Why Are All the White Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: Toward Challenging Constructions of a Persecuted White Collective

Abstract

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).

Feeling the Threat of Race in Education: Exploring the Cultural Politics of Emotions in CRT-Ban Political Discourses

“…And yet, race-evasiveness aids in reinforcing the emergence of a white race-consciousness that politicizes and mobilizes white identity (Leonardo, 2020). The emergence of whiteness as a public identity helps to mobilize claims of white victimhood that are undergirded by white people’s “felt minoritized identity” (Leonardo, 2020, p. 27) and sense of collective persecution (Jayakumar et al, 2021). This new white-centered discourse and ideology is relevant to the racialized politics that surround CRT bans.…”

The racial politics of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work.

“…Rather, our intention is to name the inherent racial and political tension in doing work that both subverts and reinforces unequal power structures, that requires compliance and acquiescence to Whiteness while also challenging it. As previous critiques of DEI work have noted, DEI can support equity causes to an extent, but DEI as an enterprise of the neoliberal university, like any other functional or revenue-generating unit, largely serves White interests (Ahmed, 2012; Jayakumar et al, 2021; Leon, 2014; Patton et al, 2019; Stewart, 2017).…”

Is our scholarship elevating or hindering transformation and possibility? Conceptualizations of student organizations in higher education

“…Racism in higher education also occurs subtly through policies and procedures couched in race-and racism-evasive ideology and a superficial, white-centered diversity logic (Bonilla-Silva, 2010;Jayakumar et al, 2021;Nishi, 2022;Warikoo, 2016). At their core, this ideology dismisses the social significance of racism, focuses on individuals rather than systems/ institutions, naturalizes white pedagogy and white organizational practices, and culturally degrades communities of color via culturally situated explanations of inequality.…”