Journal of College & University Student Housing Volume 50, No. 3 - 63

Freedom Dreaming
EXPERIENCES OF RACISM IN RESIDENCE HALLS
What Requires Deconstruction
As recently as 2023, the United States Supreme Court ruled that race-based admissions
programs violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection
Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President
and Fellows of Harvard College, 2023). Though the long-term implications of this ruling
on higher education and racial diversity are yet to be seen, the ruling reflects decisions
that perpetuate systems of advantage and disadvantage along color lines, as institutions
of higher education were never designed to welcome and benefit BIPOC students
(Stewart, 2020). Devised originally for White males to become Protestant ministers,
Predominantly White Institutions and their residential spaces have introduced and
endorsed racism since their inception (Horowitz, 1984; Yanni, 2019).
Many studies have demonstrated a pattern of past and current manifestations of
blatant racism, and-more perniciously and with damaging consequences-specific instances
of stereotyping, microaggressions, marginalization, xenophobia, and racist nativism
(Duran, 2017; Foste & Irwin, 2023; Harwood et al., 2012; Haynes, 2019; Jaggers
& Iverson, 2012; Strayhorn & Mullins, 2012). The presence of these factors contributes
to the conditions for a hostile environment as described by Balkin (1999):
A hostile environment is made up of individual acts of discriminatory speech and other
conduct by all the persons who inhabit a workplace, including managers, employees,
and even occasionally clients and customers. In hostile environments, the workplace
is permeated with " discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult " that is " sufficiently
severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim's employment and create an
abusive working environment (Harris v. Forklift Sys., Inc.). " Some of this behavior may be
directed at particular employees; other elements may be directed at no one in particular
but may help foster an abusive environment. Even if individual acts do not constitute a
hostile environment separately, they can be actionable when taken together. The test is
whether the conduct, taken as a whole, would lead to an environment that the employee
reasonably perceives as abusive. (pp. 2296-2297)
While Balkin's (1999) framework for a hostile environment was formulated in the
context of sex discrimination and gender segregation, it is also applicable to the presence
of a racially hostile environment in residence halls. In a study of 52 Black male
residents from six large PWIs, Harper and colleagues (2011) revealed that the interactions
of Black male resident assistants (RAs) with residents revealed racial stereotyping,
as did the fact that White supervisors had low expectations but higher standards
for Black resident assistants than they did for their White peers. Especially trying for
BIPOC resident assistants is that their residence hall is also their place of work; thus
they are a captive audience who cannot easily escape the pronounced marginalization
that occurs in many ways within a hostile workplace environment: isolation, microaggressions,
and disparities in race and class.
60 The Journal of College and University Student Housing
Journal of College & University Student Housing Volume 50, No. 3

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