White Guys on Campus

Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of "Post-Racial" Higher Education

Nolan L Cabrera

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813599069
• eBook ISBN: 9780813599083
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education
• Index: Social Sciences

On April 22, 2015, Boston University professor Saida Grundy set off a Twitter storm with her provocative question: "Why is white America so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?" White Guys on Campus is a critical examination of race in higher education, centering Whiteness, in an effort to unveil the frequently unconscious habits of racism among White male undergraduates. Nolan L. Cabrera moves beyond the "few bad apples" frame of contemporary racism, and explores the structures, policies, ideologies, and experiences that allow racism to flourish. This book details many of the contours of contemporary, systemic racism, while engaging the possibility of White students to participate in anti-racism. Ultimately, White Guys on Campus calls upon institutions of higher education to be sites of social transformation instead of reinforcing systemic racism, while creating a platform to engage and challenge the public discourse of "post- racialism."

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 segregat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: White Male Racial Immunity in Higher Education
• 2. “Race Just Doesn’t Matter That Much”: White Insulation, Occam’s Racial Razor, and Willful Racial Ignorance
• 3. “The Only Discrimination Left Is That Against White Men”: The Campus Racial Politics of “Reverse Racism”
• 4. “Why Can’t Stevie Wonder Read? Because He’s Black”: Whiteness and the Social Performance of Racist Joking
• 5. “I Almost Lost My Spot to a Less Qualified Minority”: Imagined versus Real Affirmative Action
• 6. “They’d Never Allow a White Student Union”: The Racial Politics of Campus Space and Racial Arrested Development
• 7. “Because It’s the Right Thing to Do”: Racial Awakening and (Some) Allyship Development
• 8. Conclusion: White Guys on Campus, What Is to Be Done?
• Appendix A: Questionnaire Results, Part I
• Appendix B: Questionnaire Results, Part II
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author