“They don’t have to make room for me because this is their space”: Black College Students’ Narratives of Racism, Whiteness, and Mental Health

Abstract Black students who attend PWIs are tasked with navigating campus environments where Whiteness – i.e., social norms, policies, and practices that uphold White supremacy – has an enduring and pervasive presence. While a growing body of research has become attuned to how Whiteness shapes higher education, less work has centered the experiential knowledge of Black students and their health outcomes. This study uses select tenets from critical race theory (CRT) to examine the pathways through which Whiteness manifests and impacts the emotional and mental health of Black college students. We deploy the CRT tenets of counterstorytelling, Whiteness as Property, and racial realism as analytical tools to center the experiential knowledge of a convenience sample of Black college students (n=25) and interrogate how Whiteness is perpetuated and maintained. The students’ counternarratives reveal how they (1) conceptualize Whiteness in the Deep South and (2) wrestle with the impact Whiteness has on their emotional and mental well-being. By revealing how Whiteness operates as a property right that perpetuates psychological harm against Black students attending a PWI, the study findings disrupt deficit-oriented discourses about Black college students and their mental health outcomes and have the potential to inform the development of policies and practices that transform college environments.