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During an interview with Erin, a second-year Asian American resident assistant at a large state institution, I (Foste) concluded our time together the same way I did with each RA of Color: I asked her what she might want the department of housing and residence life to know about her experience as a Person of Color who serves in the RA role. Quite simply, she wanted administrators to recognize the tensions of navigating white residence hall environments as a Person of Color charged with leading such spaces. Speaking about her work responding to racist incidents in the residence hall communities, she explained:
So, I mean . . . RAs are also living human beings. I feel a lot of housing, especially up there, they don’t understand that, and they expect us to work as employees who are robots and can just spew things out. But when you’re also a resident who’s going through some of these issues or who have experienced those issues, and for us to kind of shut that out and just pretend that everything’s okay while we teach these residents and listen to them, . . . [it’s difficult] without us being personally affected.
Being an RA is a unique experience for undergraduate students, in large part because those assuming the position live in close proximity with their peers whom they are charged to lead and supervise. In this regard, their positions require a highly visible presence within their residential communities and a host of educational and administrative responsibilities. Blimling (2015) noted: RAs’ “student experiences are altered by the job they do” (p. 162). Or, as Erin explained, they experience environments that produce at times robot-like expectations.
Despite acknowledgement that the RA position is an incredibly immersive and, by extension, highly demanding experience (Blimling, 2015; Boone et al., 2016), rarely have scholars examined the role of race in shaping the work of RAs of Color (Harper et al., 2011; Roland & Agosto, 2017). As Harper and colleagues (2011) highlighted: “Published research on the RA experience presents raceless accounts of the challenges these students face as well as stories of their complex residential leadership roles” (p. 193). The experiences of RAs of Color are especially important, because they are charged with being a...