When released in 1995, the film Higher Learning not only prophesized the ferocious return of White identity politics on American college campuses, but also divined the reclaiming of White identity politics as anti-Blackness politics. This “political capture” in the early twenty-first century is marked by anti-egalitarians receiving little resistance as they employ oppressive language and physical violence to upend statutory and regulatory victories associated with the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society. Director John Singleton, a Los Angeleno born in 1968 and a 1990 graduate of the University of Southern California, was keenly aware not all Americans would appreciate Higher Learning as both a celebratory and cautionary tale on the country’s past, present, and future. Yet, he was also hopeful Americans would see his film as drawing attention to the hierarchical socioeconomic and sociopolitical relationships between demographic groups in the United States. Singleton once remarked, “We took a fictitious campus called ‘Columbus University’ and made it a metaphor for America itself.” The utility of viewing Higher Learning as a metaphor for experiencing and overcoming contentious politics is key in the contextualization of the film. As Singleton explains, “American college campuses are the only place you can see America in its purest form.” By this, we take Singleton to mean that curricula and co-curricular activities on American college campuses can either magnify or distort the heterogeneity of and connectedness across the varied cultural, aesthetic, ascriptive, and political landscapes shaping life in America. Because those activities reflect policy choices, campus design can blunt or accelerate the pipeline from discomfort to grievance.