The undergraduate students who facilitate higher education socialization initiatives educate prospective and new students about campus culture and thus work toward the enactment of institutional goals for diversity and retention. Because campus climates are unwelcoming to minoritized students, minoritized students who serve as peer socialization agents (e.g., campus tour guides, orientation leaders) experience discrepancies between the messages institutions expect them to convey about campus culture and their own lived experiences. The purpose of this study was to understand the ways minoritized students who serve as higher education peer socialization agents make meaning of their collegiate contexts in relation to their minoritized identities and socialization agent positions. Through qualitative research methods framed by Critical Race Theory and the concept of a meaning-making filter mediated by self-authorship, I explored the sensemaking of 13 minoritized peer socialization agents (MPSAs) at a single large, Midwestern predominantly White institution. Most MPSAs in this study made sense of their campus culture in the context of pervasive discrimination, engaging meaning-making filters fostered by counterspaces, and enacting counterstorytelling as an empowering act of resistance.This study illuminated the ways minoritized students experience racism, cisgenderism, and heterosexism in their daily lives. MPSAs experienced microaggressions, tokenization, and dehumanization in their classrooms, in out-of-class campus spaces, and off-campus. Discrimination was also apparent within socialization initiatives through deceptive messages about campus climate, an emphasis on resource awareness, unbalanced training about specific populations, and diversity teambuilding that, according to the MPSAs I interviewed, benefited majoritized students. The underlying perspectivelessness of socialization programs and training contributed to MPSAs’ battle fatigue in a climate that institutional leaders should not ignore as they pursue their goals for a diverse student body, retention, and graduation.Most MPSAs in this study described social integration with other minoritized students in physical counterspaces (i.e., campus cultural centers), cultural organizations, and MPSA subcultures, but not necessarily in the broader campus. When students’ experiences do not align with the campus master narrative, counterspaces with other minoritized students serve as the mechanism for MPSA integration and sense of belonging.With simultaneous positive and negative feelings about their university, MPSAs engaged counterstories in an attempt to communicate nuanced messages to other minoritized students and challenge the campus master narrative. Counterstories also facilitated MPSAs’ own sense of belonging and sense of self. This study unmasks the perspectivelessness of socialization programs and suggests implications for practice, for theory, and for research. This study identifies the racist, cisgenderist, and heterosexist climates minoritized students experience and challenges institutional leaders to adopt philosophies and practices that have the potential to change the master narrative from perspectivelessness to identity-awareness.
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