About
Fadilat was born in Nigeria and raised in Staten Island, New York. She graduated with honors from CUNY Brooklyn College in 2018 with a B.A. in Psychology and Sociology. She is now a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan, where her research examines race, immigration, and the criminal justice system. Her dissertation investigates how Black immigrants and their children experience and respond to racialized state violence through both criminalization and immigration enforcement.
Her broader research agenda explores identity, belonging, and racial formation across transnational contexts. In previous work, she theorized triple consciousness to capture how Black immigrants, particularly first-generation Nigerians, navigate the layered realities of race, immigrant identity, and aspirational Americanness in everyday life.
Prior to graduate school, Fadilat worked as a Legal Assistant at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), supporting civil rights and racial justice litigation, and as a Research Assistant at the Thurgood Marshall Institute, LDF’s interdisciplinary think tank. She is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and a Rackham Merit Fellow.
