A Path Forward:Critically Examining Practitioners' Role in Addressing Campus Racial Climate Kaleb L. Briscoe (bio), Crystal E. Garcia (bio), and Ashley L. Swift (bio) Student affairs professionals (SAPs) have long grappled with the pervasiveness of whiteness within predominantly white institutions (PWIs). Whiteness is "a normative structure in society that marginalizes People of Color and privileges White people" (Cabrera et al., 2017, p. 18). Whiteness, which often reinforces systemic racism, directly affects how institutional history, culture, and racial climate are shaped (Gusa, 2010). Yet how whiteness operates is not always obvious. As Ahmed (2007) described, "We need to examine not only how bodies become white, or fail to do so, but also how spaces can take on the very 'qualities' that are given to such bodies" (p. 156). Ahmed's work emphasized how whiteness affects environments and how People of Color can be vastly harmed and deemed invisible in such spaces. The influence of whiteness on campus spaces is perhaps unsurprising, given that SAPs often normalize ideologies and practices around whiteness (Cabrera et al., 2016, 2017). Whiteness is often demonstrated in how SAPs advocate (or not) for Students of Color and respond to racialized incidents that occur all too often within campus communities. Indeed, racialized incidents, "problematic and derogatory actions and behaviors that promote negative stereotypes and send negative messages to marginalized groups" (Garcia et al., 2011, p. 8), operate under the guise of whiteness—a reality the field of student affairs rarely discusses. In this paper, we bring together our perspectives to offer insight into how whiteness informs SAPs' response to racialized incidents and advocacy for Students of Color. We explicitly speak to SAPs in student involvement roles, as we all have experience studying and working in these functional areas. Dr. Kaleb Briscoe is a Black cisgender woman and assistant professor of higher educational leadership. As a scholar, Kaleb's work problematizes oppressed and marginalized populations within higher education through critical theoretical frameworks and qualitative methodological approaches. She explicitly focuses on interrogating issues of race, racism, and racialized incidents and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated. Dr. Crystal Garcia is a Latina and white cisgender woman and assistant professor of educational administration. Her research focuses on the mechanisms through which racially minoritized students experience campus environments, with a particular focus on sorority and fraternity life (SFL). Ashley Swift is a Black, cisgender woman and member [End Page 588] of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Incorporated. She currently serves as an assistant director for the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life at a PWI. Through research and practice, we have given much thought to the ways whiteness informs how student involvement SAPs respond to racialized incidents and offer suggestions for practitioners moving forward. THE PROBLEM: WHITENESS Whiteness is Embedded in Everything Whiteness is pervasive in all aspects of higher education and student affairs, especially student involvement (Beatty & Garcia, 2022; Briscoe & Jones, in press). In Kaleb's work on SAPs' experiences with campus racial climate at PWIs (see Briscoe, 2022), she found that SAPs who work in SFL, campus activities, and student organizations acknowledged that when racialized incidents occurred, institutional leaders often engaged with the campus community from a "business as usual" mindset. There was an expectation that SAPs of Color, often Black SAPs, would counsel Students of Color through these issues, yet their white peers were not asked to do this labor. Even further, the burden of racism caused SAPs of Color to experience racial battle fatigue. Indeed, campus administrators do not consider how these practices uplift whiteness and harm staff; instead, staff are asked to be on the ground during racialized incidents with little to no training. Understanding Color Evasiveness in Student Involvement Researchers have described the concept of color evasiveness as intentional efforts by white people to avoid recognizing the ways race is weaponized to create systems that privilege whiteness (Annamma et al., 2017). All too often, SAPs engage in color evasiveness, particularly when racialized incidents occur on campus, by avoiding responding to the issue or by communicating broad statements that do not name acts of hate and discrimination. Rarely do these statements directly name the actions as racist or recognize that these are not individual...
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Oct 10, 2024
Erica Eckert + 1
Open Access