“You Weren’t Good Enough, So Here’s a Bronze Medal”: Southeast Asian American Students and Racialized Community College Stigma

Objective: This study aims to understand how Southeast Asian American (SEAA) community college students experience community college stigma. Methods: This phenomenological study employs AsianCrit as a framework to examine the realities of SEAA students in community college. Ten SEAA community college students underscore how racialization and community college stigma shape their self-perception and college-making decisions. Results: The findings indicate that SEAA community college students experience community college stigma in distinct ways, as shaped by the racialized contexts in which they experience stereotypes in education and in which their peers, educators, and family members inadvertently or intentionally reinforce this stigma. Contributions: These findings indicate that SEAA students experience racialized community college stigma shaped by their raced and racialized positionings within the Asian American racial category and intersecting with the stigmas of attending community college as Asianized individuals. Implications for practice include faculty exploration of how they reinforce racialized community college stigma, deeper engagement with families to minimize the reinforcement of negative stigmas associated with community college, and creating educational opportunities to support students’ meaningmaking and abilities to resist stigmatization. Future research should expand on SEAA students’ experiences of community college stigma to include SEAA community college students across different contexts. Additionally, research focusing on specific ethnic populations under the SEAA umbrella experiencing racialized community college stigma is warranted.