Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

Do I Belong: Being the Lonely Only in Higher Education

Teianna Cooper

Doctoral Candidate, Leadership of Organizations, University of Dayton

Abstract

This letter reflects on the layered relationship Black women have with higher education, a relationship shaped by historical exclusion, cultural displacement, and enduring resilience. Written in epistolary form, the letter traces a lifelong question of belonging as it emerges across academic institutions and within one’s own community, where intellectual pursuit is often met with both suspicion and distance. Drawing on lived experience, cultural memory, and poetic testimony, the author examines how higher education simultaneously invites Black women in while withholding full recognition, often relying on their labor, brilliance, and perseverance without addressing the costs of remaining. Rather than framing these tensions as individual struggle or imposter syndrome, the letter situates them within structural conditions that demand excellence while denying affirmation. Ultimately, the letter refuses the need to ask permission to belong and instead turns the question back to the institution itself, challenging higher education to reckon honestly with who it has excluded and what it continues to require of those who remain.