Historically White Colleges and Universities: The Unbearable Whiteness of (Most) Colleges and Universities in America
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2022-01-01
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Abstract
In this paper, we examine the academy as a specific case of the racialization of space, arguing that most colleges and universities in the United States are in fact historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs). To uncover this reality, we first describe the dual relationship between space and race and racism. Using this theoretical framing, we demonstrate how seemingly “race neutral” components of most American universities (i.e., the history, demography, curriculum, climate, and sets of symbols and traditions) embody, signify, and reproduce whiteness and white supremacy. After examining the racial reality of HWCUs, we offer several suggestions for making HWCUs into truly universalistic, multicultural spaces.
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Bonilla-Silva, E, and CE Peoples (2022). Historically White Colleges and Universities: The Unbearable Whiteness of (Most) Colleges and Universities in America. American Behavioral Scientist. pp. 000276422110660–000276422110660. 10.1177/00027642211066047 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/24727.
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Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
I am trained in class analysis, political sociology, and sociology of development (globalization). However, my work in the last 20 years has been in the area of race. I have published on racial theory, race and methodology, color-blind racism, the idea that race stratification in the USA is becoming Latin America-like, racial grammar, HWCUs, race and human rights, race and citizenship, whiteness, and the Obama phenomenon among other things. In all my work, I contend that racism is fundamentally about "racial domination," hence, racism is a collective and structural phenomenon in society (see my 1997 ASR on this matter).
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