Becoming Black: Subjective and Cultural Tensions in the Identity Experience of Being Black in the University

Abstract

The present article aims to analyze the constitution of a racial identity based on the experiences of black students during their university trajectories. The relation between the experiences lived in the university and the emergence of a racial conscience will therefore be the central object of the discussion. For this, a case study was carried out with a psychology student, 22 years old, self-declared black, enrolled in a higher education institution in Salvador / BA. The participant of this study assumed, at the beginning of his university trajectory, a position of I-student skeptic. The contact with new knowledge and people has widened their horizons and makes him begin to question what he hear, the phrases there are told to him, the way people act towards black people. A critical I-student position then emerges. However, these two positions are conflicting and ambivalent. Faced with this, he found a third position to deal with those conflicting positions he assumed: I-black student. To understand himself as black emerged for him as a result of a more critical look at the racist structure that makes up the whole social context and, at the same time, the self-acceptance of who one is. The analysis of the student’s narrative, based on the Dialogic Self Theory, made it possible to emphasize the urgent need to consider the specificities experienced by black people during their university trajectories.