Whiteness is more than a racial identity. It is a concept that is deeply embedded into the structures and histories of many institutions of higher education. Due to the pervasiveness of Whiteness, institutions are likely to have campus climates that are hostile and unsupportive of students who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.…

Henryism as a construct draws comparisons to what is commonly referred to as respectability politics, or the active adoption of standards rooted in whiteness as a regulatory instrument of one's behavior and emotions. This manuscript will bring Henryism and respectability politics into conversation in an effort to illuminate the paradox of…

The current socio-political moment--rife with racial tensions and overt bigotry--has exacerbated longstanding racial inequities in higher education. While educational scholars have developed conceptual tools and offered data-informed recommendations for rooting out racism in campus policies and practices, this work is largely inaccessible to the…

Many athletic departments at elite schools resemble exclusive country clubs. Participation in sport allows overwhelmingly White student-athletes to enter, leverage, and expand the rarefied social networks that are associated with those sports. As recent admission scandals demonstrate, these social networks are ripe for abuse by the wealthy. The…

Despite the contemporary public's discourse regarding the embrace of human diversity within the United States, Black males still are perennially brutalized, killed, and negatively stereotyped. Recent events regarding police killings underscore the reality that even though Black males have the same constitutional and civil rights as all other…

The purpose of this research is to explore the experiences of Multiracial women college students in a manner that frustrates the privileged location of whiteness and its intersecting systems of domination in higher education. To work toward this purpose, whiteness as property and intersectionality are used as conceptual frameworks to explore how…

The racialized structure of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) higher education maintains gross inequities that are illustrative of structural racism, which both informs and is reinforced by discriminatory beliefs, policies, values, and distribution of resources. Thus, an examination into structural racism in STEM is needed to…

The purpose of this critical content analysis study was to examine higher education/student affairs (HE/SA) preparation toward a racial framing that centers and honors Black mattering. We explored linkages between Black literacies and epistemic credibility as indicators of Black mattering by analyzing 24 syllabi of foundational courses in HE/SA…

Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi are the three Black women and founders of #BlackLivesMatter (BLM). Despite being founded by Black women, public discourses about BLM often foreground Black men's lives, and deaths, at the hand of the state. When attention is given to the violence against Black women, they are either blamed for their…

This article offers the concept of critical professional praxis as a framework for naming and addressing difference-neutral practices in education (an approach that does not consider the effects of power and privilege associated with social differences in teachers' beliefs, ideas, and actions). Critical professional praxis is using both formal and…

Using Howard Winant's racial dualism theory, this chapter explains how race was discursively operationalized in the recent U.S. Supreme Court higher education antiracial diversity case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.

This article presents a critical review of 112 works of research on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) in higher education. It focuses on ways previous scholarship framed AAPIs in higher education, and specifically on how those works engaged in a sustained project of countering the model minority myth (MMM). Many publications on AAPIs…

This article critically analyzes the narratives of 62 White male undergraduates at a single institution about their views on race and experiences with racism. It is framed by Mills' (1997) conception of Whiteness that is founded upon an inverted epistemology or an "epistemology of ignorance." Therefore, this analysis centers the ways in…

This case study was developed for leadership courses in higher education and student affairs programs, specifically those looking at issues of multiculturalism and social justice. It features a residence hall at a predominantly White institution with a student population and a surrounding town that largely reflect conservative views. Specifically,…

In this study, Michelle M. Espino uncovers the ways in which twenty-five Mexican American women PhDs made meaning of conflicting messages about the purpose of higher education as they navigated within and through educational structures and shifting familial expectations. Participants received "consejos", or nurturing advice, from parents…