Someday soon, I'm going to write an entire post on the ways in which campuses describe first-generation students who are overwhelmingly from poor and working-class backgrounds, especially how descriptors encourage these students to think of themselves.
In the meantime, this tweet (ok, xeet) caught my attention today.
1/4 Example of how powerful language and framing are. Universities tend to highlight the 1st Black student to graduate and frame them as a trailblazer. But what if unis talk about how long from their beginning to the time the person graduated?
— Deadric T. Williams (@doc_thoughts) July 7, 2024
While Williams is talking specifically about Black students, I often see campuses describe all first-generation students as "trailblazers". Campuses teach students that the "trail" they have had to blaze is through their lives prior to arrival on campus, without ever explaining why there isn't simply a clear map to the trailhead and access to what they need to take off once there.
So Williams urges campuses to also talk about the obstacles in pathways through campus:
2/4 Then it's not a rugged individual story of resilience. Rather, it's a story of institutional barriers that they actively engaged in. And the suffering the 1st Black grad has to endure.
— Deadric T. Williams (@doc_thoughts) July 7, 2024
It has always seemed curious to me to describe students entering what, for other students is such a clearly marked and well-lit path as "trailblazers" as if they are bushwhacking through an uncharted wilderness instead of through social institutions with long histories and organizational structures and generations of successful graduates.
What if campuses also talked openly about their histories of exclusion? What if there were open deliberations about public policy such as tuition and financial aid, campus day care, deeply inequitable K-12 schooling, or even class schedules designed for unencumbered 19 year olds?
Yes, students who are "trailblazers" deserve all credit for their tenacity and talent. We can celebrate them and still talk about why they had to be so tenacious.
Because if we don't, we are not serving students well:
3/4 The trailblazer narrative reinforces the "anyone can make it" logic rather engaging with the reality the system was designed for exclusion. And 50-leven people racialized as White graduated before this one person...
— Deadric T. Williams (@doc_thoughts) July 7, 2024
and in the end:
4/4 which leads to racial stratification in well-being post college.
— Deadric T. Williams (@doc_thoughts) July 7, 2024
Students framed as "trailblazers" learn little about why so few students like them are already there. They don't learn what it will take to demand institutional change in their interests. Instead, as Diane Reay has argued, the "heavy psychic costs” of class and race and gender inequality fall on the shoulders of those required to "blaze trails" to social institutions while others are striding along well-trodden paths.
