“We keep it all here”: A dialogic approach to constructing rural historically black colleges and universities among black students

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.