Today's modern landscape of leaders fails to accurately represent societal diversity. This inequity, as in all inequities, is not accidental, but instead the results of socially constructed norms that begin in childhood. In this dissertation, I question how internalized norms of white supremacy and patriarchy perpetuate racial and gender aligned…

Whiteness is present and performed when whites are discussing race and racism. It is also working when race isn't being discussed in STEM college classrooms. As this dissertation shows, white students in college algebra participate in white racial bonding, committing racial microaggressions and what I coin "nanoaggressions" against…

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…

Promoting student openness to diversity is an important educational goal of colleges and universities; however, scholars have noted the association between openness to diversity and an awareness of racial privilege has not been investigated (Cabrera, 2014). We examined how awareness of White privilege and religious variables predicted openness to…

In recent years a host of scholars have considered the contributions of various critical and post-structural perspectives to the study of college student development. This body of work has drawn on critical race theory, intersectionality, and queer theory, among others, to advance more power-conscious approaches to student development. Critical…

Teach For America (TFA) corps members in reflecting on their experiences, have described their motivations to join the program as idealistic, ambitious, and "profound drives to effect educational change" (Crawford-Garrett, 2012, p. 27) that eventually had to be reconciled with unexpected, harsh realities--both in their placement schools…

The study examines how white teachers talked to children about national identity and cultural diversity by drawing on qualitative research with eight- to 12-year-old students and their teachers from four Australian primary schools with different racial, ethnic and cultural demographics. Despite a range of explicit and implicit approaches that…

For many educators who lead cross-racial discussions, creating "safe" spaces in which students can express their views is a familiar goal. Yet what constitutes safety is rarely defined or contextualized. In the absence of this contextualization, the goal of safety is most often driven by White participants who complain that they are (or…

This article explores the experiences of two professors as they teach about White privilege in predominately White institutions of higher education. The authors discuss how racial potentiality shapes the classroom climates of each of the professors and then present strategies that utilize safe spaces to navigate students away from the resistance…

Rarely do White, middle-class Americans, the population from which most teachers are drawn, have the opportunity to consider themselves as racialized beings. Although personal experience is usually the best teacher, our increasingly homogeneous teaching population oftentimes lacks experience with diversity, and schools of education often struggle…

This pilot study investigates the role of anxiety for early childhood pre-service social studies teachers as they learn methods to teach curriculum on slavery and associated issues such as racism or White privilege. The findings indicate that a variety of aspects cause pre-service teachers to experience anxiety around the thought of having to…

This article investigates and documents how undergraduate students in South Africa make meaning of cross-racial interaction on the college campus in the post-apartheid era. Additionally, it explores how students perceive that interactions with diverse peers have shifted since apartheid, and how these interactions are indicative of the larger…

Most analyses of racism focus on what people think about issues of race and how this relates to racial stratification. This research applies Feagin's "white racial frame" to analyze how White male college students at two universities "feel" about racism. Students at the academically non-selective and less diverse university…

This paper reports on efforts by three Australian academics to develop students' sociocultural awareness (in particular, their racial literacy) during a time of mounting pressure on teacher educators to narrow and standardise their approaches. The field of health education provides a vehicle for research; however, it is not the paper's central…

Drawing on a larger study, this qualitative investigation uses Black feminist thought as the interpretive lens to investigate perceptions and experiences of African American female doctoral students at predominately White institutions (PWIs). Semistructured interviews were used to gain an understanding of their experiences and how these…