National movements, including Black Lives Matter and Abolish Greek Life, have resurfaced attention to racial dynamics within sorority and fraternity life (SFL) communities. Often, these discussions frame SFL as a homogenous entity and ignore crucial distinctions among organizations, such as the fact that historically white sororities and…

The design of luxury residence halls has created tension between the ideals of equitable educational experiences and increased competition to attract enrollment, as such facilities are often priced beyond the financial reach of students whose presence is essential to creating a diverse educational experience for all students. As university leaders…

This critical narrative inquiry explored how white women's racialized emotions are structured by whiteness as a technology of affect (Leonardo & Zembylas, 2013) and connected to particular college experiences. Specifically, white women college students used claims of niceness and demands for emotional comfort as cover for racial harm, while…

Space and place are central to understanding the production and maintenance of racial inequality in the United States. Though examinations of the racialized dynamics of space are present in other disciplines, higher education scholars have infrequently interrogated how space becomes racialized on college campuses. This conceptual paper functions…

College-educated white women across social classes support and uphold racism. Using narrative methods in a secondary analysis, we, as two white women, explored how white non-trans women make meaning of social class using the revised model of multiple dimensions of identity (RMMDI; Abes et al., 2007) as positioned within the context of white…

The field of student affairs has seen an exodus of staff members over the past few years. Employee attrition, however, is not a new problem in student affairs. This grounded theory study aimed to understand why student affairs professionals leave the field. Based on interviews with student affairs professionals who left the field between March…

Through a narrative inquiry study, we sought to understand how 12 student affairs professionals (SAPs) experienced whiteness and perceived the influence of whiteness on campus responses to racialized incidents. We used components of critical whiteness studies (CWS) and critical race theory (CRT) as a theoretical underpinning to disrupt the…

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…

This article reports findings from a constructionist grounded theory study with 51 first-year college students. We explored student definitions and development of a sense of belonging during their first year of college. Belonging for all participants was shaped by 3 themes: environmental perceptions, involvement, and relationships. Yet, there were…

The purpose of this narrative study was to deconstruct racial identity performance among White women in higher education and student affairs (HESA) graduate preparation programs through an analysis of responses to racial dissonance. Responses included resistance (denial of White privilege), engagement (seeking more knowledge), and transformative…

As student affairs professionals increasingly move toward developing their students into active citizens that are committed to both social justice and systemic change, it is important for these students to have a keen awareness of the basic concepts that underlie social justice. The authors argue that fundamental knowledge about the concepts of…