White defensiveness in response to racial justice education has increasingly been understood through the "white fragility" framework. This study puts forth a new framework that instead identifies a typology of white defensive moves that actively work to uphold and fortify the white racial contract. Inspired by Solórzano and…

In this study, I investigate how the rhetoric used in university responses to anti-Asian violence maintained institutional status quos to protect whiteness in higher education. Using whiteness as futurity as a theoretical framework, I employed document analysis to analyze 54 statements in response to the tragic mass shooting in Atlanta in March of…

Racism has been interwoven in implicit and explicit ways within historically white sorority and fraternity life (SFL) communities since their inception. However, few studies have provided insight to how practitioners address the realities of racism in SFL broadly, or specifically how SFL practitioners have attended to race-based incidents on their…

This case study examined how eight higher education and student affairs (HESA) professionals' racial ideologies functioned in their understanding of racial conflict. Findings revealed that participants aided in delegitimizing students' perceptions of racial conflict based on their campuses' compositional diversity, history of racial conflict, and…

We provide a composite counter story based on our own experiences grappling with investigating elementary Latinx learners' experiences and how we have leaned on each other to resist the whiteness of learning to do research in pursuit of a Ph.D. As the counterstory shows, we collectively worked together to write our own continuations of the story…

Scholars critique LGBTQ+ social movements for failing to understand how oppressive systems like racism inform the experiences of LGBTQ+ community members. To investigate whether LGBTQ+ literature in postsecondary education reproduces this same pattern, we used a critical summative content analysis approach to examine research published on LGBTQ+…

This paper takes a relatively new concept in discussions of race and racial identity -- that of "contested whiteness" -- and expands upon it substantially. I first review literature on racial incongruence and mismatch and then provide a theoretical amplification of contested whiteness by situating it in theories of racial formation and…

As the U.S. and international multiracial populations have increased, so has research in this area. Despite a multitude of studies about the unique struggles of being multiracial, little empirical data has been published about specific strategies that multiracial individuals use to navigate a monoracial (single-race)-oriented society. In this…

Empirical studies about Black graduate students have emphasized their experiences with oppression and marginalization, related psychological impacts, and the survival practices they enable them to persist within Historically White Institutions (HWIs). Yet, some literature falls short of examining how individuals thrive despite racial trauma…

Using the crossover capital framework (Salinas, 2015), this study situated the lived experiences of 12 Black and Latino men community college students across multiple places and spaces, with each space having the potential to oppress and/or privilege the individual. This qualitative phenomenological study revealed that participants actively…

Addressing gender inequities in higher education must begin with the acknowledgement that men play a key role in creating change. The purpose of this qualitative study is to center and raise the experiences of women students, and to communicate to men who are students, faculty, and administrators what women students expect from them in terms of…

In the midst of a global pandemic, racialized violence, and civil unrest, higher education leaders are faced with a difficult reality as their constituents call for meaningful engagement and leadership. While many higher education institutions claim to value racial equity and inclusion and have identified them as hallmarks in their mission…

This collaborative and creative paper explores and documents the realities of Black and Indigenous transgender and cisgender women at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Oregon in their pursuit of higher education. Through poetry, essays, personal narratives, and art, this paper reveals how Black and Indigenous students experience and navigate…

In society and on college campuses, whiteness has staked a claim as the default race for queerness. This has manifested in queer and trans people of color feeling like outsiders who must resist hegemonic whiteness at personal and institutional levels. This qualitative study explores how queer white men negotiate their relationship to race and…

LGBTQ+ communities and spaces on college campuses are often known as white-centered spaces, implicitly or explicitly excluding students of color. While White LGBTQ+ students may experience marginalization and exclusion on the basis of their sexual orientations and/or gender identities, they may unwittingly perpetuate oppression on the basis of…