Abstract
Residence halls are consequential spaces for many college students and purport to offer comfort, community, and home while facilitating meaningful learning opportunities, including interaction across difference. This qualitative case study uses theories of white space to examine campus housing at three historically white universities. Findings juxtapose staff’s and administrators’ relatively harmonious and idyllic beliefs about community with Students of Color’s experiences in campus residence halls. Across campuses, Students of Color’s sense of comfort and belonging in residence halls was ruptured by racist expression, speech, and an overwhelming presence of white people. Findings illuminate how residence halls often functioned as white spaces, where white students were disproportionately entitled to comfort, safety, and belonging. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Campus residence halls are consequential spaces on many college campuses, places 1 where students learn, build relationships, study, eat, and rest. A brief review of housing scholarship and campus websites communicates a clear narrative: Residence halls are students’ homes and, thus, places where safety, belonging, and comfort—or one’s sense of ease and freedom from constraint—are prioritized and fostered (Blimling, 2014; Worley, 2020). Belonging, or one’s perceived social support and connectedness, is a foundational requirement for students to pursue other important goals (Strayhorn, 2012). For those three million students who live on college campuses (Graham et al., 2021), their experiences in residential spaces can powerfully shape their sense of belonging, social integration, retention and persistence, academic success, and understandings of self (Erb et al., 2015; Mayhew et al., 2016; Schudde, 2011). We examine residence halls as important campus spaces, with attention to how the racialized nature of these spaces shapes racially minoritized students’ comfort, belonging, and agency.
Residence halls are spaces where students, particularly Students of Color, 2 experience microaggressions and racism (e.g., Harper et al., 2011; Harwood et al., 2012). Examining the dynamics of race and racism in housing is a critical, yet understudied, endeavor. Residence halls are influential spaces and require students to live in close proximity with their peers, intending to promote learning and capitalize on frequent interracial interactions (Bowman & Denson, 2012; Chang et al., 2006; Kuh et al., 2005; B. L. Smith et al., 2004). Thus, institutions, like those in our study, recognize the importance of these contexts and often frame residence halls as students’“home away from home.” Despite these realities, less scholarship has critically interrogated how racism and whiteness shape these contexts and outcomes, and the few papers that do are largely based on single institution studies or from a particular perspective (e.g., resident assistants or hall directors; Harper et al., 2011; Hotchkins & Dancy, 2017).
This paper draws on a larger multisite qualitative case study (Stake, 2006), examining how racism and whiteness shape students’ experiences in on-campus housing across three geographically diverse universities in the United States. This study explores how university administrators (e.g., vice presidents for student affairs) and staff (e.g., directors of university housing or hall directors) understand campus housing’s role in university life and how Students of Color experience living in campus residence halls at Predominantly white Institutions (PWIs).
Consistent with our case study approach (Stake, 2006), drawing on multiple groups’ perspectives within each case offers a deeper understanding of the different, and often racialized, perspectives about campus housing. Not unlike other institutions, colleges are racialized organizations wherein white people are clustered at the top of institutional hierarchies, and, in turn, white 3 desires, interests, and experiences are the norm (Ray, 2019). As such, white people occupied nearly all administrator roles across the campuses we studied. Scholarship, broadly, has also detailed how Staff of Color experience individual and institutional racism at PWIs (Bazner, 2022; Briscoe, 2022). In contrast, white staff’s and administrators’ experiences, often devoid of critical considerations of whiteness, are largely validated and normalized (Ray, 2019). Campus environments, like residence halls, are often constructed as race-neutral and universally supportive by white administrators. In fact, these racialized beliefs have powerful implications for the students who seek to cultivate homes in residence halls. As such, this paper examines (a) how administrators and campus housing staff understand the role and purpose of campus housing in university life and (b) how Students of Color experience these environments.
Interviews with university administrators, housing staff, undergraduate students, and resident assistants illuminated how, despite dominant framings of campus housing as places for community, belonging, and cross-racial interaction, residence halls often functioned as white spaces (Anderson, 2015), where white students were disproportionately entitled to comfort, safety, and belonging. Further, interviews with primarily white administrators highlight how dominant notions of community often hinged on Students of Color facilitating cross-racial interactions in residential communities. University administrators’ and staff’s beliefs strongly influence institutional productions of community, particularly in residence halls, through the creation of policies, practices, and norms. In short, administrators and staff help create and reproduce white spaces. Thus, to examine and disrupt racism in campus housing, we must take seriously the unique facets of white space, as racism does not occur in these spaces by accident. Our study extends examinations of racism and whiteness by juxtaposing administrators’ and staff’s idyllic constructions of community with the experiences of Students of Color to illustrate how residence halls are maintained as white spaces that facilitate racism.
Conceptual Framework
This study is grounded in sociological theories of white space (Anderson, 2015; Brunsma et al., 2020; Moore, 2008, 2020; Moore & Bell, 2019) to interrogate how whiteness shapes the lives of Students of Color. Residence halls offer an important venue to consider the racialization of space and whiteness’s material effects on Students of Color. Scholars have long studied the relationship between racism, whiteness, space, and land in the United States, tracing the evolution of white racial identity and property rights as a result of Indigenous genocide, land theft, enslavement, and stolen labor (Harris, 1993). Anderson’s (2015) theorizing on white space builds on this scholarship by highlighting how racial segregation persists long after the Civil Rights movement and the subsequent production of racially homogeneous white spaces.
Anderson (2015) highlighted the range of public spaces that are, in fact, white spaces, including neighborhoods, churches, upscale restaurants and shops, workplaces, schools, and courthouses. The racially insulated lives of white people produce and normalize anti-Black sentiments that are subsequently attached to Black people who enter white spaces. White spaces are those defined by the relative absence of Blackness and thus create the conditions in which People of Color generally, and Black people in particular, are unexpected and subsequently rendered out of place (Anderson, 2015). In this regard, People of Color disrupt the white spatial imaginary that insists on racially pure and homogenous white spaces (Lipsitz, 2007). As such, People of Color who enter white spaces are often subject to hyper-surveillance and control by individual white people, who can easily remind them of their provisional status (Anderson, 2015).
Jenkins (2021) pointedly noted, “The anti-Black spatial imaginary marks Black [people] as undesirable and therefore extractable from spaces and places that have been envisioned for their exclusion” (p. 119). At PWIs, Students of Color are frequently made aware of their place via explicit manifestations of racism and white supremacy (e.g., overt forms of racist expression) and more subtle reflections of institutional oppression (e.g., being the only Black student in a space). Moore and Bell (2017) note that the hanging of a noose or the use of the n-word by white students are not isolated anomalies but instead reflections of broader historic meanings that reinscribe white power and control. These instances signify to Students of Color their outsider status within the institution.
Although white spaces mark People of Color as outsiders who must appropriately negotiate their status, these same spaces produce significant benefits for white people. Anderson (2015) defined the white space by the overwhelming presence of white people, but others describe how institutions produce and sustain white space in ways that result in psychological and material benefits for white people (Brunsma et al., 2020; Embrick & Moore, 2020; Moore, 2008, 2020; Moore & Bell, 2017). Moore (2008) documented how spaces become institutionalized as white via historical legacies of exclusion, privileging white ways of knowing and the overwhelming power of white people within institutional hierarchies. Thus, white spaces are defined not merely by the presence of white people but also by the institutionalization of white ways of knowing and white aesthetics that ensure that whites disproportionately benefit from the space (Embrick & Moore, 2020). Similarly, Brunsma and colleagues (2020) note that white spaces are marked by an aesthetic that “socially and culturally craft ‘comfort’ and safety for Whites, where the talk, the ideas, the current events discussed, and the heroes worshipped are of Whites, by Whites, and for Whites” (p. 2010). White spaces are physical landscapes that reflect white interests, desires, and cultural preferences, while simultaneously marking People of Color as disruptions to the space’s normative sensibilities (Brunsuma et al., 2020; Moore, 2008, 2020).
In this study, we examine (a) how administrators and campus housing staff understand the role and purpose of on-campus housing in university life and (b) how Students of Color experience these environments. In conceptualizing campus housing as a white space, we illuminate how white students are disproportionately entitled to the comfort, safety, and belonging provided by campus housing, while Students of Color are often marked as out of place via overt and subtle forms of racist speech and expression (Moore & Bell, 2017).
Diversity, Social Justice, and Racism in Housing
Residential communities are often revered for their potential to positively influence student success, retention, and belonging (Kuh et al., 2005; Mayhew et al., 2016). Literature asserts that living on campus is related to student success and persistence (e.g., Erb et al., 2015; Schudde, 2011). Thus, community building and belonging persist as central aspects of residence life departmental and programming philosophies (Worley, 2020). In this literature review, and throughout this manuscript, we illustrate how dynamics of race and racism in campus residence halls are understudied relative to those of other campus spaces. Ignoring housing’s racialized dimensions leads to a continued failure to disrupt the terror and racism many Students of Color experience in housing as a result of institutionalized white space.
Diversity persists as residence halls’ central goal and feature (Erb et al., 2015; Kuh et al., 2005), despite mixed findings about housing’s influence on students’ openness to diversity (Chang et al., 2006; Mayhew et al., 2016). Roommate relationships are one example of how students interact across difference. Accordingly, several institutions have implemented policies forbidding first-year students from selecting their roommates, in favor of matching roommates in pursuit of positive diversity outcomes (Bauer-Wolf, 2018). However, Fosnacht and colleagues’ (2020) quantitative study found that students whose roommates were assigned by the institution did not interact with diverse peers more often. Further, Asian, Black, and multiracial students who had roommates assigned by the institution perceived a substantially less welcoming campus environment than their same-race peers who chose their roommates (Fosnacht et al., 2020).
Other studies confirmed that Students of Color experience PWI residence hall climates differently—and often more negatively—than white students because of racism and microaggressions (e.g., Harper et al., 2011; Harwood et al., 2012; Haynes, 2019; Johnson, 2003; Thompson, 2020). Harwood and colleagues (2012) found that Students of Color routinely experienced microaggressions in housing. These aggressions communicated to Students of Color that they did not belong on campus. The pervasiveness of microaggressions was compounded by the invalidation many Students of Color felt when reporting such experiences to predominantly white staff. Similarly, Haynes’s (2019) study of Black women in residence halls underscored how Black women encountered taxing stereotypes, exclusion from social activities, and a “refusal to reimagine college housing from any other perspective than a White one” (p. 535). Yet many administrators assumed that all students benefit from interracial interactions in housing (Kuh et al., 2005; B. L. Smith et al., 2004). Prioritizing interracial interactions often discounts the violence Students of Color experience and the value of, and the intentionality required to form and sustain, same-race friendships for Students of Color at PWIs (Gilkes Borr, 2019).
Further, a growing body of scholarship urges practitioners to consider how power pervades all aspects of residence life and to center social justice in recruitment, training, programming, and policy (e.g., Kortegast & Croom, 2019). Howard and Kerr (2019) recognized that positioning residence halls as home can minimize how residence halls function as sites of oppression and harm, especially for minoritized students. Universities endeavor to build welcoming and diverse communities via on-campus housing (Blimling, 2014), but there is a need to further document how power, like whiteness, structures housing spaces.
Although scholarship documents historical and contemporary racism on campus (e.g., Museus et al., 2015), less research has critically interrogated how whiteness shapes residential communities. Scholars traced how Black men resident advisors (RAs) negotiated lowered expectations from white supervisors (Harper et al., 2011), how assumptions about the value of racially integrated halls neglected racism’s effects on Black residents (Haynes, 2019; Thompson, 2020), and how Black students struggle to see themselves represented in residential communities (Hotchkins & Dancy, 2017). Hotchkins and Dancy (2017) described a feeling of “perpetual homelessness” (p. 48) among Black students in their study, noting that participants were frequently the target of white surveillance and often subjected to assumptions about their right to inhabit said spaces.
As one way to interrupt racism, some campuses create racial affinity communities (e.g., Brown University’s Harambee House) to increase Students of Color’s access to same-race peers while affirming their experiences and histories (e.g., Gilkes Borr, 2019; Patton et al., 2017). In the face of white backlash in response to increased numbers of People of Color at PWIs, many Students, Staff, and Faculty of Color organized to create racial affinity communities. Yet the creation of racial affinity communities often sparked further white backlash (Patton et al., 2017). In this way, whiteness—and often white people— continuously seeks to undermine basic attempts at community building and life-making at PWIs. We recognize that many Students of Color create strong communities, succeed academically, and graduate, despite experiencing racism in housing (e.g., Boettcher et al., 2019), but scholars should still interrogate and address such harms.
Further, campus ecologies at PWIs facilitate white racial comfort and racial arrested development—whereby white students’ understandings of race and racism remain unchallenged—normalizing racism and whiteness (Cabrera et al., 2016). Thus, it is important to investigate how such dynamics manifest in residential communities and consider who benefits from and is entitled to comfort in these spaces. Dominant philosophies of residence life practice, which center residence halls as valuable sites for learning about and interacting across difference, often use minoritized students (e.g., Students of Color) to support the learning and growth of students from dominant social groups (e.g., white students; Kortegast & Croom, 2019). This paper contributes to critical residence life scholarship by interrogating how ideals of community and residential spaces are racialized. As such, we inquired: How do university administrators and campus housing staff understand the role and purpose of on-campus housing in university life, and how do Students of Color experience these environments? In doing so, we consider how whiteness undermines on-campus housing’s purported function as an unproblematic good and mechanism for facilitating community and belonging among undergraduate students. Juxtaposing the accounts of administrators and students highlights significant gaps between how residential life is envisioned and how it is experienced as a white space.
Method
This study leveraged multiple case study methodology (Stake, 2006). Data are drawn from three geographically distinct PWIs: State University, Midwestern University, and Southeastern State University. Each campus had a strong institutional commitment to residence life, as evidenced by intentional residential curricula and learning outcomes. Further, two of the institutions required students to live on campus for their first year, signaling a deep commitment to the residential experience. The third institution did not require living on campus, but it had recently begun building multiple new, state-of-the-art residence halls, signaling the institution’s commitment to a residential experience. Selected institutions varied in their racial diversity and institutional type, to ensure that we did not simply study well-resourced and highly selective research institutions. A full description of each case concludes this section. Consistent with case study methodology, we conceived of each campus as unique, bounded cases (Stake, 2006).
Within-Case Sampling
Consistent with our case study approach (Stake, 2006), we sampled multiple perspectives within each case to develop a deeper understanding of the different, and often racialized, perspectives about campus housing across campuses. We entered the study from the assumption that university administrators with supervisory responsibilities over housing played a role in developing understandings of residence life’s role in the university and that housing staff were responsible for carrying out this vision. Interviewing students who lived in on-campus housing allowed us to understand their experiences in residence halls. In the end, we were able to juxtapose the perspectives of university officials with those of our student participants.
Within-case sampling procedures reflected purposeful and snowball techniques (Marshall & Rossman, 2016). At each institution, Zak Foste worked with a mid-level staff member in housing and residence life to identify potential study participants. At each site, recruitment began by identifying staff members within campus housing, such as hall directors, area coordinators, and assistant/associate directors. University administrators who worked outside campus housing but had a supervisory relationship or were frequently partnered with the department were also solicited for participation. Student participants were largely recruited after interviews with housing staff. Zak worked with hall directors and other staff members to identify student participants. Typically, housing staff shared study information with students who lived in their residence halls. Students were asked whether they would participate in an interview about their experiences with race and racial diversity in their residence halls. Interested participants completed a demographic form. Zak then scheduled student meetings during a campus visit. Select interviews with staff took place via video conferencing, while all interviews with students and university administrators took place during campus visits. Site visits ranged from 3 to 7 days in the summer and fall of 2019.
Data consist of 69 semi-structured interviews and a review of departmental websites. Departmental websites represented campuses’ and housing departments’ espoused goals, values, and visions for residence life. The data set includes 25 interviews with university administrators (e.g., vice presidents for student affairs), housing administrators (e.g., director of housing), and hall directors and 44 interviews with students who lived in campus housing. Administrator interviews offered important context about housing’s role in university life. Similarly, interviews with residence life staff explored departmental initiatives to support racial diversity, perceptions of the halls’ climate for racial diversity, and significant racial incidents that occurred within on-campus housing during their tenure at the university. Of the 25 staff and administrators, 15 identified as white, seven as Black, two as Latinx, and one as Biracial. Consistent with theories of white space and racialized organizations (Moore, 2008; Ray, 2019), those at the top of the institutional hierarchies with significant power and influence were overwhelmingly white.
In total, 44 students participated in the study. Of these 44, 29 were current or previous RAs. Among students interviewed, 19 identified as Black, 12 as white, five as Asian American, four as Latinx, three as multicultural, and one woman self-identified as Middle Eastern. One Student of Color also identified as an international student. Interviews with student participants examined what it was like to move into their residence hall in their first year of college, the nature of cross-racial interactions in the halls, and racist incidents they had witnessed on their floor or within their building. At one institution, seven Students of Color participated in a focus group. Participants who served as RAs were asked additional questions about the types of educational programs they were required to organize by the department and their perception of the department’s commitment to issues of racial diversity. All student participants were compensated with a $15 gift card.
Analysis
Data were analyzed by using a cross case study approach that pursued within and cross case analysis (Stake, 2006). First, we read a shared set of transcripts from the three cases to sensitize ourselves to the data and each institution’s context. We met multiple times to discuss our first reads of transcripts and share initial reactions to what we observed in the data. Second, we then shifted our analysis and, consistent with a cross case approach (Stake, 2006), treated each case as its own analytic unit. In doing so, we approached each of the three sites as independent and unique studies, consistent with within case analysis.
Within each case analysis, we engaged in a multistage coding process, with ongoing dialogue and analytical memoing. First, we independently engaged in open coding (Saldaña, 2021). We constructed codes with our research questions and theoretical frameworks in mind, identifying language that invoked notions of home, belonging, comfort, and safety; racist incidents; perspectives on the purpose of residence life; and descriptions of residence hall and campus spaces. At this stage, we noticed that although the contours of each case’s residential environments were unique, participants shared similar experiences and perspectives across cases (e.g., purported value of housing for exposing students to diversity or prevalence of non-Black people using the n-word).
Next, we employed focused coding (Saldaña, 2021), consolidating sub-codes under larger umbrella code categories. We created a larger “white space” code that included “description of space” and “presence or absence of People of Color” sub-codes. We also developed sub-codes under the “racist incident” code to capture incidents where the n-word was used and to denote incidents’ locations (see Appendix A). Finally, we revisited all codes through axial coding (Saldaña, 2021) and considered how larger code categories related to one another and how whiteness and racism were reinforced or disrupted through white space, messages about housing, and racist incidents. This process helped us identify patterns across cases.
Third, we created analytic case summaries to report on the uniqueness of each campus because each campus represented a bounded case (Stake, 2006). We developed several questions as a result of our analysis of all three sites to guide the creation of case summaries: How do administrators and staff discuss community? What mechanisms do administrators/staff identify for producing/achieving community in campus housing? In what ways is community disrupted or fractured? Are there negative cases of examples of Students of Color finding/cultivating safety, comfort, and joy? Finally, after negotiating our interpretations of within case analysis, we examined which patterns manifested consistently across all three cases by reviewing departmental websites and interviews. This was consistent with cross case analysis approaches that emphasize “common relationships across cases” (Stake, 2006, p. 39). It was at this point that we refined our analysis and made analytic assertions (Stake, 2006) across cases. As such, our findings represent analytic assertions that manifested across all three campuses.
Trustworthiness
We employed multiple measures to ensure that our findings would be trustworthy (Marshall & Rossman, 2016; Stake, 2006). First, we included multiple negative examples in reporting findings to offer alternative explanations and possibilities. For instance, we constantly reflected on Tichavakunda’s (2020) point that too often white researchers understand Black life only in relation to racism and neglect any recognition of Black agency. Tichavakunda (2020) offered a useful question we continually returned to: “While racism is overarching and undoubtedly impactful, are Black students’ campus lives reducible to responses to racism?” (p. 10). This question guided individual reflection and collective dialogue throughout the analysis process and guided efforts to interrogate whiteness in the study and in relation to our research question. As such, we conclude our findings by highlighting instances in which Students of Color constructed vibrant communities within on-campus housing, at times assisted by the institution and at times in spite of the institution.
Second, we include a substantial number of direct quotes to support our interpretations. In doing so, we hope to offer vicarious experiences for our reader (Stake, 2006) and to provide ample evidence to substantiate our claims. Third, although our study sought to identify themes across campuses, we provide descriptions of each case and the unique, contextual details influencing the dynamics of racism, whiteness, and campus housing. These case summaries provide important contextual grounding for the findings. Fourth, we engaged in multiple rounds of analysis and interpretation. As noted previously, after we completed multiple rounds of coding, we constructed case summaries to understand each case in context and from a holistic perspective. Finally, given our racial location as white scholars, we engaged in ongoing discussions related to our complicity in sustaining such systems and how our positioning influenced the research process (Foste, 2020). Next, we briefly reflect on our positionality.
Zak identifies as a white, cisgender man of relative social-class privilege. Lauren N. Irwin identifies as a white, queer, middle-class cisgender woman. Both authors have experience in campus housing—as former residents, RAs, and hall directors on multiple campuses. We believe that any exploration of reflexivity should reflect on the consequences of one’s positioning to the study. Of note, we were privy to white administrators’ reflections that may be in part influenced by their perceived racial comfort with Zak. That is, the accounts white administrators shared were at least in part a reflection of our whiteness. In this regard, we continue to reap whiteness’ rewards even in our efforts to disrupt it (Foste, 2020). As such, in constructing findings, we undoubtedly engaged in what Fine and Weis (1996) describe as interpretive affirmative action to challenge the power of white ideologies in the findings.
In conducting interviews, Zak sought to challenge white administrators’ perceptions and ideologies by probing for details about racial demographics, racist incidents, and assumptions about the benefits of diversity in housing. In interviews with Students of Color, Zak often learned about racist incidents. When white staff and administrators failed to recall these incidents, he probed further. Such probes often prompted white staff and administrators to have to acknowledge racism and often led to responses that attempted to reconcile their race-evasive ideologies with racism’s continued visibility. In our analysis, we consistently tried to be mindful of how whiteness operated in white administrators’ responses, particularly in those accounts that evaded engagement with race.
Although we contextualized administrators’ and staff’s accounts with interpretations that illuminated whiteness’s manifestation and domination, we also sought to honor People of Color’s complex narratives and experiences rather than limiting their experiences to racism (Tichavakunda, 2020). In doing so, we tried to remain vigilant in our efforts to not oversimplify Students of Color’s lives. Regarding our racial positioning, throughout the research process, we dialogued about our experiences in the white spaces of campus housing and how those places socialized us to initially understand university housing as a universal, unproblematic good.
Limitations
We note three limitations of our study. First, this study relies on interview data, collected over a short period of time. Thus, our findings reflect participants’ retrospective accounts and meaning making. Researchers could employ other data-collection strategies, such as prolonged ethnographic fieldwork that couples rich interviews with observation. Second, given that Black students compose the largest student group, it was difficult to unpack and present the unique racialized experiences of other racially minoritized groups and how they experienced and navigated the white space of campus housing. Given the proportion of Black students in the study and that anti-Blackness is central to construction of white space, we provide as much specificity as possible in our reporting (e.g., specifying racial groups when possible) and also recognize that our findings present the terror of racism, which was often rooted in anti-Blackness.
Finally, it is important to acknowledge interviews’ racialized nature. As Rollock (2013) noted, “The inequalities and regulations of race that govern society also come to bear in the context of the interview, shaping its richness and direction” (p. 501). Zak conducted all interviews. White scholars benefit from racial privilege in the process of interviewing white participants about race, most notably in how particular experiences and accounts may be accessible to white researchers that might not otherwise be shared with Scholars of Color (Foste, 2020). Conversely, although many Students of Color shared that this was the first time they were asked about racial dynamics in housing, it is possible that Zak’s whiteness may have been an obstacle insofar as participants were selective about what they shared.
Research Sites
In what follows, we briefly introduce each of the three research sites. Although our analysis sought to illuminate the shared properties and similarities across cases, consistent with a case-centric approach (Stake, 2006), we describe the local particulars of each site here.
Midwestern University
Located in a rural, predominantly white community, Midwestern is home to roughly 7,000 students, 79% of whom are white. Within 3 hours of multiple urban areas, students and administrators frequently spoke of a rural/urban divide among the undergraduate student body that often played out along racial lines. Interviews with administrators emphasized how the institution sought to leverage racial difference as a part of the larger educational experience of on-campus living. There was a—at times overly reductionist—belief that white students from rural areas and Black students from nearby cities and suburbs can learn from one another due to the proximity the residential experience provided. This was understood as residence life’s unique contribution. The university’s website described residence halls as “your place to call home” and integral to the “well-rounded student experience.” Despite messages that emphasized the place of housing in bridging racial differences, the department itself and the institution as a whole were home to few People of Color in positions of authority.
Southeastern State University
Southeastern State University (SSU) is a medium-sized public university in the southeastern United States, enrolling approximately 10,000 undergraduate students, 25% of whom live on campus. Although SSU is a PWI, it was the most racially diverse of the three campuses, with almost 50% of students identifying as Students of Color. Several Black students referred to campus residence halls as being like Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) because the majority of on-campus residents and RAs were Black. In general, the housing website paints residence life as integral to a student’s college experience and as being much more than just a place to sleep. The department’s mission is broadly focused on student success and inclusion. RAs mention that programming was guided by four pillars, none of which were about diversity, inclusion, or social justice. Further, the large numbers of Black students living on campus led some white administrators to believe that they had no problems with inclusion or diversity and, thus, no need to center these priorities in their work. Others were focused on inclusion in such prescriptived ways that they perceived any identity-specific programming (e.g., Black History Month events) as inherently exclusive because they did not appeal to all students.
State University
State University is a large public PWI in the western United States. Unlike Midwestern and SSU, only about 10% of undergraduates live on campus because State did not have a first-year live-on requirement. State students, staff, and administrators demonstrated the most sophisticated racial literacy and comfort talking about social justice of the three campuses’ study participants. As a result, their programs and training addressed racism and social justice more directly, as evidenced through a widely discussed microaggressions program. However, the department was still overwhelmingly white from mid-level management on up, and staff and students detailed how inclusion was undermined by whiteness and racism on campus and in the halls.
Like those of other campuses, State’s residential communities sought to provide students a place to call home and to cultivate environments where students could learn and thrive. There seemed to be a general agreement among administrators that housing is uniquely positioned to facilitate social justice and inclusion efforts because of residential environments’ intimacy. Although many staff still offered relatively idealistic definitions of community, most staff recognized that white students and Students of Color likely needed different things from living on campus. Further, State was unique in that it offered designated spaces and resources for minoritized students in the residence halls. Although all three campuses affirmed the value of residence life for enacting and achieving stated goals of diversity, inclusion, community, and belonging, each campus’s infrastructure and resources supported these goals in different ways.
Findings
We organized our results into three overarching themes in response to our two research questions: (a) How do administrators and campus housing staff understand the role and purpose of on-campus housing in university life? and (b) How do Students of Color experience these environments? First, we present staff and administrators’ idealized notions of community in housing and how Students of Color represented a necessary ingredient to achieve these goals. We then draw on interview data, largely with Students of Color, to highlight how such idealistic notions of community are easily fractured in white spaces, marking Students of Color as marginal members of communities purported to be central to student success.
Idealized Notions of Community
Across institutions, a majority of white administrators and staff frequently emphasized housing’s unique role in fostering community and belonging. As one white administrator at State noted, “You create community pretty well when you’re here 7 days a week for 9 months out of the year.” At SSU, staff members frequently described housing as students’“home away from home.” Similarly, Susan, a white senior housing official at State, explained that housing provided students a place to come home to after a tough day, and, as such, “Our role is to create a space where students have bottom line, if nowhere else, a sense of connection, belonging, thriving, mattering on campus.” John, a white professional staff member in Midwestern’s residence life department, told us the importance of housing in “building that community experience, building that experience where they have a place, when a student comes here that they have a place where they feel comfortable, they feel at home, they feel welcome, they feel safe.”
Central to developing a solid community was a persistent idea that manifested across institutions: Living in residence halls afforded students the opportunity to engage with racial differences in ways not readily available elsewhere on campus, let alone before or after college. Although classrooms or workplaces might offer tentative cross-racial engagement, living on campus provided a rare, immersive experience with those different from oneself, or so the thinking went. We describe such accounts as idealized notions of community because they were often race-evasive, overly optimistic, and at times informed, at least in part, by staff’s own time as a (white) student in (white) campus housing. Put otherwise, these accounts often rested on a white-centric integration perspective that presume living in close proximity would inevitably produce meaningful cross-racial interaction and friendship. Rarely did these notions of community, which purported to offer a course correction in white students’ racially homogenous upbringings, account for the consequences of white students’ racial insulation prior to college. Because administrators did not trouble the consequences of such extreme racial isolation in precollege environments, they rarely considered how Black students and other Students of Color may be rendered as outsiders in the very place intended to be their home away from home.
Rick, a white university administrator at State, explained, “We have people living in community, they’ll never live in again, probably. You put people together in communities that once they get out of college, they find a place to live, they’re probably never going to live in the type of community that we put them in.” He noted how the immersive residential experience was unique from other campus spaces: So in a psych course, I can disagree with you. . . . And then I walk out of that classroom, I don’t have to deal with you, right? Look, if you’re living in the same suite as me, the same room as me, or the same floor as me, as I may have to deal with you everyday. So it makes more sense to me to try to figure out how we deal with these differences in a way that, we don’t have to agree, but we need to be aligned.
Rick’s thinking implies that the immersive nature of living on campus requires that students negotiate difference, racial or otherwise, in ways that promote a harmonious living arrangement. In this regard, campus housing is an especially unique and ideal campus space to expose students to racial difference. Particularly notable about Rick’s comment is that living in such proximity will require students “to deal with you every day.” Left unsaid is who is to be “dealt with” and what it means to be “dealt with” in your home. Given that Students of Color are expected to prove their right to belong in white spaces, Rick’s commentary is striking in its lack of consideration for the role of race in such conflicts. Indeed, numerous accounts from our interviews with Students of Color, shared below, illustrate the racialized nature of being a provisional member of the community who must be “dealt with.”
Cindy, a white administrator at Midwestern, offered a similar endorsement of campus living. Like numerous officials at her institution, she described how the university could produce a particular “experience” for students. She explained the value of living on campus: So when students live in the hall, it’s just that’s such a great opportunity to really get to know people who are different. Again, we have a large population of people who come from areas that don’t have that opportunity. And so living in the halls, I mean there is nothing like learning about somebody when you live with them or you live near them. And so I want students to be able to come in and have a good first positive experience with diversity.
Rick’s and Cindy’s sentiments all reflect ideologies of integration that assume living together will result in meaningful engagement across racial difference and, ideally, cross-racial friendships. Cindy’s comments underscore an assumption that if structured properly, these interactions will be uniformly positive. However, such conceptions of community fail to trouble how such spatial arrangements mark Students of Color as outsiders—their very presence a disruption to the presumed white space. Although administrators recognize the racial isolation of many white students’ precollege environments, and subsequent expectations for how space is organized and occupied, they rarely considered how such conditioning might influence life in the residence halls for Students of Color. One cannot simply assume that living in a relatively more integrated space will inherently “fix” the precollege conditioning of white racial isolation, particularly when those very environments are largely extensions of, rather than disruptions to, the normative whiteness of students’ precollege communities.
A belief in campus housing and idealized notions of community were not limited to senior officials. Several staff members at Midwestern repeated a company line about the place of housing in university life. At Midwestern, staff often described community as an institutionally produced commodity or experience. Trevor, a white housing staff member who described Midwestern as a large family, explained, “I look at our rural farm kids, a lot of them have been grown along the lines of racism. Great-Grandpa, Grandpa, Dad. It’s just been in their family for a lot of years.” As such, Trevor hoped “the least we can do is show them that there are differences in the world, but those differences, there’s a lot more similarities than there are differences when it comes to race, and I hope that’s the biggest takeaway.” Like many administrators in the study, Trevor centered white students who grew up “along the lines of racism” rather than the consequences of white students’ attitudes, behaviors, and expectations on Students of Color in housing. In the white space of campus housing, the growth and learning of white students is often prioritized over the safety, comfort, and belonging of Students of Color. It becomes evident, then, that white students are disproportionately entitled to expectations of safety and comfort in on-campus housing.
Benefits of Living on Campus
Administrators and staff also spoke to the tangible benefits that purportedly resulted from living in residential communities. Consistent with the idealized constructions of community described above, participants’ accounts situated Students of Color as a critical and primary component of white students’ educational experience. Thus, although Susan described housing as a space for students to come home after a tough day, others often highlighted the (often unspoken) expectation that Students of Color served as a source of learning for white students in housing.
Jennifer, a white housing administrator at Midwestern, discussed the ways living on campus would prepare students for their postcollege lives. Like many university officials, she understood the role of campus housing as a space to expose students to difference in ways that would benefit individuals well beyond their years at Midwestern: [Whether] they’re going to work in an accounting office in a big city or they’re a nurse in a small town, that they can work with anybody and know how to have those people skills to get along with everybody and understand that their view of the world is not the only view of the world.
For Jennifer, exposure to diversity in campus housing afforded students the opportunity to engage in cross-racial interactions in ways that would benefit them, regardless of where they live or work in the future. In this regard, housing is framed as a universal, unproblematic good.
Like Jennifer, John spoke about how living on campus prepared students for racially diverse work environments. He noted that the institution works to equip students with “the ability to not be scared, not be afraid to want to connect with people, no matter what they look like, no matter who they are.” Doing so would allow students “to see the value in that connection, that their life will be fuller, that their work will be better.” Without offering any evidence, John assumes that students will come to college scared or afraid to connect across racial differences, and, as such, that the role of housing is to get students beyond that fear. Notably, John does not appear concerned with how the possibility that students may be scared to connect across racial differences might negatively influence the residential environment. In the white space of campus housing, such concerns are often minimized. Rather, he is primarily interested in how campus housing might move students past a fear of racial others, a seemingly tall task, in ways that will benefit their work and productivity.
Finally, Mary explained that if students “can learn to live with one another under the same roof and get through all the stress that is college, the more they’re going to be able to live in a neighborhood, the more they’re going to be able to work with professionals in their professional role.” Similar to Jennifer and John, Mary emphasizes how the process of living in campus residence halls will produce a particular set of outcomes, such as productively living among differences in neighborhoods and working in racially diverse professional roles. In essence, Mary, like many of the university officials we interviewed for this study, sees campus housing as a laboratory in which to learn about differences.
However, not all staff and administrators shared this perspective. Susan, a white administrator at State, foreshadowed the troubling ways in which Students of Color often become a form of racial capital—or, in her words, a “petri dish”—for white students in housing: We know that when students come, they’re like, “Oh I was exposed to so much in the residence halls.” But we are a darn white institution. . . . [W]e have some [students who] are like, “Okay, I’m glad that you’re excited to be exposed to me, but I need community, too, and not to be your petri dish of ‘Aren’t I interesting to you?’ Right? I need to matter to me, because I got bigger things going on than to be somebody that is interesting to you.”
Susan’s comments are notable because they caution against the rhetoric espoused by other administrators and staff that locate Students of Color as a valuable source of learning in the residence halls. In doing so, she departs from other accounts by affirming the humanity and needs of Students of Color in their residential environments.
Student Perceptions of Community
Students’ experiences in residential communities are powerfully shaped by staff and administrator beliefs about the purpose of housing, the benefits of living on campus, and the mechanisms endorsed and provided for building community. However, as much as administrators and staff sought to ensure all students felt at home, Layla, an Iranian American woman and undergraduate student at State, shared the following: The majority of our students that live on campus, I think, are white. . . . It’s just tough being the obvious minority, especially in your home. . . . [F]or [Students of Color], it is their school, and it’s their home. They don’t get to go home and escape this situation in which they are the minority. They’re living in it constantly.
White students generally offered more positive assessments of housing, and the residence halls’ racial climate, than Students of Color. Although some white RAs attributed their RA experiences to greater awareness of racism, most offered fairly positive and race-evasive accounts of their time in the residence halls. This is not to say that Students of Color had uniformly negative experiences. Many Students of Color spoke about forging strong friendships, learning new skills, accessing resources, and building relationships with RAs and staff. In fact, we highlight how Students of Color (re)claimed and created communities amid the white space of housing at the end of this section. However, nearly all Students of Color reported at least one instance when they felt unsafe, uncomfortable, or not at home in the residence halls.
Given larger framings of residence halls as places for safety, comfort, community, and belonging, we consider how all students experience residence halls in these ways. In what follows, we describe how residence halls functioned as white spaces by centering the experiences of Students of Color. Students of Color often expressed a fragile relationship to comfort and safety in housing—recognizing their right to belonging, safety, and comfort could be, and often was, fractured by whiteness and racism. However, many white students never recognized these fractures. In this sense, the illusion of universal and unfettered access to comfort, safety, and community in residence halls was a house of cards, with the potential to collapse in an instant.
Community Fractured
This theme represents how covert and overt racism worked together to preserve residence halls as white spaces—disrupting idealized and race-evasive notions of community. Across all campuses, white administrators and students generally only mentioned overtly racist incidents. However, Staff and Students of Color consistently described how racist speech, expression, and the dominance of white people undermined safety, comfort, and belonging in housing.
Community Fractured by Racist Speech
Racist speech pervaded housing environments. Across all campuses, students recounted hearing racist slurs, including white people using the n-word. In the white space of campus housing, Students of Color, particularly Black students, were often confronted with white people’s deployment of linguistic violence and anti-Black stereotypes, as white students were comfortable directly expressing and enacting racist abuse. Kelvin, a Black man and RA at Midwestern, explained that white people “say [the n-word] willy-nilly.” Kelvin’s reflection communicates how frequently the n-word was deployed and the ease with which some white students used the n-word, including around Black students. Kelvin also described how his white roommate—with whom he previously had a positive relationship from high school—started using the n-word around him once they became roommates. In Kelvin’s words, his roommate “flipped,” and Kelvin no longer felt safe bringing friends to his room because “they don’t play that.” White students’ use of the n-word in residence halls eroded Black students’ sense of physical and emotional safety and belonging.
Other Black students had to directly confront white roommates who expressed deeply held ideologies that valorized enslavement, the Confederacy, and who deployed the n-word. Tiffany, a Black woman undergraduate at Midwestern, recounted: I was telling [my roommate] why it wasn’t okay to call me [n-word]. . . . And it escalated from there, where she was having people in the room who came in talking about Southern pride, about slavery. . . . And [it] got to the point where I wasn’t going back to my room until three in the morning, because I didn’t want to deal with my roommate. . . . And it was this feeling that it was trying to make a space that I should be comfortable in, uncomfortable. . . . [It was] so awful. . . . So, literally going to the library or staying out. . . . And it just made it tough to . . . I don’t know. Being successful is the way to say it, to enjoy my college experience.
Similar to Tiffany, Hannah, a Black woman undergraduate at SSU, shared that her white roommate frequently used the n-word, asked her how to twerk, and accused her of coming on to her boyfriend, all of which made her feel unsafe and uncomfortable: I was very uncomfortable. I tried not to come to my room at all. I only came to my room at like 12:00, when I knew that all of them were asleep. I actually slept in my car one night because they had people over that were all white people, and I just didn’t feel comfortable in my room. I would stay in the library all day. So, it was bad.
Kelvin, Tiffany, and Hannah each encountered racist language from those with whom they were supposed to share their personal space. Yet Tiffany was subjected to violent and racist language that also reinforced racialized and gendered stereotypes of Black women as promiscuous and hypersexual (e.g., Jezebel stereotype; Patton & Haynes, 2018). Several Black students’ white roommates deployed racist slurs, undermining their comfort and safety and effectively evicting them from their own homes.
Mya, a Black woman and SSU staff member, described an incident in which a white maintenance employee used a racist slur in front of a Black student staff member. Mya was bewildered by this incident and wondered, “Why do you feel comfortable enough to say these things?” Indeed, racist slurs were commonplace in the white space of campus housing.
Many Students of Color also recounted hearing racist slurs by chance, often because the walls were “thin.” Sara, an Asian American woman undergraduate at State, shared that during the 2016 election cycle, she overheard students chanting pro-Trump slogans, such as “build the wall,” in celebration of his racist policies. In response, she explained, “I remember calling home. I was like, ‘Mom, I’m scared. I don’t really want to be here.’”
Many participants at Midwestern discussed a racist message that was sent to a floor’s GroupMe immediately after move-in, in which a white student used racist language and repeated anti-Black stereotypes. Although the campus police later claimed that the message resulted from a hack, this did not erase the harm that many students, particularly Black students, experienced. Tiffany, a Black woman undergraduate, shared that the message “made a lot of students feel empowered to start disrespecting Black students by saying, ‘How do you even afford to get here? Are you on scholarship? Do you play sports?’ Basically, really degrading them.”
In contrast, many white Midwestern students and staff members were relieved to learn that the incident resulted from a hack and used the hacking claim to reinforce their own perceptions that the Midwestern community was not racist. It was easier for white staff and administrators to believe that a white woman was hacked than it was for them to recognize and redress the historical and contemporary violence enacted by the n-word upon Black folks in their community. Trevor, a white man and hall director, described letting out a “sigh of relief” upon learning that the GroupMe resulted from a hack. Further, he described how important it was to ensure the safety of the white woman who allegedly sent the racist GroupMe message, explaining, “First, we wanted to make sure that the student was safe because here we have this message coming from her account. We need[ed] to make sure that her safety [wa]s okay.” In response to a racist incident, white staff rushed to prioritize the safety of the white woman associated with the message’s creation and dissemination. Such are the insidious realities of white spaces.
At the same time, Black RAs and Black staff worked to reassure parents and Students of Color that they would be safe on campus while managing their own feelings of fear, marginalization, and anger. Kiara, a Black woman RA, described having Black residents give her their phones—to reassure parents that they would be safe. Further, Sean, the department’s only Black staff member at the time, described being on campus until 2:00 a.m., meeting with Students of Color, because “If not me, who?”
Community Fractured by Racist Expression
Racism was enacted via symbols throughout residence halls. In residence halls, students are encouraged to personalize their space in ways that are consistent with their values and interests. Thus, Students of Color frequently recounted happening across confederate flags, bedspreads, and posters and pro-Trump posters and paraphernalia. Most of the time, these symbols were contained in students’ rooms, but when doors were left open—in support of community building—or when students and staff entered students’ spaces, they risked being confronted with racist symbols. Sean, a Black man and housing staff member at Midwestern, described, “We’re doing social rounds, just seeing people while they’re moving in—‘Hey, how’s it going? How you doing?’—and we see this confederate flag bedspread. I’m like, ‘What the fuck? Where are we at?’”
Ezra, a Black man RA at SSU, described encountering a room full of Trump merchandise during a health and safety inspection: [I]t was like a fucking Trump rally. He had 2020 flags going around the room, fucking Make America Great Again hat. . . . I’ve seen other residents with that type of shit in their room, but they don’t usually advertise it . . . because I think they read the room, like, this is a mostly Black building.
Derrick, a Black man and SSU housing staff member, described an incident that occurred in front of a Black resident’s room: “There was a cardboard cutout and it had ‘build the wall’ written on it, and she felt very uncomfortable. And there really wasn’t a lot we could do to help her feel better.” Because they did not know who left the cutout, the mostly Black floor was “very tense and on edge,” and the targeted resident felt “unwelcome.” However, because they are “very mindful of free speech,” there was not much the staff could do.
At Midwestern, one administrator recounted how surprised they were to learn that confederate flags were commonly displayed in the residence halls. They shared about a parent who called them because they were upset that their Black son’s white suitemate displayed a confederate flag in the common area. However, the Black student was so afraid of potential backlash that he did not want to address the situation: We had a parent who came, and she noticed that her son had not been socializing. That he had some concerns, but he would not express them. So, when she came to campus to visit and she witnessed this, she raised some issues. Because he was a student there, he was literally begging his mother, “Don’t say anything, you’re going to make it hard for me.”
However, staff and administrators explained how university free speech policies limited their recourse. Cindy, a white woman administrator at Midwestern, encapsulated most campuses’ responses: “We can’t make people take things off their door.” Racist and xenophobic symbols were protected speech. Such realities only reinforced residence halls as white spaces.
At State, multiple students and staff recounted white supremacist flyers on residence hall bulletin boards. Taylor, a Black man and hall director, shared: We had this white supremacist organization. . . . [T]heir promotional materials were pretty much everywhere. And so one’s looking at them and thinking like, okay, they feel safe enough to come here to do this on our campus. [They] feel comfortable, like this is the place that they can do that, and no one really challenged them.
Kelly, a white woman RA at State, explained these white supremacist flyers often just “pop up” in the halls. Further, Sara, an Asian American woman RA at State, mentioned that she encountered “a swastika on the bulletin board.” Racist language, symbols, and expression functioned to reassert the dominance of whiteness in residence hall spaces. Such symbols and language disrupted expectations and feelings of comfort and safety for many Students of Color, ensuring that residence hall spaces were not always the welcoming homes they purported to be.
(Re)Claiming Community Spaces in Housing
Much of what we detailed describes how Students of Color experienced racism and terror in the white spaces of residence halls. However, Students of Color also reclaimed and reimagined housing spaces as places for their own joy, community building, and worldmaking. We take Tichavakunda’s (2020) conception of Black placemaking seriously, which asserted that Black students—amid the dominance of whiteness—come together to create memories, places, and communities. We found that Black students and Students of Color challenged the norms of white spaces—effectively (re)claiming spaces and cultivating community to meet their needs.
Across all three campuses, Students of Color expressed the importance of connecting with People of Color in RA and staff roles. Layla, an Iranian American woman, did not expect to meet other Persian students at State and was excited to build a relationship with another Persian woman and RA. They developed a close friendship, and she was “always a resource for me, and really made it feel like home.” This relationship made up for Layla’s relatively absent RA and motivated her to be an RA. Kiara, a Black woman RA at Midwestern, spoke at length about the importance of being a role model for other Students of Color. Although Kiara generally enjoyed connecting with Students of Color through her role, she talked about the weight of these efforts: “There are some students who I feel like if I wasn’t there, they probably wouldn’t have stayed on campus.” For many Students of Color, establishing relationships with People of Color in RA or staff roles were central to establishing a community—knowing that they had an advocate, confidant, and friend who understood the realities of racism on campus. Students of Color’s narratives also highlighted the intentionality and time required to establish and support same-race relationships in white spaces, especially when larger institutional philosophies prioritize cross-racial rather than same-race relationships for Students of Color.
Additionally, Students of Color capitalized on existing housing spaces to cultivate community, home, and safety. State was the only institution that offered a formalized and institutionalized space specifically for minoritized students. About a decade ago, State established and staffed a diversity resource room to serve as a community-building and programming space for minoritized students in the residence halls. Morgan, a Black woman and the staff member charged with overseeing the diversity resource room, explained: “The [diversity leaders] are charged with making this a safe space and helping the students build community where we form in that culture of belonging here on campus.”
Alexander, a Student of Color who was a former RA and current diversity leader, spoke about the vibrant community cultivated through the diversity resource room. He shared that on one hand, he “want[s] everybody to know about the [diversity resource room],” but he also wants to preserve the space’s safety. Alexander explained, “Students of Color, they appreciate it as a place where they can kind of just come and relax and be themselves.” For many Students of Color, the diversity resource room was a place to escape the whiteness of campus and the residence halls. Affinity spaces, like the diversity resource room, are one way to interrupt racism and honor Students of Color’s agency. However, Students of Color deserve to access safety, comfort, and community in more than just a single campus room.
Further, Students of Color created places that refused the norms of white spaces. At Midwestern, many Black students discussed the racially segregated nature of campus residence halls. As white and affluent students moved off campus or to more expensive residence halls, Black students were more likely to be concentrated in a few halls (see Foste, 2021). Thus, many Black students, even those who did not live in the predominantly Black halls, referred to the predominantly Black halls as their “home” because of the music, culture, and community that Black students created for themselves in these spaces. Tiffany, a Black woman undergraduate, explained, “Walking in there feels like home. . . . It’s not where I live, even, but it’s just, like, that feeling of comfort every time I go in there.”
Some administrators recognized the value of affinity spaces for Students of Color but felt inhibited by local and state politics. Gary, a university administrator at Midwestern, shared, “There was talk about having a living community of underrepresented students. So all the Black students get to live together? If it’s a community that they’re going to feel confident and comfortable in and be successful at [Midwestern], sure, if it’s a choice, well, you’re just segregating them.” Despite recognizing the benefits of these spaces, Gary anticipated accusations that he was “segregating” students or that he would “show up on the front page of the newspaper as a raging racist” if he pursued such efforts in the conservative state. Although Gary’s worries were not unfounded, his lack of action only reinforced whiteness’ dominance in housing, abdicating responsibility for disrupting racism. Thus, Students of Color labored to establish and protect their own affinity spaces on campus and in the halls. Often, these spaces were not institutionally recognized or resourced.
At SSU, the residence halls were home to predominantly Black students, and Black students were the majority of RAs. A few Black students affectionately referred to the residence halls as “more of an HBCU.” Alisha, a Black woman undergraduate at SSU, reflected fondly on her time in the halls because of how she and the other Black residents “made it fun.” She shared about being “connected more with people” and feeling at “home” because of Black residents’ efforts to create a vibrant community. Across all three campuses, Students of Color refused the dominance of whiteness by creating and reclaiming spaces as places of belonging and joy.
Discussion
Although residence halls are consequential institutional environments on residential campuses and are often framed as central to student success (Mayhew et al., 2016; Schudde, 2011), dynamics of race and racism are understudied relative to those in other campus spaces. Ignoring housing’s racialized dimensions leads to a continued failure to disrupt the terror and racism many Students of Color experience in housing (e.g., Volpe & Jones, 2023). As such, this study offers a unique contribution to higher education scholarship by juxtaposing how administrators and staff construct notions of community with the racialized realities of such spaces, as reported by Students of Color across three universities. Although administrators and housing staff alike frequently framed housing as a space to foster belonging, safety, and community for students, this study’s findings highlight how white students are disproportionately entitled to comfort and safety in their residences. We consider how campus housing can foster more inclusive and welcoming environments and offer implications for research and practice.
White Space and Race-Evasive Constructions of Community
First, the accounts offered by white administrators and staff reveal highly idealistic, and often race-evasive, constructions of community in campus housing. As previous scholarship has documented, the ways administrators construct and attach meaning to notions of diversity and inclusion have powerful implications for the broader campus community (e.g., Thomas, 2018). Importantly, this study highlights how white staff and administrators’ idealistic constructions of community were easily fractured, be it by racist expression, racist symbols, or simply the sheer dominance of white people in these spaces. In this regard, our study illustrates how tenuous such notions of community are and how easily Students of Color are made to be provisional members of their own residences (Anderson, 2015; Moore, 2008).
Consistent with theories of white space (Anderson, 2015; Moore, 2008), the accounts offered in this study highlight the power of white people in residence halls to surveil Students of Color and engage in behaviors that mark them, in effect, as out of place within their homes (e.g., Haynes, 2019). Participants recounted numerous instances that reaffirmed residence halls as white spaces, including the floor-wide GroupMe message, displays of confederate flags, and the use of racist slurs. In each instance, administrators often claim that there was little the university could do because of students’ right to free speech and expression. However, such speech creates overt hostility and inflicts terror. Students of Color feared for their safety in these spaces, and two Black women were essentially evicted from their homes via racist speech. Of note, one of these instances of eviction occurred at an institution with a critical mass of Black students, highlighting how white space can function even amid racial diversity. These incidents illustrate how “sporadic (but regular) explicitly hostile racist incidents on college and university campuses work together with more subtle and institutional forms of racial oppression and exclusion to facilitate the operation of historically white universit[ies] as contemporary white institutional spaces” (Moore & Bell, 2019, p. 1765).
Further, these findings highlight the extreme stakes for Students of Color in the white spaces of campus housing—the potential loss of comfort, safety, and community in spaces that are instrumental to students’ college experience. If, as the results of this study suggest, Students of Color are not entitled to feel safe in their homes, where can they go on campus to experience safety, affirmation, and comfort? What is one to make of the reality that even their homes may not be a place of reprieve from the racial battle fatigue experienced elsewhere on campus (see W. A. Smith et al., 2016)? Not only were campus residences not a haven from the violence of racial battle fatigue found throughout the university; in numerous instances, residential environments were active facilitators of such fatigue.
Living on campus is often heralded as central to the undergraduate experience in extant scholarship (Blimling, 2014; Kuh et al., 2005; Mayhew et al., 2016) and university officials’ accounts. However, this study’s findings contribute to a growing body of research (Foste, 2021; Harwood et al., 2012; Haynes, 2019) that challenges understandings of campus residence halls as universally beneficial goods. Many institutions require students to live on campus for at least a portion of their undergraduate career (Blimling, 2014), positioning campus housing as yet another “white institutional [space] . . . people of color must actively engage in order to experience upward mobility” (Evans & Moore, 2015, p. 452).
White Space and the Commodification of Students of Color
Second, this study reveals how Students of Color were sometimes positioned as an essential component of white students’ college experience, even in environments that should be their home. This finding mirrors Warikoo’s (2016) discussion of the diversity bargain, wherein white students and institutions express support for racially minoritized students’ admission insofar as those students enriched white students’ educational experiences. Although university officials in this study framed campus housing as the space on campus where students should find a sense of comfort, where they could return after a difficult day to unwind and let their guard down, too often Students of Color were positioned as assets for the learning of white students. Even in the space intended to be students’ homes, Students of Color were expected to shoulder the responsibility of educating white students who experienced little cross-racial interaction in precollege environments. Put otherwise, white administrators’ idealistic notions of community rested on the assumption that Students of Color offered white students the necessary exposure to difference that was absent prior to college. Administrators believe that residence life was uniquely positioned to expose students to diversity in ways not possible in academic settings. Such an assumption stemmed from a belief that students had not encountered racial diversity prior to college—which is more likely to be the case for white students (Park & Chang, 2015).
Further, university officials shared that living in campus housing requires students to work through differences in productive ways. Such a philosophy insists that Students of Color have a very particular role to play in the white residential experience. White administrators often used language of comfort to discuss residential contexts that prioritized white students feeling comfortable in racially diverse settings without regard for the impact on Students of Color.
In effect, many white administrators failed to consider Students of Color’s humanity in their visions of student learning. How might administrators’ conceptions of community differ if they took seriously how precollege racial isolation produces particular expectations to white, racially homogenous spaces (Lipsitz, 2007), potential comfort enacting racist beliefs in the presence of other whites (Picca & Feagin, 2020) and group solidarity (Bonilla-Silva & Embrick, 2007)? Instead, Students of Color were often expected to contribute a consumable form of difference without disrupting the white spatial imaginary (Lipsitz, 2007).
Ironically, these spaces that were often regarded as racially diverse by white people were often considered very white—or lacking diversity—by Students of Color. In this regard, such understandings of the benefits of on-campus living echo Leong’s (2013) conceptualization of racial capitalism, or the notion that white people and institutions reap significant benefits from associations with People of Color. It is also notable that a significant focus of such notions of community is an exclusive focus on cross-racial interaction, with little in the way of considering how to connect students to their same-race peers, a critical endeavor that scholars have noted should be institutionally supported rather than left to chance (Gilkes Borr, 2019).
Further, these race-evasive, idealistic notions of community are consistent with how white people live in, and exert control over, diverse neighborhoods and residential communities (Burke, 2012; Walton, 2021). Studies of integrated residential areas documented how white people exert significant power and influence in such spaces. Much like in residence halls, “sharing geographic space does not necessarily equate to meaningful, equitable interactions across difference” (Walton, 2021, pp. 72–73). Rather, for some white residents, racial diversity functions as a commodity for white enjoyment (Burke, 2012). Our findings mirror broader trends of off-campus residential living, where People of Color are marked as outsiders in white spaces while offering significant benefits to white people via racial integration.
Situating the (Re)Production of White Space
In investigating the dynamics of white space in campus housing, we consistently confronted a paradox: continued reliance on race-evasive considerations of community, as offered by administrators, and the overt racism and terror that many Students of Color, particularly Black students, experience. Not only have scholars named color-evasiveness as racist and as a mechanism to further white racial ignorance (Annamma et al., 2017; Mueller, 2020); Students of Color recounted racialized residence hall experiences where white students often used explicitly racist language and expression. Such color-evasive notions of community fail to redress, let alone bear witness, to the terror and violence that white people deploy against People of Color in white spaces.
Some administrators considered race-conscious interventions but feared campus, community, and or/state backlash. Thus, this study also illustrates how white spaces are situated within—and (re)produced across—institutional, local, state, and national contexts. Administrators’ concerns about losing state support or being labeled as racist for pursuing socially just practices exemplify the role of state and local politics in compounding historical legacies of exclusion and preserving norms of white space in residence halls. Patton and colleagues (2017) documented similar patterns of backlash and claims of segregation upon the creation of racial-affinity housing communities. Today, many state legislatures are instituting Critical Race Theory “bans” (Flaherty, 2021) as one contemporary manifestation of such backlash. Effectively, these bans legislate protection of white comfort by outlawing instruction or discussion of systemic racism and whiteness. Such policies only exacerbate, rather than disrupt, norms and practices that preserve white space on college campuses. As such, studies of white space in higher education must continue to examine how white space is contextually produced, by considering campus histories and policies, demographics, department and institutional philosophies, local context, and state politics.
Implications for Scholarship
The present study offers multiple avenues for future scholarship and theorizing. First, this study’s findings have implications for researching race, racism, and whiteness in higher education broadly. This study’s findings emphasize the importance of a spatial analysis of racism on college campuses. Such an analysis requires that scholars consider how particular spatial contexts make certain forms of racism possible. As Lipsitz (2007) explained, “The lived experience of race has a spatial dimension, and the lived experience of space has a racial dimension” (p. 12). For instance, residence halls represent particular racialized contexts that are qualitatively different from the dynamics of classrooms, libraries, or other physical campus environments. As our study’s findings demonstrate, residence halls are unique in part because they are spaces where students are encouraged to personalize their rooms and visibly express their attitudes and beliefs. In this regard, certain forms of racist expression are made possible (e.g., hanging of confederate flags) in ways one would not expect in the classroom environment. Thus, we encourage further study of the relationship between race, space, and place in university life and how physical spaces make particular manifestations of whiteness possible.
Although the present study was concerned with the experiences of Students of Color in campus housing, staff also navigate the white space of campus housing. Given Jenkins’s (2021) contention that Black pain and suffering are anchored in space and place, further exploration of how live-in Staff of Color navigate such spaces is especially important. This would further contribute to literature on the experiences of racially minoritized student affairs professionals (Briscoe, 2022). Additionally, we encourage scholars to consider the possibilities that may emerge when using ethnographic methods to study race in campus housing. The present study drew from interviews that represented retrospective accounts. Ethnography could illuminate the ordinary and everyday ways in which race and whiteness permeate campus housing.
Implications for Practice
We affirm Cook and McCoy’s (2017) claim that “residential life staff must commit themselves to learning about the deeply complex, insidious nature of racism” (p. 69). This charge is especially true for white staff and administrators. These commitments are essential for disrupting the normalized violence in the white space of residence halls. As such, we echo larger calls to dismantle whiteness in higher education, center racial justice in residence-life training, and recruit, support, and retain practitioners who are committed to crafting affirming communities (Boettecher et al., 2019). As such, we offer two recommendations to pursue harm reduction alongside larger efforts to disrupt whiteness in higher education.
Home and Community as Aspirational
First, we urge housing departments to trouble framings of home and community. This study’s findings illuminate whiteness’s pervasive nature in the white space of residence halls—this violence undermines possibilities for safe communities. Further, not all students arrive to campus with positive associations with the word home, and it is dishonest for administrators to assume that all students have unfettered access to safety, comfort, and refuge within residence halls (Howard & Kerr, 2019). In evoking and constructing communities as universally harmonious in race-evasive ways, administrators, especially white administrators, downplayed and erased the racism and violence that students, especially Students of Color, were subject to.
Howard and Kerr (2019) encouraged universities to build communities, practices, and systems that have the capacity to be safe, inclusive, and responsive to students’ needs. These recommendations necessitate disrupting whiteness. Thus, we encourage staff—in residence life and beyond—to consider how home and community can serve as aspirations rather than presumed realities. In shifting to an aspiration of home and community in residence life, staff and students can engage in reflection and self-definition about what home and community mean—or could mean—and what would be required for residence halls to be home for students. Undoubtedly, dismantling whiteness is essential in these efforts. Further, dialogue and understanding about potential commonalities and divergences among conceptions of community are vitally important. These conversations could occur in affinity groups, as part of residence life staff training and/or residential community meetings, by salient identities, by position or status at the university, or within particular residential communities. The practices, feelings, and norms that arise in such explorations could be used to review existing policies, staff training, and daily practice in residence halls in an effort to interrupt daily instances of racist violence.
Affinity Housing
Many scholars have affirmed the value of affinity spaces (e.g., Black cultural centers) for Students of Color in housing and beyond (e.g., Patton, 2010; Thompson, 2020). We affirm the value of affinity spaces, such as racially or culturally themed housing communities. Such spaces reduce barriers to fostering same-race friendships and counter the terror and racism of white spaces (Gilkes Borr, 2019; Patton et al., 2017). Students of Color at State confirmed the importance of designated diversity resource rooms as places for community building and respite from whiteness. Black students at Midwestern frequently referenced the safety and comfort they experienced in the campus’s predominantly Black residence hall. These students did not discount the value of cross-racial interactions. Rather, safe and supportive communities were vital to their well-being and survival. However, Students of Color often shouldered the burden for creating, maintaining, and protecting these spaces (Volpe & Jones, 2023).
In short, the presence and preservation of affirming spaces for Students of Color are not a given and require substantial labor (Tichavakunda, 2020). Thus, we urge institutions and housing departments to establish and preserve racial and cultural-affinity communities and spaces. This is not to say that all Students of Color want to live in affinity housing. However, these spaces cultivate and offer a unique sense of family, home, and comfort, empowering students to be involved within and beyond campus and supporting a greater understanding of identity (Patton et al., 2017; Volpe & Jones, 2023). Although we leveraged Tichavakunda’s (2020) work on Black placemaking to center the experiences and practices of Black students at PWIs, we urge practitioners to leverage other racial and cultural groups’ practices and ways of knowing in developing supportive affinity communities. For example, Singson and colleagues (2016) detailed suggestions for centering Indigenous students’ cultures, traditions, and ways of knowing in campus housing. Further, affinity spaces’ existence should not give white staff and administrators permission to disengage from larger efforts to dismantle whiteness in housing. Rather, these spaces should be well maintained, staffed, resourced, and supported and should not be institutions’ or departments’ sole solution to addressing racist violence in residence halls.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-aer-10.3102_00028312231175643 – Supplemental material for Race, Whiteness, and Student Life in On-Campus Housing: A Case Study of Three Universities
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-aer-10.3102_00028312231175643 for Race, Whiteness, and Student Life in On-Campus Housing: A Case Study of Three Universities by Zak Foste and Lauren N. Irwin in American Educational Research Journal
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