Investigating the white racial equilibrium and the power‐maintenance of whiteness

Abstract

The white racial equilibrium is a social, historical, and cultural location where whiteness is insulated from critique and the importance of race is largely ignored by white people. The expectation of the white racial equilibrium is one way white people define their whiteness, and this expectation protects white supremacist epistemologies and ideologies. We completed interviews with fourteen white undergraduate students to understand more about the processes employed by students when challenged by the white racial disequilibrium. Using consensual qualitative research (CQR), we coded their responses and found seven representative domains, with two categories endorsed by every participant: "assumption of valid knowledge" and "non-racist beliefs." While some respondents displayed thoughtfulness about race and whiteness, findings suggest that most participants attempted to restore the white racial equilibrium by centralizing the innocence and beneficence of whiteness and white people through various rhetorical maneuvers, including (1) invoking superficial and incomplete knowledge of complex racial topics, and (2) depersonalizing themselves from racist acts and ideas,This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Radicalizing safety: A critical narrative analysis to abolish the police

“…Cultural beliefs are also cemented in this way, such as what types of people are seen as criminal threats (Delgado, 1994;Gilmore, 2007), personality stereotypes of different races (View et al, 2018), what types of social movements are allowed (Davis, 2016;Kendi, 2016), which forms of political protest are socially accepted (Osterweil, 2020), the legitimacy of police (Vitale, 2017), and much more. Other research suggests that dominant social narratives are invoked as a way to escape racial discomfort and rationalize racial inequities (Drustrup et al, 2022). Finally, even much of academia fails to challenge dominant narratives and their oppressive implications, as some research that seeks to center counternarratives has been regarded as biased when they do not compare those counternarratives to dominant (i.e., white) experiences (Stanley, 2007).…”