Talk is not Action: Students of Color at Predominantly White Colleges
The next chapter serves as the opening for Part III: Systemic Racism and Social Change. Dr. Chandra V. Reyna’s contribution titled “Pursuing Racial Justice on Predominantly White Campuses: Divergent Institutional Responses to Racially Palatable and Racially Conscious Students,” examines the campus culture and administration of a predominantly white university through interviews with undergraduate students. Her findings indicate that using diversity as a talking point does little to change the behavior and climate of the student body or administration. Indeed, using equity as marketing without committing to meaningful action can bring more students of color to an academic institution where they are treated poorly, feel excluded, and are unsafe.
College administrations tend to prefer to promote what they see as a safer form of diversity and a color-blind agenda. They are more likely to respond to emails from prospective students of color when they avoid using racialized and politicized language. There are also significant barriers to accessing institutional support for accepted students when enacting social justice initiatives. Students of color are expected to provide a limited and acceptable dose of diversity for their white peers to encounter. Their inclusion serves to make the university look better according to modern metrics, but they receive minimal support in their efforts for reform and social justice.
In the 1980s, many colleges and universities integrated diversity into their schools’ language and rhetoric without making significant changes to the institutions or cultures of predominantly white colleges. Diversity rhetoric on its own supports a color-blind worldview that downplays and excuses racial inequity. The absence of any will to address underlying issues while simultaneously using progressive language only serves to hide and advance the social structures in which racism is reproduced.
Dr. Reyna’s research for this study was conducted at a predominantly white university in a historically conservative and majority-white state. The school created an office for student diversity and inclusion after an unfavorable campus climate survey in 2008. In addition, they have had many incidents of racist language being used in dorms and an association with white nationalist groups on campus. The findings indicate that while the college is better at promoting inclusive language in its recruiting and administrative statements, they are not protecting their students of color or making race and racism priorities in education and campus life.
The interviews demonstrate how the university prefers racially palatable students of color. The institution only wants to promote diversity when it makes them look good and makes them feel comfortable; anything too challenging or radical is rejected. The Native Student Council’s proposal to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ day on the university calendar was denied when the proposal included references to the violence and brutality native people faced. When rewritten to soften the language and center promoting the cultural heritage of the state, it was approved.
Students of color feel they have to ensure everything they do and say suits their white peers and the white school administration. If they want to get anything done, they have to have white students or administrators on their side and to get their support, they need to use comfortable language, familiar paradigms, and emphasize the ways it will benefit white students or the university’s image.
Increasing numerical racial diversity isn’t enough and can even be harmful to the students of color who are enmeshed in an institution that does not have equity and reform as their priorities. This environment can be full of microaggressions and even actively unsafe for people with marginalized identities. Just saying you promote inclusion does not change the culture of the campus nor the reality of systemic racism in higher education.
About the Author
Stella Hudson is a Graduate Assistant with the Baha’i Chair for World Peace. She graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2021 with a B.A. in English. She is attending the University of Maryland and pursuing a Master’s of Library and Information Science.