Webinar: Well-intended Expectations, Unintended Consequences: Exploring Black RA Experiences at PWIs [Webinar Recording]

DeAndre Taylor:
Hello everyone and welcome to today’s webinar for the Commission of Housing and Residential Life. I am excited that you all are here and I just know being in housing, this is one of our busy times as we are all approaching fall break. We’re going to have a great conversation today with Dr. Steven Johnson from the University of Kansas to present on a needed topic as we think about our student staff.

My name is DeAndre Taylor. I am Dr. DeAndre Taylor. I’m the Chair for the Commission for Housing and Residential Life, and I’m excited to partake in our fall webinar series. I am presenting from or speaking from Wisconsin, particularly the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, where we acknowledge the contributions of the Miami Potawatomi and the Ho-Chunk Nations. And we acknowledge and honor the history that those nations and the 12 other Nations have brought to the Wisconsin-Parkside area.

With that in mind, I’m going to turn it over to Dr. Steven Johnson. And before I do that, I want to just acknowledge and thank our sponsor, Roompact, for being such a thought-provoking partner as we think about residence life and the work that we do. So thank you to Roompact. And this is our second to final webinar and we are thrilled to have Dr. Steven Johnson join us today. So Dr. Johnson, I am going to turn it over to you.

Steven Johnson:
Thank you, Dr. Taylor. And thank you to all of you for joining this webinar titled Well-intended Expectations, Unintended Consequences: Exploring the Racialized Experiences of Black Resident Assistants at Predominantly White Institutions.

I am fortunate to have the opportunity to present to you today and appreciate the invitation from the Commission for Housing and Residence Life. As previously stated, my name is Steven Johnson, Jr. I use the he series pronouns, and I happen to have a few different hats currently at the University of Kansas. I serve as the Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in our School of Business. I’ve recently taken on a dual interim director role where I oversee the Office of Sorority and Paternity Life and then also the Student Involvement and Leadership Center.

And with each of these campus roles, they give me an opportunity to connect directly with students and to advocate with them and on their behalf. And I get to partner with them to see their professional, academic and their personal goals realized. And a lot of the work that I do with students over the years have influenced my research interests and this being one of them, which I’ll get to share a little bit with you all today.

My foundations in higher education though started with my work in Housing and Residence Life. I was an RA, I was a graduate assistant. And then my first full-time job was in housing. And so that formative experience continues to influence my work today and the work that I do with students. And so I’ll get to share a little bit more about my own sort of positionality later, but did want to sort of set the scene there. But first, I’ll orient us to the time or how we’ll utilize our time together today.
All right. I’m presenting to you all from Lawrence, Kansas where the University of Kansas occupies land forcefully ceded in a series of treaties with Tribal Nations. This traditional territory was not a single property with borderlines, but rather maintained by Tribal peoples as stewards. And we recognize an enduring relationship tying Tribal peoples to the land. That relationship remains embedded in Tribal identities, cultures, and languages. The University of Kansas recognizes and supports the sovereignty of all indigenous peoples and community, including the four federally recognized Tribal Nations present in Kansas today, the Prairie Band Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Sac and Fox and Iowa.

By acknowledging the land and in recognition of modern historical settler colonialism, including that perpetuated by North American institutions of higher education, ACPA actively commits to supporting higher education and decolonizing their practice and scholarship through our mission values, excuse me, and the strategic imperative for racial justice and decolonization.
And so student employment is a growing trend, with over half of college students working while attending school, may even be more now. Recognizing that the resident assistant role is a campus employment opportunity, oftentimes with attractive compensation models, these positions will draw in students from all kinds of backgrounds, and particularly those that may be from historically underrepresented racial or socioeconomic backgrounds.

While some of the studies around the resident assistant role or experience highlight the benefits of the RA role, my study in this session will explore the nuances of the Black RA experience and provide some actionable recommendations to housing professionals and campus leaders. Through engagement with this webinar, it is my hope that participants will be able to describe some of the unique challenges that Black resident assistants encounter in their roles at predominantly white institutions, analyze practices and policies within their current or former organization that negatively impact the recruitment and retention of Black RAs, and then develop some recommendations that either can be utilized by you or your departments or your colleagues that may address barriers for success for Black RAs at your institution.

So a little bit about my own researcher or presenter’s positionality. I said before, as an undergraduate student, I pursued the RA role primarily because I was encouraged by my RA at the time and our hall director. I served on our hall council and had been sort of informally influential in some ways to my peers and they said, “I think you can do this role.” And so I applied. And while I was in the role, there were many things that I loved about the role, my connection with the residents that I was responsible for, the opportunity to facilitate meaningful programming, have one-on-one connections with students, help students through concerns and crises. But the experience wasn’t always positive for me.

At times, there were times that I navigated isolation in my role and in my hall community. In my immediate hall community, there were a few people who I felt like that I worked with that I felt like my experience was like theirs. And so I felt like an outsider in some ways.

My grades suffered. I spent so much time trying to be so good at the role that I was not being a good student, and almost risked losing the job because my grades had fallen below where they needed to be. I had fewer opportunities to participate in other campus activities. I was emotionally taxed a lot of the time doing some of the work that were required for us.

When I made the decision to leave the RA role. So I was an RA up until my senior year, it was hard because I knew there would be financial implications and that it may be difficult to navigate some expenses that I hadn’t yet had because of the compensation that was associated with the role.
But later, I rejoined the housing as a graduate assistant and then I continued as my first professional career role was in residence life. And in these roles, I had the opportunity to supervise RAs and lead departmental initiatives. And in working with students, I got to connect specifically to Black RAs as most of my experiences have been at predominantly white institutions. And working with them and responding to bias incidents or engaging with them during staff trainings and a variety of other interactions, I learned that their experiences as undergraduate staff members were not too dissimilar from mine, even though there had been sort of this time gap between when I was an RA and when they were RAs.

So my experience as a former RA matched with the experiences that I was observing with the RAs that I was working with at the time really influenced my decision to do this research study and to learn more about what are the current experiences of Black RAs who work at predominantly white institutions. And so I used all of that to influence the development of my research questions, interview protocol participant outreach, data collection processes, and then my analysis.
And so as we prepare for our time together today, I’ll share some background information that will contextualize the Black RA experience through literature review and explanation of the research study that I conducted. With the research study that I conducted, I will share some of my observations, the findings, and then the recommendations that I developed as a result of the study.

I’ll insert a few purposeful pauses, places where we can take a break and engage in some thoughtful inquiry and reflection. I’ll facilitate a discussion where we can kind of process what we’ve learned over the time and how what we learned can connect with the institutions and the organizations that we’re currently a part of. And there’ll be an activity where we can do that. And then lastly, I’ll just provide some final remarks outlined in some of the lessons that I learned through this research study and things that I learned as I was preparing for this presentation.

And so the literature that informed my research study was drawn from a few different broad topical areas, including studies that highlighted the racialized experiences of Black and other students of color, study that centered on campus climate experiences and then current race-related events or activities. And they were referenced to get a better understanding of how students might perceive their own experiences at their institution, specifically how they move through their institution, through their racial identity. I also looked at literature that offer insight concerning the impact of racial experiences on academic outcomes and help seeking behaviors. And noting that this study was specifically about Black RAs, I knew that there was a need to better understand how Black students’ experiences on campus, both as students and employees or as campus representatives, I needed to have a better understanding of that.

And so a lot of my literature review also referenced studies that were about residence life, the benefits to living on campus, benefits to working on campus, and then Black students’ experiences within residence halls.

And so I’ll take the next few minutes to kind of hit at some very broad observations from the literature. I’m talking like 30,000 foot level things. And so as I look at… I sort of have these four buckets of literature that I’ll kind of outline as our foundation before we continue on with the presentation.

And so my first bucket is just understanding the racialized experiences in institutional environments. And so first I define racialized experiences as direct or indirect incidents, interactions or events where race-related issues were present. This also included situations where Black RAs might’ve had a heightened sense of awareness about their racial identity. And so that’s sort of the working definition that I’m using for racialized experiences.

So the research found that students of color generally interpret their campus climates to be more harmful and negative than their white peers. Additionally, Black students are more likely to encounter hostile campus climates and racism, which then can negatively impact their campus and academic performance. Stereotypes, Subtle and overt racism and microaggressions are some of the main sources of stress for Black students on college campuses.

Looking at on-campus student employment, as Black RAs are often undergraduate student employees of their college campus, it was relevant to generally understand how these students experience their work at institutions through the lens of their social identities. As I kind of shared before, underrepresented populations may utilize campus employment to pay for school and other associated costs. And so we know that oftentimes people get jobs because they get paid to do them. And so the employment though at college for a lot of students is described as one of the most prevalent out of class activities and can have an influence on persistence and the student’s performance.

Black students, probably no surprise to anyone here, but Black students are not shielded from hostile campus climates or an unwelcoming work environment culture or racist interactions just because they’re employees of the institution. And so these adverse encounters can negatively impact their experience and may have detrimental impacts on both their work experience or their work performance and their academic performance, recognizing that they are situated within this academic environment of students.

And so in various studies about Black student staff and Black student leaders, researchers have found that students who regularly encounter oppressive incidents also have difficulties identifying outlets to express their discontent with the institution.

Looking specifically at motivations for working while attending school, I looked at a lot of research on why students were working. And what we found or what I found was that, again, it’s increasingly common for students to work while they’re attending school. But what should be noted here, and I think it’s important for the study, especially as this study is situated sort of in a racialized context, is that students who are historically disadvantaged, students that identify within a minoritized racial category or socioeconomic category, these students are more likely to have to work while attending school to be able to pay for their cost of attendance.

And so it’s essential to understand that as we recognize that this campus work experience can be meaningful, but also often it’s very, very necessary for students to be able to stay at the institution and persist to graduation. And then when we look specifically at the experiences of Black students in campus housing environments, a lot of the studies about residence life noted the critical role that campus housing plays in acclimated students to campus. Living on campus can contribute to students’ development of a better sense of community and belonging, them acquiring a supportive network and building relationships. And a lot of these benefits are certainly for first year students, new to campus students, but that these are benefits that can be experienced throughout a student’s time within these residential environments.

Countless institutions will encourage campus living emphasizing this value of convenience, this connection to learning and being able to support learning. Typically, we talk about how students have higher grades they live on campus. And then also recognizing that there often is an exposure to diversity, because there are so many people from different backgrounds that are living in a shared space.

At the root of many of the benefits and initiatives and programs that are offered through the campus housing experience, the campus living experiences, the labor that’s actualized by resident assistance most often through helping students locate campus resources, build community and holding residents accountable to policies, this is where the residents, these are the ones that are sort of actualizing these benefits to living on.

And so while the RA role is regarded as this coveted experience, this beneficial experiences, we also know through the literature that Black students, a few of them will occupy these roles on predominantly white campuses. And for the studies that do look specifically at Black RAs who are navigating these campus roles, a lot of them highlight the struggles for these staff members, naming concerns like feelings of isolation or onlyness, lack of support from departments or institutions specifically around encounters that they have about their race, and then the demands on their schedules. And so an overall impact to their perception around their student experience because of how challenging the role can be for them because of some of these struggles.

And so next, I’ll get into talking a little bit about my research study. And so the purpose of my study was to better understand how Black resident assistants at predominantly white institutions made meaning of their racialized experiences, to discover what motivated them to pursue and stay in the RA role, and to learn about the health seeking behaviors that they may have explored when navigating their residential environments.

And so the research questions broadly are guided exactly what I just shared in the last slide, but again, I highlight that definition of racialized experiences being interactions, incidents or events, direct or indirect, where they may have encountered race-related issues or an experience that they had that elicited their own sort of self-awareness of their racial identity.

So we’re going to take our first thoughtful pause, pause for thought, and I encourage you… We’ll take about three to four minutes and I encourage you to think about who do you believe makes student employment roles within your organization or at your institution attracted to Black students? In what ways do you work to recruit Black student to your unit’s employment opportunities? So think about three to four minutes to think about that. You’re welcome to put your responses in the chat. You’re welcome to come off mute to share. We’ll take a minute to pause, before I share what I learned as far as motivations for Black RAs pursuing the RA role.
So while folks may be still brainstorming, I’ll go ahead and share what I learned. And so findings from the study suggested that Black RAs pursued the role not simply for the housing and the meal plan or the compensation, but also to build supportive networks for themselves and to continue their education. Excuse me.

We look at this quote from Serenity that says, “I think it’s beneficial for people of color specifically because it helps us stay in school. Without this job, I might not be graduating in the spring like I’m graduating this year.”

Beyond just being a job, the RA role was the vehicle for retention for many of the RAs in this study. And again, not simply just because of the compensation, I mean, I’ll get to share some of their reflections also about compensation because some of the compensation pieces were complicated, but they also shared again that lower cost of attendance and being able to have an actual place to live just helped them with being able to stay in school.

Another motivation for pursuing the RA role surrounded this idea of building community. And so eight different RAs in this study, and I interviewed 13 RAs for this study, but eight of them spoke to this experience of helping others and feeling empowered not only to build their own community, but to help to facilitate community building with other residents. And so we see this quote from Dominique that says, “I became an RA for the free housing and to take the cost down, but also to make more friends. I was like, ‘I should do this to save money, but also to meet and make more new friends.'”

We’ll skip this pause and we’ll keep going. When I look at sort of the second research question that gets at just challenges for Black RAs in the role, Black RAs were asked to identify the challenges that they faced, and broadly they named that they felt like they had to reduce their own needs to meet positional expectations and to perform well in the role putting the desires of others before their own.

We see this quote from Alexis that says, “One of the disadvantages is that you just don’t always get the feeling that you’re a student first, because you are the person that’s in charge and making sure everyone else is a student first and like cultivating everyone else’s experience. And so you kind of realize that there really is nobody there to help you cultivate your own experience.”
Acknowledging through a lot of the student developmental… or studies about Black students’ academic outcomes, persistent retention and graduation, we see that it is common for Black students to have lower achievement rates than many of their peers. I found this comment and other comments about sort of self-sacrifice and lacking adequate support to be noteworthy in light of what we know about how Black students move through our educational institutions.

Yes, the compensation can be helpful, but also at what cost if the academic experience is diminishing. Additionally, while the role was originally praised as being helpful for retention to the next year in school, there were a few comments about how the compensation didn’t match the expectation and how some struggled even with the RA role to make financial ends meet.
We see this quote from Anthony where it says, “Yes, you’re getting free housing and a free meal plan and the convenience of being on campus and all of that, but the cashflow isn’t enough if you want to be able to leave the role. The pay is like 95 bucks every two weeks, and that’s not enough. My phone bill was most of that. And so that’s not enough to be able to leave the role and go start somewhere else. And even if you try to get a job to save up, technically you have to report that job.”
Though this finding was not specifically… This one was not specifically about race, it was important to highlight in this study, given that seven of the 13 participants that I interviewed, so a little bit over half of them, discussed having to have additional jobs outside of the RA role.

And so we look at this growing trend that the RA role can be demanding, and then we have students taking on additional opportunities, work opportunities to be able to, again, to sustain themselves in school. And the demands of the role making it really challenging to actually take on an additional role because of some of the ways that our campuses have caps on hours that you can work and jobs off campus often are commonly cited to not be as flexible as on-campus employment. And so just this really complex experience for these Black RAs.

And so again, one of the other themes of this study was looking at the racialized experiences for Black students and the racialized experiences that were identified in this study included being a point person for issues around race in their communities, lack of support from their colleagues and leadership when they were encountering situations that surrounded race, concerns regarding the departmental responses to racialized incidents, either within the staff teams or in the halls, or just the greater institutional response to racialized incidents in the ways that that may have made some of these folks feel invalidated or pressured to fill in gaps, and then feelings of isolation and feeling misunderstood and feeling alone due to this disproportionate representation of Black staff members in their housing departments.

And so when encountering racialized experiences, the Black RAs in the study explained that they felt most affirmed through departmental relationships and connections with other Black peers or other Black professionals. Challenging relationships in their house community led them to seek support outside of their immediate staff team, and again, most often with Black professionals in other parts of campus.

What I will say is we see, I think that Nova’s… Nevermind, I’ll save on that point. But it should be noted that not all Black RAs described having a direct experience with racialized incidents and that none of the experiences that these folks encountered were exactly the same. But for those who did, they were able to articulate the impact of those experiences and what they wish their departments would’ve done differently to support them.

And so we see this quote from Xavier where he shares, “But I can’t fully be 100% transparent because I don’t know the underlying stigmas that my supervisor may hold. As much as I want to go into the office and express my rage, I don’t want to be seen as an angry Black person. I don’t want her to interpret me as that person. As much as I want to express deep grief and sadness, I also don’t want her to feel like, ‘Oh, he’s a weak individual.’ And since I can’t understand what she may be thinking in her mind, I’m now reluctant on how I emotionally operate around her because unconscious biases are real.”

I also include an example from Nova where she shared her frustrations about being unfairfully targeted by a coworker specifically to a respond to an incident that involved Black residents. Nova described her frustrations as with being continually contacted about an incident and explained how the incident made her feel both protective of the Black students that were involved in this ongoing incident, but also annoyed with her coworkers because of her coworkers’ inability or not even inability, but her coworkers just blatant disregard to respond to the incident that was happening in her community because of the identities of the folks that were involved.

And so Nova shared, “You’re coming to me because these people identify with me. You think that I can connect with them more instead of you dealing with the situation when it’s your residents who are coming for these residents, and it’s your residents who are causing conflict with these residents. And I hate to, but I’m going to call it what it is, you’re coming to me because I’m Black and you think that I can automatically deal with these residents.”

When addressing departmental support, many of them express how they wish their departments would just be more aware of what they may be navigating and to not treat their concerns like an afterthought and to have protocols and responses within the department that actually address their racialized concerns.

And so here, I will actually take this pause because I think that I’ve shared a few things and I do want us to kind of marinate on. What do you believe are some of the avenues of support for Black resident assistants on college campuses? And you can think specifically about yours.

So take a few minutes. I’ll give about two to three minutes for you to think through. And again, you can utilize the chat. You also are welcome to come off mute if you have something that you want to share more publicly, but what do you believe are some avenues for support? And afterwards, I’ll share some of what I learned through what I asked for the students in this study.

Okay. And so I’ll share what I found. Generally, again, the relationships in the hall… Oops, sorry. I did see a comment in the chat. Sorry I didn’t give you long enough to respond.

Okay, awesome. We’ll see how many of these things connect with what you all were reflecting on as well. But generally the experiences with or the relationships within their hall community, be it with the supervisor or with their peers, were meaningful and greatly influenced how Black RAs navigated their work experiences. Those who had more positive relationships tended to describe feeling more supported and described better help-seeking strategies involving their immediate team members. Those with more negative experiences within their staff teams often went outside of either the hall community or the department community for support.

Black RAs discussed building relationships with their hall or community team, but also highlighted some instances, excuse me, where they formed special relationships with other Black RAs, those that were not necessarily in their building, but folks that had their same role on campus.

When navigating racial incidents, and I asked about help seeking behaviors when navigating racial incidents, often many of them first went to other Black RAs and then to Black faculty and staff mentors, and then to white supervisors or non-Black supervisors where applicable. And so we see this example with Kendyl that illuminates this hierarchy of where I go for support and Kendyl shares, “If I just want to vent, then I’ll go to my other RA friends who are people of color because I feel like they’ll understand. If I’m going to go get advice, then I’ll go to people like Kenneth, my supervisor in the Multicultural Center, or my mentors outside of housing because I feel like they’re just going to get it more.” And this was Kendyl specifically responding to racial incidents on campus.
And so we see the peer-to-peer relationship is important, and I think a lot of literature affirms that. And the hall experience is important, but where that lacks or where folks feel like they just can’t connect in that way, we also do see this trend of finding folks with similar lived experiences or shared experiences in campus, and then specifically looking at those who may have some leadership authority. It could be people in offices of multicultural affairs that was referenced a few times, it was referenced here in this quote, or just staff of color or Black staff that are in other places where these Black RAs find them accessible.

And so we are now at the point in my presentation where we’ll do a little activity. We have about 10 minutes for this, and then I will share some final thoughts. But what I’ll notice that many of the expectations for the resident assistant role, I understand as someone who’s worked at residence house, it exists for the proper functioning of the residence life operation, right? It’s common to have RAs present in the building for a certain number of hours during the week and to limit the number of outside commitments to help to ensure visibility for residents. It’s common to have RAs respond to incidents and concerns and policy violations, some of which may be racialized in nature, such as slurs and resident conflicts and protests and whatever the incident may be. It’s common to provide room and board as an incentive for RAs to live where they work.

And while these positional expectations exist, what I learned from the study was that there still are some negotiations that Black RAs have to make in order to occupy this particular leadership role. Do I become an RA or do I not be an RA and have more time and space to join this club or organization that will connect me with more like community? Do I take on this extra job and risk my performance in my role, or do I stick it out and then struggle financially to make my ends meet? And so just a lot of negotiations that they’re having to navigate in this role or risk having to leave, which could have a detrimental impact on their academic journey.

And so wanted to take sort of the next, let’s say eight minutes in small groups, a group to three to four to reflect on these questions. What expectations for student staff exist within your organization? Are there any student staff expectations that may have unintended consequences for the staff? How might your organization consider the needs of student staff when developing job responsibilities and the operations for employees? And what’s one recommendation you can make to support a more student-centered approach for engaging employees?

I want us to also consider this through the lens of what I’ve shared about Black RAs’ experiences and think about what does it look like to better support Black RAs within our units. And so we will now have a moment to break out into small groups and have this conversation. You all will be invited back after a little bit of time to kind of share out. And then I will share the recommendations that I found through this study and some final thoughts.

Welcome back. Thank you all for participating in that portion of the presentation or the webinar. I’m curious, for those of you that were meeting in the small groups, were there any staff expectations that you identified that may be in lieu of what we talked about today could have unintended consequences or unexpected impacts for Black RAs? Or you can answer too, maybe the fourth question for a recommendation that you might make to support considering the experiences of Black RAs when organizing their role for your department.

And I’ll take a moment to pause because I know I moved quickly through the not letting folks finish their message in the chat the last time. So I’ll take a few minutes to pause as folks are capturing their responses.

Yeah. I see a comment in the chat that talks about our expectations around their emotional maturity, expecting them to be more mature than their peers, while also not fully acknowledging them in some ways is my own interpretation of those process. They are near to peer. They’re oftentimes around the same age. And so some of the expectations that we have of them around their emotional maturity could be, again, an expectation that can have some unintended consequences, for sure.

Yeah. See a recommendation in here around the development of an affinity group for Black RAs to be able to share their experiences, but also to build community and the focus on their humanity. Yes, thank you.

Yeah, I see another comment about the development of an advisory board to be able to provide recommendations to departmental leadership. Yeah, I see a comment in here around the expectation around limiting the time or outside involvement or employment or mandating essentially full-time employment during those training times. I do remember the marathon of training, weeks and weeks of long, long days and having to prepare your hall community physically after long days of training, absolutely.

Okay. If you are writing, please continue to write. I’m going to go to the next slide just to kind of share what I learned and some of the recommendations that came from this research study. So yes, a lot of what you all said, I know that there were comments earlier in the chat around affinity networks or convening groups and seeing some of this low attendance. And I think that at the start of anything where you’re building a culture around something that that could be the case. But we also see from the recommendations both in the chat and then also through this study that a space like that seems to be necessary and critical for folks. And so I’ll share my recommendations in order, but just wanted to kind of affirm that too before I got to these recommendations.

And so supervisors should realize their responsibility in helping to create a better team dynamic that prioritizes the inclusion of all members, regardless of their social identities or backgrounds. Many of the previously stated comments in my study surrounded Black RAs’ need for an advocate within the hall community, and reiterated the need for the hall leadership and then the departmental leadership to be supportive in thinking about what does it mean to create a supportive and affirming climate in the work experience.

Recognizing that Black RAs also often find support with those who either work in diversity offices or with mentors who identify racially similarly to them, supervisors could develop formal and intentional relationships with campus diversity offices or other diverse staff on campus. This can help with ensuring that the staff that report under them have exposure to some of these professionals on campus and know that they are there and another avenue of support. It also can help with developing more meaningful departmental relationships too with offices that can support the holistic development of our student staff.

Departments are urged to recruit and hire more diverse staff at all levels within the organization. Some of the notes around feelings of isolation could be mitigated in some ways with ensuring the visibility of role models for these diverse student staff. Also noted that the Black RAs felt this need to go outside of the department for support. In some instances, having better interdepartmental representation can assist with students having channels to express their concerns with people who have the ability to directly influence, positively influence their work experiences.

It’s recommended that departments develop identity-based affinity groups. That has come up again. I know I’ve made that comment before. Where possible, Black RAs in my study talked about how they created informal spaces, but to have those spaces formalized can support this sense of belonging, especially when it can counter this feeling of onlyness or isolation, especially in the cases where Black RAs may be the only Black RA in their community or one of few in their community. And so being able to talk about their racial experience in the role with other folks can be helpful.

And then housing departments can help to alleviate some of the harmful consequences of racialized experiences by intentionally developing and delivering better diversity, equity and inclusion training for all staff. Enhanced training can prepare all staff to recognize and address incidents involving race or microaggressions or other biases, and people can feel empowered to do that regardless of what their racial identity is.

Additional training may also help staff at all levels to better understand how to communicate across differences and promote the development of more intentional responses to racialized incidents that happen within the hall community and on campus.

And so these are some select references, not all of them. The reference list is very long, but these are, I think some of the ones that connected with some of the quotes that I pulled from the study. And here is my contact information. I now open the floor for any questions or comments or reflections that folks may have as a result of being here today.

DeAndre Taylor:
If there are no questions, Dr. Johnson, we want to thank you for presenting this information. So please give us a virtual round of applause for Class of 2003 Diamond Honoree, and today’s webinar presenter, Dr. Steven Johnson. Thank you so much for this well-needed topic. We thank you so much and for your contributions to our field.

Again, we want to thank Roompact as our sponsor for their great work. And then we have our last webinar, our very last webinar of the season is going to be taking place on December 5th at 11:00 AM Pacific Time. So please check out that information on CHRL’s, Commission for Housing and Residential Life Facebook page, where you can go on and register. So thank you, Dr. Johnson.
And if you all haven’t done so, today is the last day to submit your votes for ACP election. So thank you all so much, and I’ll see you next time.