Structural racism and the working lives of african international students: a critical race analysis of on-campus employment in united states higher education

Abstract

African international students occupy a structurally distinct and analytically undertheorized position within the scholarship on race, education, and work in the United States. Arriving from across a continent of fifty four nations and hundreds of ethnic traditions, they nonetheless encounter an American racial formation that collapses this diversity into the single, historically burdened category of Blackness. Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT), Victor Ray's (2019) theory of racialized organizations, and Rawls and Duck's (2021) concept of tacit racism, this paper examines how on campus workspaces at U.S. universities reproduce racial inequality in the daily working lives of African international students. The argument is structured across three levels of analysis. At the macro level, F-1 visa conditions transform citizenship into a racialized credential that strips African international students of bargaining power and renders them structurally captive to institutional employers. At the meso level, the university functions as a racialized organization whose informal hiring norms, task allocation practices, and credentialing standards encode whiteness as the unmarked baseline against which all workers are evaluated. At the micro level, tacit racism operates through the taken for granted interaction orders of campus life to systematically disadvantage students whose accents, cultural idioms, and styles of self presentation do not conform to white, native English speaking norms. The paper contributes to the sociology of race and education by extending CRT to a transnational context, disaggregating the homogeneous category of international student, and demonstrating that the racial hierarchy shaping the lives of African international students is reproduced as much through bureaucratic routine and interpersonal micro interaction as through overtly discriminatory policy.