UC Davis

While populist political figures, racism, and white nationalism have been a part of American culture since the first colonizers arrived in the early 17th century, the rise of Donald Trump to the highest executive office in the US, combined with an exponential growth in technological and social media capabilities and the SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic created a unique set of challenges for students of color over the past five years. Previous scholars have studied the effects of racially charged campus climates on the lived experience and sense of self of African American students at predominantly white institutions (PWIs), as well as the rigors of intensifying academic expectations in postsecondary settings (Harper and Newman, 2016). These challenges, along with a sudden (and now prolonged) shift to distance learning (Bambara, 2009; Staves, 2017) have created even greater inequities for a historically marginalized population of young students. Furthermore, previous work has delved into the effects of divisive nationalist political rhetoric, both historical (Mansky, 2018) and including the ill-fated Presidency of Donald Trump (Sdunzik and Mullen, 2018). However, there is little to no work examining the effects of Trumpism and white nationalism in the United States on the lived experience of African American college students. This study focuses specifically on that issue, by asking how and why the lived experience of African American community college students is impacted by white nationalism, both on campus and in the community at large. For data collection, this study utilized three focus groups of 4-6 African American community college students enrolled at Solano Community College in Fairfield, California. The students ranged in age from 18 to 21, and focus group interviews were between 30 and 60 minutes long. Conceptually, the study uses both Critical Race Theory (CRT) and symbolic interactionism (SI) as a framework, with a discussion regarding sense of self scaffolding these concepts to provide a window into the psychological nature of educational and social challenges faced by African American students.