Mapping Racial Literacies
College Students Write about Race and Segregation
“A joy to read. The letters are beautifully written, and they are filled with insight and wisdom. They express the ways in which graduate students of color find themselves ‘out of place’ in a world that was never designed to support them and the forms of abuse with which they must routinely contend.”
—Carmen Gonzalez, Morris I. Leibman Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law
The Pipeline Is Broken explores the reality of racial exclusion and bias in graduate student education, arguing that the insidious effects of structural and institutional racism substantially chip away at the very pipeline of future BIPOC academics—already limited for other racialized reasons.
A series of letters written by graduate students of color, this collection offers a multifaceted account of the challenges, oppositions, microaggressions, and outright discrimination that these students face in higher education settings. Graduate students describe navigating hostile mentoring relationships and unwelcoming campus cultures and peers and laboring for poverty wages to earn their degrees. Yet these letters celebrate joy, community, and agency, offering a more complete and affirming view of graduate student life. Through these brave personal stories, The Pipeline Is Broken asks readers to interrogate what it means to navigate higher education as a person of color and to understand that the reality of faculty of color’s numerical-minority status is a complicated phenomenon whose genesis rests not at the moment of job interview. Rather, these letters show, this status is an intricate manifestation of a process that begins in elementary schools, is reinforced in high school and colleges, and is part and parcel of the minefield that is graduate education in America.
Essential reading for anyone who cares about racial equity in education, mentorship, leadership development, or student well-being, The Pipeline Is Broken is a guide, a mirror, and a call to action all in one, challenging graduate programs, faculty, and administrators to examine their complicity in maintaining inequitable systems and offering suggestions for building cultures of care.
