Where Are You Comin' From, Where Are You Goin' To:
Placing and Black Students' Discursive Construction of Community

CJM Writings > Thesis Home > Chapter 3: Out of Place (intro) > Placing & Shared Territory > Material Contexts of Placing: Black Student Union

Black Student Union (BSU)

The BSU is another context where Black students can share territory. Within her first three weeks as transfer student at C.S.U.N., Thanya had already attended BSU meetings (Monday evenings). Students mentioned that it was common to hang out at the Union just prior to the BSU meetings. The Union hangouts and the BSU meeting place, therefore, are racialized territories that share a general spatial area as well as a social and temporal space. The migration from the hangout to the meeting might be part of the same, predictable phase.
Chris planned to join the BSU because it dealt with current issues pertaining to race, issues that affect not just Black students but Blacks in general.

. . . they deal with issues that happen with Black people, they deal with many different areas of campus life, off campus life, and it's kind of like a current event kind of situation where they just talk about what's going on and they either devise a plan of action or they, uh, they, they just keep it going.

BSU members, therefore, place themselves in shared territory with Blacks in general. Chris said that he was encouraged to join the BSU by current members, who probably placed him by race (Face): "They've seen me and they go, 'Well, you should go to our meetings sometimes, see what we're about.'"

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CJM Writings > Thesis Home > Chapter 3: Out of Place (intro) > Placing & Shared Territory > Material Contexts of Placing: Black Student Union

Placing and Black Students' Discursive Construction of Community

Copyright (c) 1996, Corinna J. Moebius