White Guys on Campus: Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of "Post-Racial" Higher Education

Index

Preface

When I began conducting scholarly work on racism, I thought it might be a laudable long-term goal to write the first book on Whiteness in higher education. I quickly realized that book has been written several times under such titles as What Matters in College (Astin, 1993), How College Affects Students (Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005), and Leaving College (Tinto, 1987). This is not meant as a jab at the foundational texts of the field of higher education. Rather, I wanted to highlight the strong vein of Whiteness that each one of these seminal books has embedded within it. For example, Tinto (1987) conducted a critical synthesis of the higher education scholarship to identify the factors that contribute to students leaving college. However, the bulk of the scholarship he reviewed relied on samples that were disproportionately White, and his theorizing has been critiqued for this (e.g., Tierney, 1992). Instead of calling his text Leaving College for White Students, Tinto universalized his language and spoke of college students, rendering omnipresent Whiteness invisible.

This is a simple example of how Whiteness is embedded into the very structures of society. It did not take Tinto overtly trying to prioritize White experiences to make Whiteness a central component of his theorizing. Racism is so engrained in the fabric of U.S. society that Bonilla-Silva (2006) argued we live in a country of Racism Without Racists. That is, it does not take intentionally racist actions to perpetuate racism, as the normality of Whiteness will do. This normality is precisely why engaging issues of race and racism is so difficult. In order to address this issue, one has to be able to first name the problem. When Whiteness is named, there is a predictable response—a lot of White outrage (e.g., White Fragility; DiAngelo, 2011). This anger tends to become more intense when people agitate for racial equity because, as the internet philosopher Anonymous offered, When you’re accustomed to privilege, equity feels like oppression.¹

This dynamic is precisely why, when writing this book, the image of the Fighting Whites mascot² was a perfect visual metaphor for the work, but a little history is necessary. In Colorado, the mascot for Eaton High School was the Fightin’ Reds. When some Native students at Northern Colorado University said the mascot was stereotypical and offensive (e.g., misshapen nose, loin cloth, and eagle feather), they were told by White school officials and community members that there was nothing racist about the Fightin’ Reds (Johansen, 2010). Within this context, the students created the Fighting Whites mascot for their university intramural basketball team (Klyde-Silverstein, 2012). If there was nothing wrong with a stereotypical Native mascot, it should be acceptable to have a stereotypical White mascot, correct? Wrong! The outrage and backlash were swift. The same people who found nothing racist about the Fightin’ Reds mascot were fiercely critical of the Fighting Whites, ignoring the fact that the latter was satirizing the former (Johansen, 2010). That is, they were more upset at a critique of racism than at actual instances of racism. This dynamic was present throughout my research for White Guys on Campus. The large bulk of White guys I spoke with were more upset about imagined racism against White people than about actual racism against People of Color.

This work is more than scholarship. I am constantly reminded that the normality of Whiteness has real, everyday consequences. While editing this book, I took a break to run to my local Walgreens. Dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops, I walked into the store and immediately heard over the intercom, Security to the front please. I thought, No way they’re talking about me, and I went about my business. Soon, I realized there was a White store manager staring at me as I was pricing toothpaste. She asked me, What are you doing? I replied, Shopping. She gave me some space but continued to surveil. After about five minutes, I approached her and said, That’s really messed up. I literally did nothing wrong and you’re accusing me of stealing. She replied, You’re right, I should have just followed you instead. That was not much better. I put down the items I was going to purchase, left the store, and have not returned. Evidently, being a Brown man with a ponytail in Arizona means I am under suspicion while buying toiletries. It was a relatively minor incident, but still keeps me on my toes—reminding me that this work is not simply an academic exercise but rather is rooted in one of our most pressing and difficult social problems to address: racism.

This book uses a critical lens to take an unapologetically radical approach to the study of Whiteness. Radical colloquially is framed as a pejorative, but I use it as originally intended. Radical derives from the Latin root radix, which means root. Frequently, analyses of diversity in higher education ignore root causes of racial stratification, which is akin to trying to kill a thistle with a weed-whacker. The root structure is still in place, and the thistle regrows. In contrast, this book presents a radical analysis of racism in higher education, seeking to get to the root of this social problem—identifying how institutions of higher education and individuals within them both contribute to systemic racism and sometimes can be vehicles for social change. So, let’s get to the root of it, shall we?

1

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

White Male Racial Immunity in Higher Education

On November 8, 2016, demographobia (Chang, 2014)—or the irrational fear of demographic population shifts—reared its ugly head and the Forty-Fifth was elected president of the United States. He won overwhelmingly with White people, in particular non-college-educated White people. Analyses of this trend tended to fall into tired old stereotypes of good (non-racist) versus bad (racist) White people. Implicitly, this let college-educated White people off the proverbial hook for their own racism. After all, it was the uneducated, racist, hillbilly rednecks who turned over the country to the Forty-Fifth, right? To quote the Forty-Fifth, Wrong! Many common and insidious manifestations of contemporary racism occur on college campuses, as I will elaborate later.

Additionally, some of the most headline-making racial controversies involve institutions of higher education. For example, Dr. Lee Bebout, a White professor at Arizona State University, offered a graduate seminar on Racial Theory and the Problem of Whiteness. Only knowing the reading list and having no testimonies from inside the classroom, Fox News immediately deemed this course racist against White students.¹ That was interesting considering the reading list included Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. The public outcry was swift, and while the class was still offered that semester, threats against Bebout and his family poured in and neo-Nazis flyered his home neighborhood labeling him anti-White (Lemons, 2015). This example proved to be so controversial that an Arizona law was recently introduced to outlaw university teaching of social justice in public educational institutions throughout the state, and this class was one of the central illustrations of the need of the legislation (Polleta, 2017).

Consider also that Boston University professor Dr. Saida Grundy tweeted, Why is White America so reluctant to identify White college males as a problem population? (Jaschik, 2015). From an empirical standpoint, this question makes a lot of sense. On college campuses, White men are disproportionately responsible for code-of-conduct violations, sexual assault, and alcohol abuse, among many other antisocial behaviors (Boswell & Spade, 1996; Capraro, 2000; Harper, Harris, & Mmeje, 2005). Given this context, why would this statement be deemed controversial? Instead of engaging Grundy’s message, the news coverage tended to frame her as the problem, asking questions such as:

Why is it acceptable for her to be racist against White people?

How can she teach White men?

Would this Tweet be acceptable if it was a White professor making a similar statement about Black students? (Cabrera, Franklin, & Watson, 2017, p. 16)

Dr. Grundy, a first-year assistant professor, had to publicly apologize, and Boston University’s central administration openly condemned her tweet (Jaschik, 2015). What is going on here? How is it possible that these two events spiraled into national, headline-garnering controversies?

Both of these examples highlight an interesting trend regarding the intersection of Whiteness and higher education. The central questions and issues raised by Drs. Bebout and Grundy were not the core of the controversies. Instead, their actions were labeled racist, when in reality their primary social crime was examining White responsibility for societal racism. That is, when racial issues arise, they tend to be framed as a minority problem—implicitly not holding White people accountable, unless it is those bad racist Whites (Cabrera et al., 2017). This is not a new trend. Almost a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois was continually asked, How does it feel to be a problem? (1969, p. 43). Du Bois understood that Black people, like himself, implicitly owned the racial problem, maintaining the racial innocence of White people. Essentially, what Drs. Bebout and Grundy did was name Whiteness and highlight its problematic nature, and the negative public reaction was swift. They disrupted a powerful yet unspoken social norm: the invisibility of Whiteness. The fact that these instances became controversial says more about the current state of our society than the rhetoric these two professors used.

Almost paradoxically, the undergraduate years can also be a time of incredible racial growth for White students and sites of challenging contemporary racism (Cabrera, 2012; Cabrera et al., 2017; Reason, Millar, & Scales, 2005; Saénz, 2010). This book grapples with these tensions through a critical examination of White men on college campuses, unveiling the frequently unconscious habits of racism (Sullivan, 2006) as well as the possibility of developing anti-racism among White students (Reason & Broido, 2005). This is an unexplored issue for a number of reasons. First, and most fundamental, there is massive and pervasive misunderstanding about what constitutes racism. These limited definitions include the following:

Racism is an individual fault, and not a systemic reality

Racism requires meanness, hatred, or bitterness toward the outgroup

Racism can occur against any racial group, including Whites (Cabrera, 2009, p. 7)

If this is the extent of contemporary racism, then it is only a minor problem. In the 1970s, it fell out of favor to publicly state that Black people are inferior people, and the overwhelming majority of Whites profess to favor racial equality (Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, & Krysan, 1997). Instead, the systemic realities of racism persist, but overt expressions of racism are frequently driven underground (Bobo, Kluegel, & Smith, 1997; Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Omi & Winant, 2015). This makes racism a powerful social force. It is not only an oppressive social system but also difficult to define, and its contours become apparent only when there is a challenge to it.

Within this framework, it is critically important to explore the racial lives of White undergraduate men because they tend to be ignored when issues of racism arise. For example, a common analysis of campus racism involves microaggressions, the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership (Sue, 2010, p. 3). The insidious effect of microaggressions is not the isolated incidents but their cumulative impact as they mentally and emotionally wear down People of Color, frequently resulting in racial battle fatigue (Smith, Allen, & Danley, 2007). Microaggression scholarship, however, is very limited because, as Cabrera et al. (2017) argued, these analyses almost always stem from the perspective of those targeted by microaggressions (p. 36). That is, there is a microaggression enacted upon a microaggressee, but without a direct analysis of the microaggressor. There is an effect with no cause. This is the purpose of this book—to fill in this missing component on campus-based racial analysis.

Whiteness and Racism on the College Campus: Past to Present

In 2015, the University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity made headlines when a YouTube video went viral of them singing the song, There will never be a nigger in SAE.² They were immediately expelled, and OU’s president David Boren claimed that his university had a zero-tolerance policy for racism. This framing views racism as the exception on college campuses, not the rule. I took issue with this stance and offered the following: No institution of higher education in the country has a zero-tolerance policy for racism. Racial bias—much of it unconscious—is so ingrained in American society that any institution that actually enforced zero tolerance would have to expel half its freshman class before winter break. What Boren actually means is that OU has zero tolerance for overtly racist actions that are caught on camera, are posted to YouTube and embarrass the institution in the national news (Cabrera, 2015). Essentially, racist incidents tend to be individualized, and perpetrators on college campuses are viewed as a few bad apples instead of a predictable outcome of two issues. First is the persistence of systemic racism in contemporary society, and our collective unwillingness to address this oppressive social force. The second is that despite being labeled bastions of liberal indoctrination,³ many of the same racial conflicts that play out in the general society also occur on college campuses (Cabrera, 2009).

Institutions of higher education were not created to be racially inclusive, and they have been struggling with that legacy ever since (Cabrera et al., 2017; Cole, 2018; Geiger, 2005; Harper, Patton, & Wooden, 2009; Karabel, 2005; Mustaffa, 2017; Thelin, 2004). That is, universities are paradoxically spaces for educating the societal elite (Cabrera et al., 2017; Karabel, 2005), while concurrently aspiring to be spheres of democracy via scholarly inquiry and non-repression (Gutmann, 1999). Unfortunately, it is not possible to have an arena of democracy and non-repression if minoritized racial groups are systematically excluded, preventing equal participation (Cabrera, 2014d).⁴ Given the history of U.S. higher education, it is not surprising that racism is a central and foundational component (Harper et al., 2009; Mustaffa, 2017). As Cabrera et al. (2017) offered, It was not just that [institutions of higher education] actively recruited [White] students, but they also created exclusionary policies both implicit and explicit that excluded non-White, nonmale, and nonwealthy students from gaining access (p. 58). Access to colleges and universities did increase substantially through the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, which started the movement toward mass higher education (Geiger, 2005; Trow, 1970). While Black students also experienced substantial gains in access, some nuance is warranted (Harper et al., 2009).

First, Black enrollments primarily rose at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), a reminder that segregation was the law of the land and became further entrenched with the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) ruling (Chesler, Lewis, & Crowfoot, 2005; Harper et al., 2009). Second, the quality of education at these public HBCUs tended to be substandard due to a combination of underfunding and a primary focus on vocational training. Roebuck and Murty (1993) offered a scathing interpretation of the reasons for structured inequality: To get millions of dollars in federal funds for the development of white land-grant universities, to limit African American education to vocational training, and to prevent African Americans from attending white land-grant colleges (p. 27). Even with a massive expansion of public higher education, there were mechanisms in place to keep Blacks in their place and preserve White racial dominance.

Some of these formal structures of explicit segregation were dismantled by the mid-twentieth century, in particular via Brown v. Board of Education (1954), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate is inherently unequal. However, Derrick Bell (1979) has been highly critical of this ruling in that he did not see it as actually having the best interests of justice and Black people at heart. Rather, segregation was outlawed because it benefitted White people, or what Bell (1979) referred to as interest-convergence. Additionally, it is questionable how much this ruling affected higher education. In fact, Brown (2001) argued, the mandate to desegregate did not reach higher education until one decade after Brown, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (p. 49). That is, the all deliberate speed clause of Brown did not have a meaningful impact on colleges and universities until they were threatened with the loss of federal funding if segregation persisted.

Despite this issue, patterns of higher education access substantially increased for minoritized students with the creation and implementation of affirmative action (Crosby, 2004; Harper et al., 2009). Even though affirmative action tends to be framed as a race-based program, the primary beneficiaries numerically have been White women (Crosby, 2004). Regardless, the program has been a significant driver of access for minoritized students in higher education (Chesler et al., 2005; Harper et al., 2009). However, these modest gains have eroded because of persistent attacks on affirmative action in particular and race-conscious social policy in general (Crosby, 2004; Santos, Cabrera, & Fosnacht, 2010). HBCUs have even been pressured to recruit more White students (Harper et al., 2009). Within this sociopolitical landscape, racial gaps in access along racial lines persist and have sometimes even expanded (Carnevale & Strohl, 2013; Posselt, Jaquette, Bielby, & Bastedo, 2012). However, the racial problems of higher education only begin with access. The college campus, as Hurtado (1992) argued, is a context for conflict.

An issue that is prevalent in the larger society and very widespread on college campuses is cultural appropriation (Keene, 2015). It is not just that White students adopt cultures that are not their own, but they also do so in very stereotypical and racist ways (Garcia, Johnston, Garibay, Herrera, & Giraldo, 2011). A common way that this occurs on college campuses is in the form of racial theme parties. One example was the ghetto-themed party UT Austin students threw in 2007 in honor of Dr. King’s holiday, where White students came dressed as Aunt Jemima while eating fried chicken and drinking malt liquor (Wise, 2007). Later that year, students at Santa Clara University held a south of the border party where the White students in attendance dressed as maids or pregnant Latinas (Georgevich, 2007).

Given the massive size of U.S. higher education, one could think that these transgressions represent the beliefs of just a few bad apples. However, similar parties have been documented at the University of Texas School of Law, Trinity College, Whitman College, Washington University, Virginia, Clemson, Willamette College, Texas A&M, UConn School of Law, Stetson, Chicago, Cornell, Swarthmore, Emory, MIT, Macalester, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, Louisville, Wisconsin Whitewater, William Jewell, Oklahoma State, Auburn, UC Irvine, Syracuse, Tarleton State, Union College, Colorado, Tennessee, Arizona, Alabama, Illinois, Delaware, and Mississippi (Wise, 2007). Keep in mind this list represents only the schools where students were caught and embarrassed their institution on social media. Thus, this is simply the tip of the proverbial racial iceberg.

Parties like these have been in existence for years, but the emergence of social media has allowed them to be more publicly visible (Chesler et al., 2005, p. 48). It is a classic example of what Picca and Feagin (2007) refer to as backstage performance—that is, the actions of White people are markedly different in the presence of People of Color (front stage performance) versus among other White people (backstage performance). Additionally, racial theme parties and hate crimes bring an incredible amount of negative publicity to institutions of higher education, creating coercive pressure to handle these situations with minimal media attention. This is why in Hurtado et al.’s (1998) study of Texas A&M, fewer than 10 percent of racial discrimination cases on campus were actually reported.

Part of this trend is related to White racial segregation on college campuses. Contrary to Beverly Daniel Tatum’s (2003) provocative title, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Alone in the Cafeteria?, it is actually White men who segregate on campus the most (antonio, 2001). Despite the empirical reality, Students of Color are continually blamed for campus segregation or balkanization (Cabrera & Hurtado, 2015; D’Souza, 1991). Also, these racially segregated environments are not innocuously separate. Rather, they are the campus subenvironments that foster the greatest sense of reverse racism, or the perceived racial victimization of White people. Throughout this book I present reverse racism in quotation marks for two reasons. First, it is an accurate description of how many White people feel about issues of race. Second, it has no basis in reality, necessitating the scare quotes. It represents what Feagin and O’Brien (2003) refer to as sincere fictions. They are sincere because White folk genuinely believe them, and they are fictions because they are not real in an empirical sense.

Returning to the college campus, the more that White students are segregated from the non-White campus population, the more they are likely to perceive a sense of reverse racism (Cabrera, 2014b; Sidanius, Van Laar, Levin, & Sinclair, 2004). The housed Greek system is an area of campus where segregation is particularly heightened (Cabrera, 2014b; Chang & DeAngelo, 2002; Ross, 2015; Syrett, 2009). This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense because the Greek system is one of the few areas on campus where students are able to exclude their peers from participation (Cabrera, Watson, & Franklin, 2016; Ross, 2015). This is not a new phenomenon. Astin (1993) postulated that racial insulation might be one of the driving forces behind Greek participation: A good deal of racial strife may lead to the formation of social organizations that cater to a particular racial or ethnic group or to conservative students who want to isolate themselves from racial interaction (p. 341). This segregation, in turn, tends to foster backstage performance, as Picca and Feagin (2007)