“Oooh it Feels Good to be Black”: Racial Justice Organizing, Black Spaces, and Backlash in Higher Education

Abstract

Black and other BIPOC students face substantial psychological and material harms from racism across predominantly white institutions of U.S. higher education. Drawing on interviews with Black organizers at the University of Missouri, this article asserts the centrality of space to the workings of student racial justice organizing. I examine some of the spaces that interviewees described—including official campus spaces as well protest spaces created by students—that contributed to their well-being and organizing success, and argue that students produced valuable knowledge and spaces through collective struggle that helped to foster a psychological shift toward power, pride, and unapologetic Blackness. I use these examples to argue that the liberatory tools and practices of student racial justice organizers are being increasingly dismantled, punished, and criminalized in the United States, most visibly in the prohibition of programs, policies, and content intended to foster racial equity and inclusion and in efforts to crush the multiracial student movement against war and genocide in Palestine.