Let's Go There

It is without question that the past few weeks and the coming months and years will require Student Affairs professionals and all college/university educators to reconsider our efforts to engage students meaningfully.  It cannot be overstated how important our work is at this historic juncture.  Hence, I am writing about this now—while believing that this topic should have been engaged long before now. 

In the past few weeks, I’ve had interesting conversations with students, staff, faculty, and other members of the higher education community, including volunteers and other auxiliary service members, about the presidential election and the disturbing national climate.  These conversations have been ‘interesting’ for a variety of reasons, including the ways some people expressed shock, sadness, emotional breakdowns, anger, frustration, ambivalence, stubbornness, and reserved joy.  Reactions were varied and informed by identity, social location, knowledge of history, critical consciousness, and sense of hope.  Another reason I found these conversations fascinating is connected to my interest in the ways that people talk about social justice topics and concerns, and about race in particular.

Many of the people I’ve been speaking with are White identified men and women.  I am a Black male educator who has worked at PWIs my entire career.  I have been fortunate to have seasoned experience engaging with White colleagues and students around topics of racial in/justice and whiteness.  While it isn’t the dimension of my work I am most excited about doing everyday (because sometimes it frustrates and depletes me so), I am appreciative of those opportunities to provoke deeper reflection and development for White students.  I feel a profound sense of obligation to engage whiteness as part of the work in supporting underrepresented students and pursuing inclusion and equity; but also as the work of U.S. higher education generally.  We must do this work; and more critically and meaningfully than we have to date.

I have observed over the course of two decades in the field how unsophisticated and frankly uninterested educators have been at engaging anti-racist white identity development with White students.  Certainly, I’ve seen some engagement of whiteness at lectures, forums, and within particular courses and classrooms.  However, within Student Affairs, this critical work is often left undone.  This is true because perhaps we don’t know how to do this or we simply haven’t prioritized it, leaving students (of color) to bare the cost of their priceless contributions to diversity and inclusion development at our PWIs.  Professionals reify normative and invisible whiteness when they continue to engage white students about race only when talking about or with students of color.  It’s bothersome.

However, the election of the 45^th president of the United States challenges us yet again.  Throughout the campaign, White students spoke with me about campaign themes and their wrestling with whiteness—something I often helped them name.  But I always seek to name whiteness when I engage with White students and colleagues. They don’t have to think about race everyday the way I do.  But shouldn’t they?  Shouldn’t they be aware of their wardrobe and their seating choice when they enter my office?  Shouldn’t they consider their word choices?  Their entitlement to my time and energy, with utter disregard for the time and energy I dedicate to others?  Their surveillance, voyeurism, and sometimes almost pornographic gaze of my clothing, my speech, and my cool?

To engage whiteness is to go there!  To disrupt and upset. To push back and resist.  To engage whiteness is to interrogate, examine, and rip it coldly from its snug and safe solipsist space.  College educators must learn to do this in the curriculum and co-curriculum.  For those of us who work in support of student development outside the classroom, we must engage whiteness—whether or not we are White—with a commitment to interrogate it within ourselves, within others, and within the physical, ideological, and practical structures and culture of our institutions. 

To read more about whiteness, see Towards A Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies.

Dr. Paul M. Buckley is assistant vice president and director of The Butler Center at Colorado College.