Together and alone? The challenge of talking about racism on campus

Abstract

Higher education institutions are among the few places where people of different racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds can engage with each other in more than just a superficial way, providing students a unique opportunity to develop the skills needed to function effectively in a diverse, increasingly global world. Whether students develop this capacity will depend in large part on whether the institution they attend has provided structures for those critical learning experiences to take place. But what form should such learning experiences take? This essay argues that positive cross-racial engagement may require both structured intergroup dialogue and intragroup dialogue opportunities to support the learning needs of both White students and students of color in the context of predominantly White institutions.