The Unchosen Me: Race, Gender, and Identity among Black Women in College (review)

Unchosen Me is third in a trilogy of works in higher education focusing on the educational experiences, trajectories, and challenges of African American women college students. (See also Banks, 2009; Bush, Chambers, & Walpole, 2010.) Together, their timing signifies a need for closer analysis and understandings of college students who are marginalized on multiple fronts including, but not limited to, race and gender.

Unchosen Me reveals the brave stance that rising higher education scholar Rachelle Winkle-Wagner took in focusing her doctoral research on a population of students often overlooked because of their perceived successes. Winkle-Wagner's work illustrates the costs of that success, the challenges that Black women college students face both on and off campus, in predominantly White and predominantly Black environments, and in the negotiations that her set of 30 participants employ to make spaces for themselves.

Her participants all work in the chilly campus climate of Mid-west University (MU), located in a small city with a campus population of 35,000 students, only 9% of whom were non-White. Using critical ethnographic research methods, Winkle-Wagner regularly met with the women over the course of nine months in eight separate groups called "sister-circles." Given her own identity as a White woman, Winkle-Wagner made the effort and gained the trust of these women, built organic relationships with them, and achieved an honest glance into these women's lives.

In addition and, she would argue, more importantly, the groups became centers of strength from which these women could reach toward each other as they navigated more comfortable spaces for themselves on and off campus. Winkle-Wagner confesses that she grew, too, ultimately becoming an advocate for them and others like them at multiple units and levels on MU's campus. Winkle-Wagner's ethnographic participant-observer method is rigorous and trustworthy, employing multiple methods of validation. Moreover her transformation to a role of advocacy is at the heart of the ethos of critical methods.

As an overarching theme, the issue for many of these women was not necessarily open hostility, but rather subtle indications of Otherness, and what seemed to be forced choices of conformity to a predefined set of roles for Black women students. These roles were articulated not only by the predominantly White surroundings of MU's campus but also within enclaves carved for and by students of color.

While the majority of women self-identified as African American, two identified as Black Latina, and one as multiracial. Twenty-four were first-generation college-goers. Through her selection process and description of participants, Winkle-Wagner attests to the heterogeneity within her sample, although she chooses not to develop the contours of that heterogeneity thoroughly, perhaps because further discussion would detract from the overarching theoretical construct she calls the "unchosen me."

Unfortunately, the flaw in this work lies in its macro and micro theoretical underpinnings. Winkle-Wagner begins this volume with W.E.B. DuBois's conceptual frame of double consciousness. That "one ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" (1903/2003, p. 3). Yet the sense of otherness felt by these women goes beyond the duality of Black skin in America.

More appropriate frameworks could be found in Beale's double jeopardy (1970/2005), King's multiplicative identity (1988), Crenshaw's intersectionality (1989), Essed's (1991) everyday gendered racism, and/or critical race feminist (Wing, 2003) theoretical constructs. Each of these frames employs analyses at the crossroads of race and gender, allowing for additional junctions with such factors as social class, language, and sexual orientation.

Dubois's notion of double consciousness indeed provides a frame for understanding the culture shock experienced by these women entering a campus environment that is overwhelmingly White. Yet it does...