The Gatekeeper: Gendered, White Racial Bonding in College Algebra

• In Event: The Responsibility of Dismantling Whiteness 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).

White Racial Bonding has been theorized and engaged in the research as both backstage (all-white groups (Picca & Feagin, 2007)). 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 against college students of color in a STEM classroom, and particularly .

Conceptual Framework and Methods: This paper draws on Critical Whiteness Studies and draws 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.

I use portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997; Ohito, 2017), including ethnography and in-depth interviews of students and instructors to understand and illustrate how whiteness works in college algebra.

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) and without the use of racially-coded language. The largely white student groups I describe used the mistreatment of the sole student of color at their respective tables. As the white students in this study created unspoken rules and wielded microaggressions against Students of Color to communicate to them and each other what the rules were, they developed 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 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 limit participation for students of color.

Author

• Naomi Nishi, Colorado State University - Fort Collins