Lost in the shuffle: Urban African American students cast into a rural white university in the USA

Abstract

Rogers offers a counterpoint to ethnographic analyses focused on rural people’s adjustment to urban life. He shows how young adults with an urban background find it difficult to adapt to a small town’s lifestyle. Through observation and in-depth interviews, he examines the experience of undergraduate African American students attending a southern Appalachian University. They all came from cities which are much larger than the town that borders the university. The interviews indicate that they enjoy their classes, feel little of the effects of racism typical of the South of a few decades ago, but uniformly find themselves bored. Most of the other students leave campus for their homes nearby, but these students do not, by and large, own automobiles and must stay on the campus. They find themselves isolated and unable to make new friends, and, as a consequence, some plan to leave the university.