that they enable authenticity, for instance, invokes a Black persona constituted through the praxiological act of mimicry, which Judith Butler (2015) calls a stylized repetition of embodied behavior and aesthetics. But, to further complicate the matter, mimicry may also be understood as a subversive communicative tactic. As Baxter (2011) contends, individuals may employ the communicative figure of the clown, in which a discourse is depicted as absurd through its performances of mocked exaggeration. Black students may summon specific features associated with white respectability, such as extreme properness or gentility, to both acclimate and ridicule, subsequently revealing both the arbitrary and precarious nature of such valorized performances.
When combined, data underscores both performative and spatialized dimensions of the “discursive templates” (Baxter, 2011, p. 59) identified in the present study. Utterances generate a discourse of Black agency identified by the competing pulls of constraint, subordination, and expressiveness, and gesture a Black ontology defined by adaptability in service of survival. Students are aware of the risks their Blackness poses in a spatialized, cultural discourse in which whiteness maintains the most valuable currency. This positions the rural HBCU as a dialogically produced organization with conditional expressive latitude, potentially making motivations for attending an HBCU infringed, indeed, possibly extinguished.
Theoretical Implications
In dialogically centering the intersection of race and geographic region, this study examines the ways meaning is produced “through the interplay or struggle of competing possibilities of meaning” (Baxter et al., 2021, p. 7) and unveils how authoritative discourses of rural whiteness shape student experiences at institutions designed to combat those very regimes. This work extends the scholarly and paradigmatic capacities of the CIFC framework by turning to RDT 2.0. For 2.0, “power is conceptualized as the discursive capacity to define social reality” and “resides neither in individuals (neither their internal motivational state nor their capacity to influence based on the other’s dependency relations) nor in social groups, but in discourse” (Baxter, 2011, p. 124). This makes 2.0 a productive theoretical framework for better understanding not only the discursive struggles constituting meaning for individuals, but also in organizations. This work extends RDT 2.0 by (1) placing it within an HBCU educational context, therefore (2) identifying a new series of discursive tensions unique to and constituting that context, (3) offering further evidence of the inherent connections between subjectivity, discourse, ideology, and behavior, (4) providing an empirical, relationally grounded example of a tension-centered organization, a useful approach for work on organizational structuring (Schein, 2015) and public relations (Sommerfeldt & Yang, 2018), and 5) evidencing the lesser discussed phenomena of triadic discursive interplay.
Praxiological Considerations
Although this list is not exhaustive, there are various considerations for people working at and supporting rural HBCUs: 1. Administration should be mindful of needed resources on campus that meet the unique contextual demands of its students. For example, it would be helpful to provide on-campus stores where students can purchase personal care items and food. This can reduce pressures to leave campus for basic needs for those students who feel unsafe doing so. 2. Rural HBCUs need to provide on-campus resources promoting cross-racial socializing, such as social hours, festivals, and organizations specifically addressing racial division. HBCUs’ increase of white students will likely continue, yet more work needs to be done to build bridges across cultural and racial balkanization. 3. White faculty should remain conscious of their position within HBCUs. Students show preference for faculty who do not shirk matters of race but, rather, address it in thoughtful ways (a) acknowledge one’s own positionality, (b) refute approaches maintaining narratives of Black subordination, and (c) demonstrate an ethics of care for the personal and relational dimensions of the student. 4. Lastly, white faculty need to also remain mindful of and sympathetic towards the additional labor faced by their students of color and how those exercises influence student performance in and out of the classroom.
Limitations and Future Directions
While this study has generated important findings, additional work could and should be done as scholars recognize the importance of these institutions and the unique considerations they demand. Major limitations of this study are that its participant sample is relatively small and originates from just one institution. Similar work could be done at comparable institutions to both concretize this study’s results and identify additional discursive conflict. This study did not address matters related to gender identity or physical ability; this could be yet another rich area to investigate in future work. Moreover, RDT would prove useful to further explore tensions faced by both white students and faculty at rural HBCUs. Such research would continue to paint a clearer picture about the identity politics characterizing both on-campus sensemaking and relational processes and those between the university and its host culture. I encourage communication researchers to attend more prominently to HBCUs in future projects. Doing so will not only expand the discursive parameters of our disciplinary purview, but make more inclusive the forms of scholarship, institutions, and epistemologies academia is willing to consider and therefore legitimize.
Conclusion
This study investigated how Black students attending rural HBCUs make sense of their experiences through a dialogic lens. Using RDT 2.0 the project shows how dominant discourses regarding these institutions are both reinscribed and challenged through a series of discursive interplay by attendees. The project spotlights how students have the potential to challenge dominant discourses positing HBCUs as celebrating Blackness (DCB) through a marginal discourse problematizing these institutions for underscoring racial difference in ways that promote inauthenticity and immobility. In conclusion, the discursive construction of and assumed benefits for attending these universities are called into question.
Footnotes
Author note
Many thanks to the reviewers of this manuscript, and especially to Associate Editor Dr. Kristina Scharp, whose kindness and insightfulness not only made this manuscript stronger, but the journey towards its publication all the more rewarding. You can contact Dr. Brewer at
Acknowledgments
I would like to think the reviewers for their wonderful insight during the process of strengthening this work. I would also like to thank Dr. Kristina Scharp for her kindness and guidance as I worked to improve the manuscript.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Open Research Statement
As part of IARR’s encouragement of open research practices, the authors have provided the following information: This research was not pre-registered. The data used in the research are not available. The materials used in the research are not available.
