"In the contradiction lies the hope": White student affairs administrators' understanding of whiteness

Among white people, there is a pervasive mentality that color-evasiveness (Bonilla-Silva, 2003) is an ideal approach to racial equity, meaning many white student affairs professionals may equate refusing to see race as synonymous with being anti-racist. The narrative that white people do not see color is problematic and inaccurate when, in actuality, it serves to maintains white dominance and white supremacy. In order to promote racial equity on college campuses, race needs to be illuminated, recognized, and reckoned with by white people to counter this ideology. The purpose of this qualitative study is to understand how white student affairs administrators describe being white and how whiteness impacts their work in student affairs. Utilizing ontological expansiveness, a critical phenomenological methodology, the researcher interviewed nine white student affairs administrators at a historically white university in the Southeast region of the United States. This university has established diversity and inclusion as one of its top values. All nine participants completed two semi-structured interviews. Data analysis methods included several line-by-line readings and the development of a code-book utilizing the conceptual framework of whiteness and essential concepts from the literature. As a result, six themes with corresponding sub-themes emerged: distance and proximity: the other side of the tracks, navigating judgement, values of whiteness, performative commitment, racism (in)action, and student affairs indoctrination. This study exemplified the ways whiteness permeated the division of student affairs, allowing for an in-depth understanding of the need for political and structural change, as well the need for genuine and authentic commitment by student affairs towards anti-racism.