Michaela Jenkins

• Priority Area: Race, Racism, and Inequality
• Disciplines: Africana studies, sociology, ethnoracial thinking, Blackness, culture, and hierarchy.
• Mentor: Dr. Christina Jackson
• Mentors' Disciplines: Africana studies, urban sociology, race, and inequality
• School: Faculty of Arts and Sciences
• Department: Africana Studies Program/Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice

Michaela McMillian Jenkins is a scholar of culture and inequality who uses multi-method and interdisciplinary tools to investigate how Blackness and anti-Blackness are shaped by different cultural contexts and racialized organizations. Her current research agenda focuses on the growing significance of ethnic identity to Black people and the organizations and systems they exist within. Her dissertation, completed in the department of Sociology at Emory University and now being revised into a book project, outlines how Black immigrant descendants and Black enslavement descendants in the United States are interpreted through different constructions of diversity at colleges and universities. This project emphasizes how the racial contexts of educational institutions shape how they portray themselves as diverse, and how ethnicity affects when Black students win and lose as schools navigate a changing legal landscape around affirmative action and DEI. This work makes unique contributions by examining structural mechanisms for patterns of Black ethnic educational attainment rather than cultural mechanisms.

In addition to revising her monograph, Dr. McMillian Jenkins will use her Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship to conduct research on how location and proportions of Black immigrant descendants and Black enslavement descendants shape how Black descendants of enslavement create and define their ethnic identities. Specifically she focuses on three contexts for Black American ethnic identity experiences--Black enslavement descendants majority areas in the United States, Black immigrant descendant majority areas in the United States, and Black people who were born in the United States but now live elsewhere. This project attempts to deepen understanding of how being a part of a region or nation’s dominant ethnoracial narrative affects development of one’s ethnic identity and orientation towards the importance of ethnicity in daily life.

Dr. McMillian Jenkins will also incorporate her research into her undergraduate instruction in the Africana studies program and the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology departments at Rutgers University-Camden. She looks forward to continuing to incorporate student voices in her research and theorizing through partnership with the DICE office and scholar-mentorship. Some of her favorite mentorship activities are demystifying higher education and helping students see the value in the communities they came from.