Front-Stage, Stealth White Racial Bonding in College STEM

• In Event: Whiteness-at-Work in Higher Education

Abstract

Purpose: White racial bonding (Sleeter, 1994; 1996) has been defined in the literature as the communications/interactions between white people related to race, particularly those that are racist or disparaging toward people of color (Cabrera, 2018; Fasching-Varner, 2013; Sleeter, 1994; 1996).

White Racial Bonding (Sleeter, 1994; 1996) has been theorized and engaged in the research as both backstage, or in all-white groups as Picca and Feagin (2007) define it. Previous publications have shown a reliance by white people on language about race and/or racially-coded, denigrating comments about people of color out of earshot of people of color. This paper uses portraiture to look at how white racial bonding is also enacted ‘front-stage’ and without racialized language by white students bonding in their mistreatment and microaggressing against college students of color in a STEM classroom.

Conceptual Framework: This paper draws on Critical Whiteness Studies and develops Sleeter’s concept of white racial bonding, drawing on Yoon’s (2012) concept of whiteness-at-work to examine the paradoxes that lie in the creation of white racial bonding through white students’ mistreatment and distancing from students of color.

Methods and Materials: This study uses portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), drawing on ethnography of a college algebra course, as well as in-depth interviews of students and instructors. My use of portraiture combines critical ethnography, narrative inquiry, and hermeneutical phenomenology (Ohito, 2017) to understand and illustrate how whiteness works within white racial bonding in college STEM through rich portraits.

Findings: This study contrasts and contributes to the concept of white racial bonding in that I show how white students engaged in white racial bonding frontstage (Picca & Feagin, 2007), i.e., in front of people of color and without the use of raced or racially-coded language. The largely white student groups I describe used the mistreatment of the sole student of color at their respective tables through ‘nanoaggressions’ and through the co-construction of ‘whiteness/rightness rules’ (Author 4, 2019). As the white students in this study nonverbally affirmed the unspoken rules and wielded nanoaggressions against Students of Color to communicate to them and each other what the rules were, they developed the white fictive kinships (Matias, 2016) through these more subtle but enduring white racial bonding practices.

Significance: This study brings together Sleeter’s (1994; 1996) white racial bonding concept with Yoon’s (2012) whiteness-at-work concept and builds on them to show how whites in college STEM also use stealth white racial bonding practices front-stage (Picca & Feagin, 2007) and the resulting violence that impacts students of color. When the research community can better understand these connections and the myriad ways that white people engage in white racial bonding, we can then better understand how these white racial bonds can be disrupted.

Author

• Naomi Nishi, Colorado State University - Fort Collins