Black and Smart: How High Achieving Women Experience College

Even academically talented students face challenges in college. For high-achieving Black women, their racial, gender, and academic identities intensify those issues. Inside the classroom, they are spotlighted and feel forced to be representatives for their identity groups. In campus life, they are isolated and face microaggressions from peers. Using intersectionality as a theoretical framework, Davis addresses the significance of the various identities of high-achieving Black women in college individually and collectively, revealing the ways institutional oppression functions at historically white institutions and in social interactions on and off campus. Based on interviews with collegiate Black women in honors communities, Black and Smart analyzes the experiences of academically talented Black undergraduate women navigating their social and academic lives at urban historically white institutions and offers strategies for creating more inclusive academic and social environments for talented undergraduates.