This chapter highlights issues of racism and neoliberal capitalism that exist within the market‐like structure of intercollegiate athletics on college campuses, as well as some of the consequences for student‐athletes. We discuss the importance of using critical frameworks to better understand and shift the culture and structure of athletic programs to be more inclusive and supportive of the needs and interests of college athletes.

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As the most watched college sport broadcast of all time, the US Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN)’s College GameDay (CGD) is one source of socialization that primes US audiences to make certain associations. Through disaggregated analysis of regular- and post-season CGD pre-game and game-of-the-week broadcasts during the 2016 football season, the authors examine the coverage of players’ physicality and injuries, contrasting the portrayals of Black and white American football players. The paper documents prominent narratives that promoted Black players as relatively invulnerable, while making the case that these narratives serve to prime audiences to ascribe inhuman abilities to Black people and thereby reinforce white supremacist ideology.

In the context of ongoing antagonism on college campuses, attacks on Critical Race Theory, and widespread backlash against racial justice initiatives, this paper underscores the growing need to recognize co-optation and other counterinsurgent strategies used against racial justice to make room for transformative scholarship. By presenting qualitative interviews from 15 white HBCU students, we illustrate how diversity research, advocacy, and organizing previously used to advocate for racial justice has instead constructed distorted understandings of race and racism and has been used to expand ideologies of whiteness. The findings show what CRT scholars have cautioned about for decades—when left uninterrupted, ahistorical approaches to racial diversity programming and research may lend to the co-optation of justice-focused diversity language and the appropriation of BIPOC strategies of resistance. This not only inhibits and detracts from racial justice work, but can function to expand white supremacy. We relate these narratives to an emerging racial backlash whereby white people attempt to distort understandings of structural racism to claim a “persecuted” status—a delusion that we argue warrants a new ideological frame. We posit this work lays the foundation for advancing equity in one of the most counterinsurgent eras in higher education (Matias & Newlove, 2017).

Student affairs professionals must strive to address the needs of an increasingly diverse student population. As such, this review critically examines scholarly research over the last 25 years regarding the concept of cultural competence as it pertains to students, student affairs professionals, and faculty members. This review also develops a critique of the concept of cultural competence and proposes to suspend and replace terms such as cultural competence and multicultural competence with what we refer to as transformative cultural responsiveness (TCR). TCR, as an alternative, centers intersectionality in its conceptualization, and locates students' experiences within a systems analysis of oppression. The article concludes with a discussion of the critical gaps in existing research and the questions that warrant further study.