ABSTRACT
This study began as an interest in the college experience, but it quickly became apparent there was much to be learned about race at this moment in the United States by taking it seriously and examining it at the micro level of individual experience and narration. The interviews with these men and women show many things, in fact, too many things to analyze in one chapter or one book. Their words reveal the ways that race is indeed shaped by and overlaps with class, stratification, and sex/gender explanations of inequality and oppression, and how racial identity is socially constructed by contexts as wide ranging as historical era, campus climate, neighborhood, and conversation.
