Maria R. Lowe

Food for Thought: Frequent Interracial Dining Experiences as a Predictor of Students' Racial Climate Perceptions

This article describes a study that explored factors which influenced undergraduate students’ perceptions of the racial climate at a predominantly white liberal arts university in the South. Mixed methods results suggest that race, aspects of the institutional climate, and frequent interracial dining experiences in the campus cafeteria differentially affected students’ campus racial climate perceptions.

“Sowing the Seeds of Discontent”: Tougaloo College’s Social Science Forums as a Prefigurative Movement Free Space, 1952-1964

Based on archival research and in-depth interviews conducted from 1999 through 2007, this article examines the role of Tougaloo Colleges Social Science Forums as a prefigurative collective free space in Mississippis civil rights struggles. These Forums offered White and Black integrationists a unique opportunity to come together to hear lectures and discuss provocative ideas, some of which informed and inspired challenges to the states system of White supremacy. By providing a location where integrationist networks and ideas were established and developed, the Forums helped to sow the seeds of discontent for challenges off campus and offered an interracial microcosm of the world that the Southern civil rights movement was trying to achieve. The article sheds light on specific ways an on-campus free space at a private Black Southern college fostered and mobilized oppositional ideas, interracial networks, and practices prior to and during the development of the Mississippi civil rights movement.

The Racialized Impact of Study Abroad on US Students’ Subsequent Interracial Interactions

Using an online survey of American undergraduate students, this paper serves as a case study of a liberal arts college located in the Southern United States (US) to explore the effects of studying abroad on students’ attitudes and behavior related to diversity upon their return to campus. We find that white students and students of color report significantly different study abroad experiences and distinct patterns related to their likelihood to engage with racial, but not other forms of, diversity when they return to their home university. Specifically, students of color are more likely than white students to report that their study abroad experiences have increased the likelihood that they interact more frequently with individuals from different racial backgrounds in a number of campus contexts. Utilizing existing literature and our qualitative data, we address possible reasons for these racialized patterns.

Who Looks Suspicious? Racialized Surveillance in a Predominantly White Neighborhood

In recent decades, neighborhoods across the United States have begun to employ digital media to monitor their communities for outsiders who are seen as suspicious. Yet, little is known about these surveillance practices and their consequences at the individual and neighborhood levels. Such monitoring behaviors are important to analyze not only because of the ways that perceptions of criminal threat are often racialized but also because of the role that private citizens play in initiating contact between strangers and the police. Based on an analysis of e-mails submitted to a listserv in a liberal, predominantly white neighborhood from September 2008 through August 2009, this article explores how residents identify, discuss, and respond to people whom they define as suspicious. Findings show that most suspicious person e-mails focus on black men who are also more likely to be portrayed as unique threats to neighborhood safety. These results suggest that listserv surveillance practices foster racialized notions of criminal threat that both reinforce the boundaries of predominantly white neighborhoods and reproduce the perception of black men as criminals.

Performativity Double Standards and the Sexual Orientation Climate at a Southern Liberal Arts University

ABSTRACT This study employs quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how heterosexual, bisexual, and gay students rate and describe a Southern, religiously affiliated university’s sexual orientation climate. Using qualitative data, queer theory, and the concept tyranny of sexualized spaces, we explain why non-heterosexual students have more negative perceptions of the university climate than heterosexual male students, in both bivariate and multivariate analyses. Although heterosexual students see few problems with the campus sexual orientation climate, bisexual men and women describe being challenged on the authenticity of their orientation, and lesbian and, to a greater extent, gay male students report harassment and exclusion in a number of settings. These distinct processes are influenced by broader heteronormative standards. We also shed much-needed light on how gendered sexual performativity double standards within an important campus microclimate (fraternity parties) contribute to creating a tyrannical sexualized space and negatively affect overall campus climate perceptions.