Manufacturing blackness: Skin color necessary but not sufficient. Race relations and racial identity at an Ivy League university (Pennsylvania)

Using interviews, focus groups, and survey data, I attempt to identify important individual and structural factors that shape the college experience for black students at the University of Pennsylvania. The majority of extant research on black students' college experiences has presented black students as coming from similar disadvantaged socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds who share a common racial identity, belief system, and worldview. One of the key findings of my work is the great heterogeneity of black compared to white students. Unlike whites, black University of Pennsylvania students are extremely diverse with respect to socioeconomic status, neighborhood and school background, and nativity. Black students are also characterized by an extremely skewed sex ratio in favor of females. All of these differences within the black student community promote competing constructions of blackness. Thus, just as they are thrown into an institutional environment that highlights race and makes it salient, black students are placed in a social context almost guaranteed to promote conflict and competition over the composition and content of racial identity. Students' conceptions of what it means to be black do vary depending on several background factors including social class, nationality, gender, and pre-college interracial contact. These demographic factors, however, are not experienced unidimensionally, but are experienced simultaneously and vary depending on the student's desire to part of the "black community." My findings suggest that the problematization of racial identity by virtue of the institutional environment of selective universities and the heterogeneity of their black student bodies constitutes another unrecognized and understudied explanation of the black-white achievement gap.