A critical race culture cycle study of class inequities in higher education

Abstract The culture cycle details how cultural ideas, institutional practices, daily interactions, and psychological processes mutually reinforce (and disrupt) social class inequities in U.S. education contexts. Attending to how the intersections of classism, racism, and sexism shape culture cycle processes unearths nuances in social class inequities and their consequences. In this paper, we argue that by taking a critical race perspective to the culture cycle framework, or a critical race culture cycle lens for short, we can more fully interrogate interrelated power structures in educational contexts that dynamically influence each other over time to shape students’ unique psychological realities of marginalization and, importantly, their acts of resistance. To build our argument, we first describe the utility of a culture cycle study of social class inequities. We then illustrate how a critical race culture cycle lens sharpens psychological investigations of these inequities. We offer cultural mismatch theory as an illustrative example for our argument and showcase how such a lens provokes a different set of research questions that attend to power, intersectionality, and resistance. Finally, we discuss how a critical race culture cycle lens offers new opportunities for theory and research in the study of social class inequities more broadly.