Tales of talented black students on majority-white campuses running through a racial gauntlet that has them questioning their brilliance, abilities and place are familiar to parents like me who have a college-bound child at home.
The trauma that sometimes comes with being a black student at predominately white institutions is tangible. In their 2015 paper, “Reimagining Critical Race Theory in Education: Mental Health, Healing and the Pathway to Liberatory Praxis,” Ebony McGee, a professor at Vanderbilt University, and David Stovall, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that black college students who weather the effects of studying and living on predominately white campuses suffer from a “physical and mental wear-and-tear that contributes to a host of psychological and physical ailments.”
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