BUZZ
College students figure out how to talk about their experiences to signal race
Admissions offices are sifting through college essays and working to find black students without drawing legal challenges, guests on a recent National Public Radio segment admitted.
“In college admission, trauma is shorthand for blackness,” National Public Radio reported as part of its “Code Switch” show focused on racial identity issues.
Host Gene Demby interviewed former Georgetown University admissions officer Aya Waller-Bey for the April 25 episode.
Waller-Bey recently completed her doctorate in sociology at the University of Michigan where she studied “how Black students make sense of racialized expectations to narrate trauma in college personal statements,” according to her bio.
The pair discussed “how admissions essays are used to help colleges bring in the type of students that they want,” Demby said. “[H]ow in the wake of affirmative action being struck down by the Supreme Court, that still revolves in a lot of ways around race, and what all that tells us about the kind of diversity that is seen as valuable and visible in the elite spaces.”
Admissions officers are looking through essays for stories about being “first-gen” or “low-income,” Waller-Bey said. That is because schools are trying to figure out a way around the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that affirmed racial discrimination in higher education is illegal.
Here’s the pair talking:
DEMBY: …How do we know that they’re metabolizing in the ways you’re talking about?
WALLER-BEY: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I mean, I think, increasingly so universities have to really be mindful of their institutional priorities right now because of the constraints placed on by the federal administration. So I think identities such as first-gen and low-income are actually becoming incredibly important. I think admissions officers and universities are trying to figure out how to mark students in the process. How can we identify students? How could we categorize them in ways that are, like, compliant and, like, constitutional? You know, because they…
DEMBY: Right, they won’t get you, like…
WALLER-BEY: Sued.
DEMBY: …Flagged for – yeah, exactly.
Disclosures, Waller-Bey said, “give really important context” so admissions officers “can advocate” for particular students.
This leads black students to figuring out a way to signal their race
But the consequence is students are now saying, “OK, they need me to disclose so they can see me in this process. They need to know my background, my identity. They need to know I’m first-gen. They need to know I’m low-income. They need to know I’m Black. They need to know all these things so they can see me qualitatively now – right?” – because of the limitations post the 2023 race – decision on race-conscious admissions.
However, asking black students and other groups to talk about their pain is itself painful, she said.
Waller-Bey criticized the “commodification of pain, this commodification of Black trauma, this commodification of trauma of immigrants,” but said it “is often incredibly valuable for organizations and institutions.”
