No matter who you are, or where you come from, at the very least some effort had to be applied to get you up the stairs of the ivory tower. However, the lung up and the experience once there can vary greatly depending on the intersections of your identity and how the world perceives those intersections. This has been researched greatly within the scope of undergraduate programs. There is now a healthy research canon that can describe correlations between identity factors and the pursuit of education. This has lead to real world impact, such as the creation of programs in the likes of the NYS Dream Act, that provides state funded grants to undocumented undergraduated students that formerly would not receive any federal financial aid for higher education, and programs similar in different states targeting different minoritized and racialized students. Research and the programs that are created as a result of it are a driving force in aiding students of diverse and underserved backgrounds to etch their way into academia and ultimately, to a greater professional, economic and social well-being. However, the idea (to avoid calling it a problem statement), as Nadya and I call it, is that more students of color should be able to make it into the ivory tower, particularly to masters and doctoral level programs, and that it should not fall solely on our own shoulders for that to happen, but also on the academic institutions, professors, administrators, policy makers and our white colleagues. There are more People of Color (PoC) pursuing graduate study than ever before, but retention of these students appears to be diminishing instead of rising. Specifically in Primarily White Institutions (PWIs).
Talk about white ceiling!
Inspired by the work of previous Graduate Students of Color (GSoC) that persisted within PWIs we create this publicly accessible digital space to elevate their invaluable labor in exploring the narratives and experiences of GSoC and to create a conversation among ourselves and the powers that be, about what this experience is like for us as GSoC in PWIs. When the talents of prospective graduate students of color are stripped because of personal implicit bias, microassaults and lack of institutional intervention in creating an educational environment that adheres to the learning needs of all it’s different populations, we are also stripped of nuance and perspective. We seek to pull from the scarce but incredibly powerful research of other scholars to make a space where we can be “empowerment agents” to one another, as well as propose tools to create more empowerment agents that are just as invested in the dismantling of the systems that allow for such discrepancies to exist.
