THE PROJECT
This project began with LEXengaged, a social justice living and learning community at the University of Kentucky led by Dr. Nora Moosnick.The theme of the living learning community was the horse industry from a social justice perspective, highlighting the contributions African Americans had made to Kentucky’s premier industry, horse racing. Students learned about social justice efforts in Lexington, KY while mentoring local elementary school students.
2016
Soon after the 2016 Presidential election, racial hate speech occurred on the social justice living and learning floor on a white board, messages like “hang n,” “kill coons."Residence Life organized an evening session to address the situation. Black and Brown students sat on one side of the room and the white, rural kids sat on the floor cowering. A student from Chicago talked about family members who advised her against coming to Kentucky for fear of her safety, and women recalled being denied access to white fraternity parties. Meanwhile, the white rural students looked shellshocked and inexperienced with what they were hearing.
Generally, many students had lost sleep because they did not know whether they could afford another semester, their accounts frozen, unable to register for classes; inevitably, these students were Black and brown.
There was also the grim predicament so many rural kids faced, less widely known. One afternoon, we were on our bus returning from the elementary school and a white, rural student from western KY read from her phone, “He’s dead, he’s in jail, and she’s pregnant,” talking about people she went to high school with. To this, two Black and Brown women shook their heads and said something like, “You don’t want to go to her town.” A white student from eastern Kentucky, who raced home for a multi-person funeral that semester, piped in, “Oh, yeah, you wouldn’t want to go to my hometown. They found a dead body in the creek last week.” “Yeah, they found a dead body in the creek in my town last week, too,” the student from western Kentucky rejoined.
What was clear was that both sets of students were suffering.
Interactions like the ones on the bus and the events of fall 2016 set a mission to bridge the divide between rural and urban students. If students heard each other’s stories empathy would result.
2018-2020
2020
For two years, twelve student interns along with Dr. Moosnick gathered students’ stories. Oral histories chronicled the stories of rural or urban (suburban) students from the University of Kentucky (UK), West Virginia University (WVU), University of Florida (UF), and University of Mississippi (UM or Ole Miss).
These stories reveal the frailty of the dichotomy and instead underscore class alliances between unsuspected populations. Class, unexpectedly, but not surprisingly, emerged as a salient point of connectivity rendering the rural and urban fixation less consequential.
Three former students, Emily, Saturn, and Tori stayed with Dr. Moosnick during the pandemic to write and reflect on these interviews. They sat, socially distanced, in Dr. Moosnick’s backyard during the summer of 2020, zoomed during the winter and finally got to see each other again in-person during the spring and summer of 2021. Through the process they became family, needing each other to get through difficulties during the pandemic, an aura of love surrounding them.
NOW
This work has cumulated in the creation of the book, Campus Candor: Students' Stories Unmasked. It is a tactic to confront entrenched segregated existences by laying bare students’ stories, unearthing intersections among unsuspecting student populations, and catching young people before they settle into segregated adult lives.
