No abstract

Throughout the post-civil rights era, colleges and universities across the United States have periodically experienced explicitly racist incidents on their campuses. From the hurling of racial slurs at students of color, to the hanging of nooses on campus, to students donning Ku Klux Klan outfits or throwing "ghetto" parties that caricaturize communities of color, these incidents challenge the notion that modern racism has changed to a more subtle form, referred to as colorblind racism. We place these incidents within a broader context of race and institutions, suggesting a connection between overt racist expressions and the more covert elements of neoliberal color-blind racism. Through a critical discourse analysis of news stories about these incidents, the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and the controlling legal cases involving racist expression on campuses, we suggest that explicitly racist incidents operate in tandem with neoliberal educational policies and color-blind racism to mark and reinscribe colleges and universities as white institutional spaces.

In the past two decades, social scientists have begun to explicitly interrogate the racialized economic, political, cultural, and ideological mechanisms of social space. This work interrogates the overt and covert racial organization of social spaces and the ways in which systemic White supremacy is facilitated by racialized space. Drawing on and synthesizing that work we explicate a critical theory of White space, explicating how geographical, physical, cultural, and ideological social spaces reproduce a racialized social structure organized by White supremacy. We argue that White spaces are integral to racialized social systems and global anti-Black racism in ways that not only normalize the existing racial and social order but ensures Whites’ fantasy(ies) of complete dominion over place and space, as well as control over brown and Black bodies.

How and why do nominally open organizations remain racially segregated in the post-civil rights era? What role do interpersonal interactions play in the perpetuation of segregation? Using ethnographic data gathered from seven, majority white, evangelical churches across four states, we find that social actors (i.e., clergy and congregants) play a central role in continuing racial segregation by executing "race tests" on people of color who attempt to gain entry to these spaces. Race tests are performances by white individuals and groups, in the presence of incoming people of color. They utilize racial microaggressions, playing on persistent racist stereotypes and/or histories of racial violence, to preclude or precondition people of color's participation in predominantly white social spaces. White actors in white social spaces initiate utility-based race tests to determine whether people of color are willing to serve the interests of whites in the space, or execute exclusionary race tests to coerce people of color into leaving the space. We provide examples of both types of race tests and discuss the role of such microaggressions and the racialized emotions at play in the reproduction of segregation in historically white social spaces like white evangelical churches.