As a former K-12 teacher and now a professor, Dr. Patrice W. Glenn Jones had a question: What motivates and deters Black students when they want to participate in activism? And how can educators empower Black student voices?
An assistant professor of English at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide, Jones authored a new report titled, “Activism Deferred Among Black American students,” published by Rutgers University’s Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, and Justice on Wednesday.
Her research explores how Black high school and college students at predominantly Black institutions think about activism through qualitative interviews with 17 students between March 2018 and December 2019. While her research was conducted before, the report comes out not long after protests swept the country on behalf of George Floyd, a Black man killed in police custody in Minnesota.
At the time, Jones was struck by how voiceless students felt.
“Most of them communicated [that] they just felt like they were invisible and nobody cared and nobody listened to them and they just had this lack of power in their own lives and their own destinies,” she said, a thread she found “extremely alarming.”
Overall, in conversations with students, Jones teased out four major themes: Black students felt unheard; they felt deeply aware of racial inequities; they felt a desire to participate in social activism but didn’t always know how to go about it; and they found themselves motivated by a sense of group belonging and collective action.
That last component – collective identity – is why she chose to focus on students from predominantly Black high schools and historically Black colleges. Jones earned her Ph.D. in educational leadership at an historically Black institution, Florida A&M University. She wanted to see what students thought about activism in the context of a “shared sense of community,” a “shared sense of responsibility” and “shared values,” she said, and whether that environment nurtured their social engagement.