The Realities of Dark-skinned Women in Higher Education

The experiences and differences between dark-skinned black women and their peers within higher education is a topic that has only recently gained traction within research. These notable differences manifest themselves through colorism, racial biases, negative self-esteem, and wanting to belong, which in turn paints a picture of the true realities this demographic of women face in higher education. This poster analyzes the experience of dark-skinned black women and the factors surrounding, influencing, and perpetuating their current treatment in the Western educational world. This analysis will be structured by theme to raise awareness of the realities of being a dark-skinned black woman in Western education.

Hi, my name is Tashianna Patterson and I am a senior student here at George Mason University. I am going to tell everyone here a little bit about my undergraduate research project. So a little bit of a preface to this project is that this is one that I started a previous semester in a different class and I was happy to have the opportunity to turn it into something a little bit bigger through OSCAR and so yeah let’s get into it. The title of the project is the realities of dark-skinned black Women in higher education and my project happens to be a creative one. My method was a short story as I am someone who loves to write and I think writing is a good way to bring awareness to topics. This project is intended for the young adult age demographic so college students work perfectly for that and I have just really enjoyed doing it. The first step to completing this project was conducting a literature review and in the literature review, I really tried to focus on definitions and themes that were relevant to my work. An example of that would be colorism. I did a lot of research on the historical implications of colorism and how it has and continues to plague the black community and how it also affects the different aspects of black people’s lives. And with the literature review, I also did a lot of reading. You can’t write if you don’t read so I read a lot. Reading helped me to focus on the skill level of creative writing, how to write creatively, and for different demographics. There are certain types of structures that different demographics like to read and I worked hard to make this authentic. And so reading was another big thing. After that, I spent around three to six hours per week writing and editing. I would meet biweekly with my mentor, Dr. David Corwin and we would just go bounce ideas off of each other, makes line edits and those meetings were just very helpful. I didn’t expect how when you write you often hate what you wrote and then someone else reads it and you’re like maybe it’s not so bad. Ultimately what I hope for this project is for awareness to be brought to an issue that I think does not get a lot. I definitely also think representation and hopefully someone who reads this work and thinks this is an experience that I have or know someone else is having and just help people understand this better. I want to start by thanking OSCAR for funding this project and giving me the opportunity to continue this work. And then another thank you to my mentor Dr. David Corwin for being such a tremendous help to me this semester. Thank you so much for listening to my project.