Toward Abolishing White Supremacy on Campus

Foreword

Pietro A. Sasso

As a mixed-heritage cisgender Latino male descended from a multiracial father, I could never imagine myself authoring this forward as a child. My mother was white and my parents were in a complex marriage they did not deem as interracial because they avoided conversations about race. I vividly remember my father picking me up from my after-school program and he was frequently asked for his identification because many of the staff did not think he was my father. I also remember being pulled over by a highway patrolman and the police officer walked around to my side of the car first and asked me, “are you okay?” My father avoided discussing the impact of racism on his lived experiences as well as the glares from others when we walked in the mall as a family. I am an “elder millennial” and so malls were a significant space of presence and public life in the 1990s. Yet, when we were in these spaces, he often wanted to be perceived as white and often favorably highlighted other families with blonde hair or blue eyes.

He worked in the finance industry and was often one of the only Persons of Color in many corporate meetings and he was frequently described as “immigrant workhorse.” His white coworkers engaged in interest convergence in which they claimed to care about the needs of the working class, especially about increasing home affordability. They convinced my father to open more bank offices in low-income or “distressed” neighborhoods which was a term he struggled to understand. They offered home loans and were marketed as access points for home ownership, but these cases were deemed “subprime” with excessively high interest rates. I wonder to what extent it trapped many families into house poverty and reinforced a veiled form of redlining. My father blindly thought he was doing goodwill for his community and others who faced similar barriers and circumstances as he grew up in tenement housing with little public sanitation.

My father was unable to recognize white supremacy or name the behaviors of whiteness. He was an active agent in trying to conform the ways in which it subjugated his own identities as a Latino, Italian, and North African multiracial male who emigrated from South America. The immigrant work ethic rooted in white supremacy were part of the productivity metrics that placed severe pressures on his body resulting a terrible battle with Crohn’s disease that cost him his life. His incessant need to work and become successful was a farce sold to him as the “American Dream” which is one based on a meritocracy of white protestant work ethics. He gave up his own culture and identities because he thought marrying a white woman would make him successful because his previous one was an arranged one which was customary in his culture. His family disowned him for extended periods in efforts to shirk his culture in his success quest which were rooted in norms of whiteness.

These experiences of my father influenced my gender socialization as a broader component of my own process of “becoming.” I walked through most of my life avoiding and living in a postracial paradigm and allowing others to anglicize my name. It took decolonizing my mind to understand my own positionality and proximity to whiteness in ways I benefit from it or have unknowingly contributed to reinforce its social reproduction. I was unable to name white supremacy, but it seemed to be nefarious. Yet, it was difficult for me to deeply understand because it was presented to me and my peers in many innocuous ways as forms of control and use of cultural property (Harris, 1993). I noticed the ways it was reproduced as I got older and the ways in which it sought to also reinforce itself through socialization and inculcation on our college campuses.

I am increasingly concerned about the more overt ways white supremacy is more omnipotent and increasingly physically violent again. Yes, we have a deeper understanding about the ways in which whiteness exists among the lived experiences of marginalized Persons of Color, but white supremacy, norms of whiteness, and legacies of settler colonialism continue to exist on our campuses and its curriculum. However, texts like this offer knowledge as a truthful empowerment towards disrupting these systems of oppression.

I am privileged to author this forward for this long overdue text. This text was significantly delayed by a number of issues such as personal challenges and even a pandemic which killed over one million people in the United States. This text has persevered and is a persistent reminder of the strength of truth. From college students in Sperry’s and khakis carrying torches in 2017 on Mr. Jefferson’s “grounds” at the University of Virginia to even more targeted hate crimes as mass shootings such as in Buffalo, New York in summer 2022. Media stories about other racist forms and events of white supremacy on college campuses provide face validity to white supremacy. There has been urgent necessity for this text and the problematizing and troubling provided by these authors within the pages herein reminds more good fight is needed.

White supremacy continues to permeate our college campuses and extend beyond the boundaries of our own college campuses. I have noted in my own scholarship that whiteness is a material culture that exists as an identity, cultural discourse, and system which seeks to own property and reproduce. Leonardo (2009) noted that, “‘Whiteness’ is a racial discourse, whereas the category ‘White people’ represents a socially constructed identity, usually based on skin color . . . Whiteness is not a culture but a social concept” (pp. 169–170). Jones and Okun (2001) deconstructed white supremacy as a typology of characteristics that are omnipotent across predominantly White spaces. These include: (1) perfectionism, (2) sense of urgency, (3) defensiveness, (4) quality over quantity, (5) worship of written word, (6) paternalism, (7) either/or thinking, (8) power hoarding, (9) fear of open concept, (10) individualism, (11) more progress, (12) objectivity, and (13) right to comfort. These behaviors often can be damaging or traumatic to persons of Color and other colleagues. These same behaviors often permeate higher education as whiteness often obscures racial consciousness (Jones & Okun, 2001).

Moreover, Cabrera noted that whiteness lacks Crenshaw’s (1989) construct of intersectionality because oppression is absent, as noted under the tenets of Critical Race Theory (Cabrera, 2019). However, Harris and Patton (2018) note that these concepts are conflated by many scholars or higher education professionals as an identity, rather than a systems concept. Moreover, intersectionality should be rooted in the original concept by Crenshaw (1989) which suggested multiple, interlocking spheres of oppressions such as White supremacy and hegemony marginalize people, particularly within Communities of Color. White supremacy refers to the system of racial oppression that privileges engagement with White students as well as faculty and staff on college campuses (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Feagin, 2006; Omi & Winant, 2015). This social system inoculates and privileges behaviors and forms of capital that are unconscious to many white students or others because they are unaware of their social locations (Cabrera, 2019). They are often obscured by their privilege in which their own behaviors are opaque to them (Applebaum, 2010). Whiteness is unconscious to most White persons because they do not understand their own identity, positionality, and privilege in a larger system of White supremacy.

Moving white college students to an increased position of consciousness about their own whiteness and participation within a larger system of White supremacy can be taxing on staff and resources. It can also reinforce white supremacy by centering whiteness, thereby taking away even more from other historically marginalized identities on campus. Efforts to educate white students, faculty, or staff have produced mixed findings.

Cabrera found in his series of qualitative studies at predominately White institutions (PWI) featuring samples of White undergraduate college students in which the privileges of Whiteness allowed them to not consider race (Cabrera, 2017). This perpetuated what was termed “relative racial ignorance” in which they are completely unaware of other social issues and issues of race because they are enveloped by the privileges of whiteness. Further findings suggested that “white students used their white agility” avoid conversations about race with others (Cabrera & Corces-Zimmerman, 2017). This was particularly more common at highly selective institutions (Cabrera, 2012). These students experience what Cabrera et al. (2016) identifies as racial arrested development.

Higher education collectively continues to engage in white immunity with statements such as, “But … I am not racist.” The discourse shifts to nonparticipation in the system that benefited them to an individual identity focus in attempts to deflect conversations about race or equity (Cabrera, 2019). White immunity captures the systemic racial and social treatment of People of Color and the disparate racial treatment of which white people have been immune from (Cabrera et al., 2017). White immunity more accurately describes the systemic nature of white supremacy within higher education in the innocence it claims. Furthermore, its use of white privilege pedagogy individualized racism and created a binary of good and bad White people of those who recognize and identify their privileges and those who deny them. Foste (2020a, 2020b) found that some white student leaders position themselves against other uninvolved students in which they presented themselves as racially conscious and progressive. Yet, they held stereotypical views and paternalistic assumptions about Persons of Color in wanting to “save” them . Even when unaware, White people are supporting and recreating a system of racial oppression.

White privileges, from a historical context, came through the denial of rights and opportunities of People of Color (Cabrera et al., 2017). Foste and Jones (2020) suggested that even white student leaders are unable to identify their own racial location within the system of White supremacy. However, they engage in an “enlightenment narrative” in which they make claims of cultural awareness, but continually contradict their own understanding with racially ignorant discourses. They have an overwhelming desire to avoid the label of racist as described by Foste and Jones’ (2020) who termed this the ignorant construction of whiteness where white individuals minimized race and described their White victimhood because of the university’s diversity efforts. Students claimed victimization because they felt blamed when their campus became “preoccupied” with inclusion efforts. Many white student leaders operate to support the racial status quo which reproduces and reinforces whiteness by maintaining racially innocent perceptions of themselves and the institution.

Like its undergraduate student leaders, higher education engages in performative social justice and inclusion which they consider it as an achievable endpoint which can be observed, measured, or evaluated, rather than a continual process of self-work. This text is organized into five sections to help readers understand and interrogate whiteness and white supremacy as an identity, cultural discourse, and system that assumes property over others as material. Each section offers nuance and depth about the ways in which whiteness appears on our college campuses and across higher education as well as strategies to disrupt its continued spread.

Section One is entitled “Dismantling Legacies of Educational Colonialism.” This section highlights academic and settler colonialism in higher education. Initial chapters in this section interrogate these themes as case studies and later chapters offer disruptive strategies towards decolonization. This section focuses on academia and curricula, while section two focuses on white identities.

Section Two is “Disrupting Narratives about White Identity and Literacy Formation.” In this section, readers will gain a better understanding of how whiteness as an system is differentiated from white identity is exploring the ways in which it is “hidden.” Other chapters explore how identity expression is reduced or limited by whiteness through the use of autoethnography or other qualitative inquiries. Additional chapters interrogate gendered binaries of masculinities and feminisms. All of these chapters offer reasoned, collective hope for ways to resist norms of whiteness and white supremacy.

Section Three is “Confronting Manifestations of White Supremacy on Campus.” This sections specifically builds on many of the disruptive strategies presented in previous chapters. Several chapters offer personal narratives as accounts of the ways in which they have integrated scholarship as a source of liberation against white supremacy. One specific chapter even offers insight into higher education in South Africa which offers some parallels to higher education.

Section Four is entitled “Pedagogies of Escape from White Supremacist Indoctrination.” This section explores various teaching approaches in teaching about whiteness. Other inclusive pedagogies are explored for use at Predominantly White Institutions (PWI). One chapter helps the reader draw additional parallels by offering context about Caribbean higher education and decolonization.

Section Five is “Excising White Privilege from Institutional Policy and Campus Culture” and offers one of the only chapters in the text specifically focused on LGBTQ+ and Generation Z experiences. There are other chapters about cross-race mentoring, white allyship, and anti-racist affinity groups. The final chapter offers a more focused conclusion to identify more specific ways in which white college students, faculty, and staff can assume individual and collective take responsibility for disrupting whiteness and white supremacy.

In its totality, this text helps us move towards deeper, more complex ways to conceptualize the ways in which whiteness and colonialism have perpetuated ownership of higher education and reinforced white supremacy. Higher education, especially white students, have framed racist actions as innocuous (Reason & Evans, 2007) and they offer underestimation of levels of campus racism and racial tension (Harper & Hurtado, 2007; Rankin & Reason, 2005). Racism only becomes as an issue when it does not privilege white people at the expense of Students of Color (Reason & Evans, 2007). When pushed or challenges, white students or others often respond with defensiveness about reverse racism or “white guilt” or “white girl tears” in their use of victimization or claiming to be ignorant (Foste, 2019, 2020a, 2020b).

This text also offers a point of reflection for us to engage in critical examinations of whiteness and for others to reflection on their own white identities. Logics of whiteness hold terms racial hyperprivileged, particularly among white college men, to reinforce a more a patriarchal masculine society to enhance the privileges of being white; this racial hyperprivilege exists in college environments in which White people have cultural property ownership (Cabrera, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c; Cabrera et al., 2016; Gusa, 2010; Harper & Hurtado, 2007). Campus have continued to cater to white racial comfort which inoculates white privileges (Cabrera et al., 2016; Gusa, 2010).

Assuaging or catering to these forms of privilege perpetuates racial arrested development (Cabrera et al., 2016). This racial comfort is rooted in structured racial ignorance which becomes the excuse in which there are tendencies to minimize racism and feelings of victimization which have gone unchallenged (Cabrera, 2014b).

This text also provides us with a stark reality of the continued harm and violence inflicted on Communities of Color and how educational institutions have becomes sites of violence. Kimmel (2017) notes an anger or sentiment of dispossession that become clearer from recent racist violence across our country in which is suggests, “they were in power, they believe, but now they’ve been emasculated, their birth-right transferred to others who don’t deserve it. And now they march, fight and bomb innocent civilians to reclaim their manhood…” (p. 277). My father died during the authorship of my contributions to this textbook. His own experiences will never parallel my own, but his lived experiences serve as a reminder to me as a scholar. He would have not understood much of what I am discussing in this forward section. Moreover, he would simply be able to communicate that white people cost his career after he gave them everything they needed. They extracted his consciousness and career at the expense of his own body. White supremacy subtly assumed property over him through veiled processes of interest convergence. He is buried, but so is his pain. His gravestone is a reminder of the suffering and stolen lives that white supremacy and colonization has extracted from so many. If higher education is intended to more a more egalitarian space for the dissemination, repository, and creation of knowledge then this text helps us become more conscious about how there might be possibilities towards this end.