“Fly on the wall” moments reveal whiteness-at-work for contested white graduate students

Abstract

Contested white students often feel caught between two worlds, liminally situated, betwixt and between monoracial constructions of race. They are a subset of undergraduate and graduate students who are differentially located along the borders of whiteness, but who share common experiences of racial ambiguity, insecurity, and contestation. Contested whites report being under constant pressure to explain and justify their racial location along the borders of whiteness. Their narratives of racialization powerfully reveal the operations of whiteness-at-work in fleeting, everyday moments in U.S. universities and colleges. This manuscript tells the stories of Fly on the Wall moments for three contested white graduate students. I use critical discourse analysis and critical narrative analysis to explore how Fly on the Wall moments reveal iterative, paradoxical constructions of whiteness-at-work. Implications for postsecondary education are explored.

Keywords:

• Contested whites
• discourse
• whiteness-at-work
• multiracial
• graduate students

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 I capitalize the words Black, Indigenous/Native, and other words meant to indicate racially minoritized populations in the U.S. context, but do not capitalize white or whiteness – following the standards of Pérez Huber (2010) – as a grammatical move to decenter white dominance. I use mixed and multiracial interchangeably, and sometimes both together, following the usage of study participants. I also use Latin* to indicate Latinx/o/a people (see Salinas, 2020).

2 This in vivo phrasing comes from participant narratives.

3 These variables are termed differently by different scholars. For example, self-identification is labeled as “racial identity” by Rockquemore and colleagues (2009). Ascribed race is termed “racial identification” by Rockquemore et al. (2009), “outsider classification of race” by Feliciano (2016), and “street race” by López et al. (2018), and is closely related to Khanna’s (2004) articulation of “reflected appraisals.” Many works coming from a social psychology lens use the words “racial targets” and “racial perceivers.” Federal classification is named “racial category” by Rockquemore et al. (2009). It is important to note that ancestry could also be another sub-category of race, and that Ascribed Race could be further divided into how one is perceived by others and how one thinks they are perceived by others (see Saperstein et al., 2013).

4 Since 1997, the Office of Management and Budget defined white as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020).

5 It is important to note that the discourse of normative whiteness is not the sole discursive force in these moments of racial contestation for Damien, nor for the subsequent narratives from Kamilia and Nico. Clearly, the One Drop Rule (Davis, 1991; Hickman, 1997), as enacted in a closely related binary discourse of white/not-white, and the discourse of essentialist anti-Blackness also co-construct these moments and subjectivity. I examine the interactions of these other discourses in other work (Mohajeri, 2018), but for this manuscript, I focus on the operations of normative whiteness.

6 This is actually a derogatory term in Italian, used to demean Black people, but at the time of data collection, Nico had a less incisive understanding of the term.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Orkideh Mohajeri

Orkideh Mohajeri, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education Policy & Student Affairs at West Chester University. She earned her doctorate in 2018 from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and has 20 years of work experience in postsecondary settings. Her current scholarship focuses on racial contestation in the U.S.