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[Editors' note: University of Michigan graduate student Kristine Molina was an award winner in the 2007 student essay contest sponsored by the National Women's Studies Association's Women of Color Caucus. Feminist Collections is pleased to be able to showcase Ms. Molina's scholarly paper in this issue, particularly because it is topically related to a series of book reviews on women in academia that we published a couple of years ago. see especially "Narratives from Women of Color in the Halls of Academe," by Pat Washington, in volume 28, no. 1 (Fall 2006), pp. 1-6; available online at http://minds. wisconsin.edu/bitstream/1793/22264/2/FCWashington.pdf.]
We cross or fall or are shoved into abysses whether we speak or remain silent. And when we do speak from the cracked spaces, it is con voz del fondo del abismo, a voice drowned out by white noise, distance and the distancing by others who don't want to hear. We are besieged by a "silence that hollows us." (Anzaldua & Moraga, 1981, p. xxii)
Women of color in America have grown up with a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service. (Lorde, 1984, p. 119)
Too frequently, women of color feel marginalized, silenced, invisible, or tokenized in institutions of higher education. Too frequently, work that focuses on the marginalization of women neglects the particular experiences of women students of color, who must confront marginalization not only because of their race or ethnicity, but also because of other social identities: gender, class, ability, and sexuality. How these social identities intersect is rarely discussed. In fact, the particular lived experiences of women of color are almost nonexistent in research on higher education. The discourses that do exist focus almost exclusively on people of color as distinct and internally homogeneous groups.
Psychological research that seeks to examine the ways in which different women of color experience various forms of social marginality remains, like women of color themselves, virtually invisible. Women of color have essentially been "shut up" and "shut out" of mainstream psychological research (Graham, 1992; lmada & Schiavo, 2005; Reid, 1993; Reid & Kelly,...