Coming Back Home to Live and Not Die: A Human Geography of a Working-Class Black Gay Male Navigating the Local Higher Education Pipeline

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how in the span of three decades, a working-class Black gay male college student residing in a post-industrial city navigated college. Through a postcolonial geographic epistemology and theories of human geography, we explore his narrative, mapping the terrain of sexual, race and class dialects, which ultimately led to Marcus’s (pseudonym) completion of graduate school and community-based policy research. Marcus’s educational human geography reveals the unique and complex intersections of masculinity, Blackness and class as identities woven into his experiences navigating the built environment.