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The first community college, Joliet Junior College, was founded in 1901 by William Rainey Harper, an early president of the University of Chicago as a means of providing an associate degree for students (Geller, 2001). As with many higher education institutions of that period, enrollment was limited to a select group. With the introduction of the G. I. Bill after World War II, community colleges began to thrive in the United States as more servicemen began to pursue training. Researchers suggest that community colleges have evolved through various stages: extension of secondary schools, junior colleges, community colleges, comprehensive community colleges, and now learning community colleges (O'Banion, 1997; Tillery & Deegan, 1985). Consistently, the public community college has at the core of its mission a focus on access – open admission regardless of ethnicity, gender, or social economic status. This open admission policy contributes to the attractiveness of community colleges for many students, particularly adults and women. They were designed to meet students at their individual point of entry and help to prepare them for the workforce or transfer to a Baccalaureate degree granting institution (Lanni, 1997). They offer flexible course scheduling, lower educational costs, smaller classroom settings, and more intimate contact with faculty and staff members than many of the larger universities (Lundberg, 2003; Ness, 2003). Additionally, they provide occupational training for individuals seeking to increase employability skills, as well as educational opportunities for underprepared students in a diverse environment.

To highlight some of the tensions and complexities that persist in President Obama’s widening support of Marriage Equality during his second administration.

My primary research design uses autoethnographic detail and draws on two methodological frameworks: (1) the “personal is political” use of subjective voice in feminist theory (particularly in the writings of black feminists), and (2) the postmodern view of complex, “messy” and conflictual intersections of race, gender, sexuality, in the writings of critical race and queer theorists.

My primary finding highlights how macro social structural processes related to white privilege and racial domination and how micro cultural narratives contributing to homophobia and heteronormativity in African American religious circles creates both positive and questionable views of President Obama’s support of Marriage Equality, among African Americans heterosexuals, and within the African American LGBTIQ community.

The primary value of this chapter contributes to the discussion on the persistent tensions between religion, race, and sexuality, which make fragile allies between supporters of Marriage Equality and supporters of Civil Rights and racial justice.

Williams was a black feminist pragmatist who contributed to and drew on the ideas and practices of the “Hull-House school of race relations” (HHSRR). This American theory unites liberal values and a belief in a rational public with a co-operative, nurturing, and liberating model of the self, the other, and the community, based on the historical ideas and commitments of abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln. Education and democracy are emphasized as significant mechanisms to organize and improve society, especially the relations between black and white people. This school had a distinct institutional influence, structure, and status (Deegan, 2002b). As an African American women who wrote and spoke using feminist pragmatism as it applied to the black experience viewed from her lived standpoint, she developed black feminist pragmatism (Deegan, 2002a). I concentrate here on her writings on biculturalism, especially her (Williams, 1907) essay on the perils of “a White Negro.” She wrote about this anomalous racial category in a number of other pieces that I also analyze here.

The educational experiences of Black immigrant women in P-16 education are often understudied in critical scholarship about race, ethnicity, and gender. The existing literature on Black students in US higher education tends to overlook within-group diversity, oftentimes highlighting the experience of domestically born African Americans and neglecting the experiences of Black people born outside of the country. To address this gap in the education discourse, we examined the experiences of Black, African immigrant girls and women who have experienced all or part of their P-16 education in the United States. Using a combination of Critical Race Feminism (CRF) and transnationalism as our theoretical frameworks, we sought to answer two research questions: (1) How do Black immigrant women in the film describe their process of racial, ethnic, and gender identity formation? and (2) What are the literacy practices and educational experiences of Black African girls and women? Methodologically, we drew from Saldaña's (2009) model of film-based qualitative inquiry to analyze the documentary Am I: Too African to be American or Too American to be African? (directed by Dr Nadia Sasso). In our analysis, we foreground the lived experiences of eight women from three African countries: Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. Major findings from this qualitative analysis include: (1) the importance of cultural negotiation for immigrant girls and women, (2) the presence of dualities in language and ways of speaking in education, (3) a tumultuous racial identity formation process, and (4) the linked perceptions of students' gender identity and beauty. Finally, we present implications for immigration policy, inclusive research, and equitable practice across P-16 education.

This paper explores the National Study on Women in Higher Education and Student Affairs.

It includes a collectively written diary, archives, focus groups, and interviews with a diverse group of women leaders from across the country. The women are diverse in terms of their self-identified race, class, age, sexual orientation, position on college campuses, and additional identities.

The author’s feminist approach to the review of these materials highlights notions of pay inequity, intersectionality of identities, and the power of women’s groups in educational settings.

The author’s research identifies areas critical to intentional change in educational policy and programs that have the potential to increase access and equity for women in higher education.

Researcher Highlight: Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950)

Michelle, a first-generation college student from a predominantly Black urban area, was a senior health and recreation major at Midwest University. Although successful in her health and recreation coursework and an engaged campus student leader, Michelle “often talked about her time on campus as ‘painful’” (Winkle-Wagner, 2009, p. 99):You might get the one person who's like, “Well I don't like Black people,” but, then you have a bunch of other people ganging up on him saying, “That is so old, nobody does that anymore.” And I feel like I am more accepted by White people than I am [by] the Black people. Because they're like, well she doesn't dress a certain way, or … “Why are you listening to that type of music?” (Winkle-Wagner, p. 99)

Controversy has long swirled over the claim that Donald Trump's base has deeply rooted authoritarian tendencies, but Trump himself seems to have few doubts. Asked whether his stated wish to be dictator “on day one” of second term in office would repel voters, Trump said “I think a lot of people like it.” It is one of his invariable talking points that 74 million voters supported him in 2020, and he remains the unrivaled leader of the Republican Party, even as his rhetoric escalates to levels that cautious observers now routinely call fascistic.

Is Trump right that many people “like” his talk of dictatorship? If so, what does that mean empirically? Part of the answer to these questions was apparent early, in the results of the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES), which included survey questions that we had proposed which we drew from the aptly-named “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” scale. Posed to voters in 2012–2013 and again in 2016, those questions elicited striking responses.

In this chapter, we revisit those responses. We begin by exploring Trump's escalating anti-democratic rhetoric in the light of themes drawn from Max Weber and Theodor W. Adorno. We follow this with the text of the 2017 conference paper in which we first reported that 75% of Trump's voters supported him enthusiastically, mainly because they shared his prejudices, not because they were hurting economically. They hoped to “get rid” of troublemakers and “crush evil.” That wish, as we show in our conclusion, remains central to Trump's appeal.