White University Spaces’ Moderation of Undergraduates’ Racial Conceptualizations, Attitudes, and Identities

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 28. Racialization, Power, and Institutions

Abstract

The transition to college represents a formative period in the life course, particularly for emerging adults whose identities, beliefs, and worldviews remain in flux. As undergraduates move from the relative familiarity of home and high school into new academic and social environments, they encounter diverse individuals, ideas, and institutional structures that can challenge, reinforce, or reshape how they understand themselves and the broader social world. Among the most consequential of these understandings are those related to race and racial inequality. Far from being fixed prior to adulthood, racial conceptualizations, attitudes, and identities often evolve as undergraduates navigate new intellectual frameworks and social contexts for the first time. This paper examines how undergraduates’ understandings of race and racial inequality change over time within institutions of higher education, as White university spaces, and whether academic programs moderate this change. Drawing on original longitudinal survey data collected from undergraduates at an elite, private-religious, and predominantly White midwestern university, I investigate shifts in race concepts (beliefs about what race is), racial attitudes (affective orientations toward racial others), and ethnic-racial identities (sense of belonging and attachment to one’s group). I do this using multilevel fixed effects modeling to assess within-individual change across undergraduates’ first two years on campus and to evaluate how disciplinary contexts, particularly contrasts between social sciences and humanities versus engineering and natural sciences, shape these trajectories. Ultimately, this paper highlights how institutions of higher education are powerful sites of racial socialization and meaning-making, with implications for how future professionals come to understand and reproduce or challenge racial inequality.

Author

• Maura Rose Kraemer, University of Notre Dame