Redressing a Gap in Higher Education and Whiteness Literature: Conceptualizing the Pervasiveness of Whiteness in Higher Education Organizations

Abstract

Higher education scholars have studied white supremacy and whiteness to understand the ways racial inequity persists in the academy; however, scholars mostly focus on individual and social levels of analysis such as individual ideologies or macro systems of oppression. Recent literature on racialized organizations have begun to address whiteness, but we have yet to fully understand how whiteness functions within organizations to reproduce racial inequities and sustain white supremacy as a racialized hegemonic power. Furthermore, there is little evidence on how organizations and their leaders support or resist whiteness. In this systematic review of whiteness in higher education research from the past 20 years, I identify a gap in the literature—that whiteness in higher education organizations is under examined. To begin to redress this gap, I designed a conceptual framework that examines how white supremacy as a hegemonic and racialized power via whiteness functions and is potentially contested in higher education organizations.