Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

Dear Higher Education: Belonging as a Black African Immigrant Woman in Spaces Not Built for Me

Martha Kakooza

Morgan State University

Abstract

This letter emerges from my "conscripted fieldwork" as a Black African immigrant woman navigating predominantly white spaces of U.S. higher education for over a decade. Drawing on dialogical narrative inquiry, I interrogate the complex and contradictory nature of belonging for Black African immigrant students in institutions structurally designed to exclude us. I trace my epistemological rupture upon migrating from Uganda to a historically white institution, where I acquired a heightened racial consciousness. In Uganda, ethnicity and class were salient identity markers; Blackness was intrinsic. In the United States, I was racialized differently, reordering how I understood myself and compelling me to theorize belonging from this new migratory location.

Even within progressive spaces like Women's and Gender Studies, I encountered the reification of white cultural norms and the systematic marginalization of Black and African women's epistemologies. Yet I write with what I call "critical curiosity,” which is a refusal to accept higher education's current architecture as inevitable. I hold space for stories of belonging that emerge in and against exclusionary institutions, where students compose new narratives of community and possibility. This letter is both a critique and an invitation: a demand for accountability and a vision of Higher Education otherwise, fundamentally restructured by the wisdom and scholarship of women of color.