Keith Edwards:
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Today, we are talking about white men on campus. I’m thrilled to be joined by three scholars, deep thinkers and fun people to discuss privilege, race and racism, gender and sexism, social justice, resistance and learning. Student Affair Now is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you’ll find these conversations make a contribution to the field and a restorative to the profession release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find us at StudentAffairsNow.com or on Twitter. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards. My pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker, consultant, and coach. You can find out more about me at keithedwards.com. I’m hosting this conversation today from Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is the ancestral home of the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples.

Keith Edwards:
Let’s get to the conversation. Today I have these three fabulous folks here who have done a lot of thinking and research and scholarship around white men on college campuses and what is going on with them and how are they impacting others and how can we reach them from critical perspectives? So I’d love to have you just all introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about who you are and what your day job is. And then also, if you could tell us a little bit about how you got interested or how you got started in really critically exploring white men on campus and Nolan. I think we’re going to begin with you.

Nolan Cabrera:
All right. Thank you so much for her, for having me and putting this together. It’s going to be a wonderful conversation. Nolan Cabrera – associate professor at the University of Arizona. He, him, his. And in my day job, I teach about issues of race, racism, campus, racial dynamics critical race theory and also introduction to issues in higher education. How I got into this issue is sort of a professional and a personal, really the personal drives that, and that was growing up in McMinnville, Oregon. And that was in the early nineties. This was rural Oregon, not what people think about Portland, Portland. Yeah. Although I do have a lot of experience living in there as well with that, you know, Portland nice, but also racist at the same time. And I think all of my work, especially around whiteness has been trying to grapple with this issue where I’d have people in my life, who I knew, who cared about me, who were very close confidant, supporters, mentors, friends, family, et cetera, who would say some things that were just really off racially, but 12, 13, 14 years old, you can’t quite put a finger on it.

Nolan Cabrera:
So I started wanting to dive into that and figure out how can ostensibly good people who I care about and love a great deal, do some really horrific things racially without even really realizing it. And that’s what really started to propel me in this direction.

Keith Edwards:
Wonderful. We’re excited to hear more about where that scholarship has taken. Jörg, tell us about a little bit about you

Jörg Vianden:
Jörg Vianden – he, him, his pronouns professor of student affairs administration in higher education at UW LaCrosse in Western Wisconsin. I’m originally from Germany, but I’ve lived here now in the US for 25 years. The background is my favorite German football team Cologne the season starts today. So that’s a little bit more about sort of the side story of me but really still continue to follow and connect heavily with German language, music, culture, relatives. So it’s tough, especially in these times to be far away from, from family and other friends. In, in my faculty position, we have a master’s program in a doctorate program and I teach because we have quite a bit curriculum and quite a small faculty. I teach sort of all of the courses that we offer. I’ve taught them before. Most of them, at least the ones that I teach most often are sort of related to writing a dissertation prep capstone prep for the master’s students.

Jörg Vianden:
The way that sort of, I got into thinking about research on white men is primarily because when I came here in the mid nineties, some of the things that I noticed around race and racism were different than they are in Europe. That’s not to say that Europe isn’t also incredibly racist and especially heavily xenophobic. But the, the way that racism and sexism and homophobia here felt was different than at home. And my dissertation was about white men and my qualitative methodologists said, you shouldn’t study people of color. You should study white men because that’s who you are. And I had not ever thought about it that way. And so from that time on with a few sort of side turns, I sort of have always come back to sort of thinking about white men and masculinity. And so that’s that’s where I am now.

Keith Edwards:
Great. Thank you. And thank you for being here, Rachel, tell us a little bit about you.

Rachel Wagner:
I’m Rachel Wagner. She, her hers pronouns I’m coming from Anderson, South Carolina, which is the rightful homelands of the Cherokee and I, my day job is I’m an assistant professor of higher ed and student affairs at Clemson university. Prior to that, I spent almost 20 years in housing and residence life on college campuses and got into this work. I’m a gender scholar. I come at gender thinking about it through like a critical postmodern lens. And I came to do work on men and masculinities primarily to respond to how much of my time and energy as a hall director was going into responding to men’s bad behavior in the residence halls, whether that was alcohol, vandalism, rape, sexual assault, violence. What have you. All of the ways in which that was completely taking all of my time on a regular basis.

Rachel Wagner:
And I also have been my – training is in social justice education, my doctoral work, and I kind of fancy myself, a social justice educator and doing that kind of like workshops engagement with students and faculty and staff and communities. And I was always really, I always was and continuing to work through being both focused upon and triggered by white men in the room in particularly their resistance. Right. And so a lot of my own work has been thinking through that right now, doing an autocritography looking at engaging white men’s resistance and social justice education spaces. So I’ll pause there.

Keith Edwards:
Well, thank you. Thank you for that brief introduction. I want to stick with you. Full disclosure, I’ve been a white man my whole life. So I’m, I’m familiar with this and thinking about it in my, my own life and my own research. And I think for me, the two most salient identities are my, my whiteness and my gender as a man. And so I’m really excited to have the three of you here to unpack this even more and learn even more. Rachel, I want to begin with you. You through many fortuitous opportunities for me have taught me so much about why and how engaging these conversations about dominance is so critical in addressing oppression and fostering the liberation. Could you help explain? And I think some people might be listening, curious why we’re, why we’re focused on white men. We are focused on white men plenty already. For those who might be wondering why we’re having this conversation, or why should we, or should we even be having it? Could you help us explain why and how to focus on this?

Rachel Wagner:
Sure. I love this question. I love that the question is about why are we focusing on dominance which is different than white men, right? Like there’s, there’s ways in which there’s a relationship between those two descriptors, but they’re also not interchangeable. Right. And so for me, dominance is about understanding how power and opportunities and access are being distributed in asymmetrical ways. Right. and and dominance can speak to like not just an embodiment right of a particular identification or how a person gets read in a space or how person enters and interacts with a space. That’s real, that happens. There’s lots of ways that we can make sense of and tease apart that particular dynamic. But, but the, but the conceptualization of like white masculinity for instance, goes beyond bodies, right. It also speaks to how norms, policies and organizing structures happen within institutions.

Rachel Wagner:
It also speaks to how we ideologically conceptualize what the norm is. Right. And so I think about how, like, Peggy Phelan talks about how men and, and you could layer onto this white men are marked within a social reality. And by that, what she’s talking about is that that is what’s valued within a particular sociopolitical environment, but she also talks about it has a quality of being unremarked. Right. but we don’t talk about it that it becomes inevitable, reasonable normative. And so this idea that if we don’t pay attention, if we don’t scrutinize, if we don’t examine what is dominant we only have a part of the story and, and perhaps they’re not always tapping into some of the some of the thrusts and some of the elements that we really need to understand and be able to source.

Rachel Wagner:
So I think about like on my campus maybe other folks who are having this experience currently, like we were having, I think I’m on like three new task forces on social justice or equity and inclusion that have started since June. When we discovered racism as a community and these task forces were having lots of conversation. What does our campus need? How can we like engage in issues of equity and inclusion in dismantling racism. And much of our conversation is situated in the interpersonal level. It is talking about bias, talking about whether that’s implicit or unconscious or whatever is the current, like terminology of the day, talking about like person to person, individual level of discrimination and creating like training or even policy protocols to discourage discrimination and like engage compliance, and that’s important. But if that’s our exclusive attention and our attention is not on the cultural and ideological ways in which dominance is being secured, maintained and produced, then we’re missing such a big part of what we can potentially leverage to transform.

Rachel Wagner:
And so my, my liberation is tied up and being able to interrogate dominance. And so of course we have to talk about it. We have, we can’t dismantle that, which we can’t name and that we can’t describe and that we can’t see in it’s discrete particulars. Right. And so that’s why I think it’s important. I, I think that our attention needs to be on – I advocate for our attention to be on all of the different levels in which dominance in the form of like societal oppression plays out and it doesn’t just happen at the individual level. It also happens at this ideological level, the ways that the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves delimit what’s possible, and what’s available to support everyone’s thriving. And I have a stake in that. Right. So,

Keith Edwards:
Yeah, you’re reminding me that we, we often do talk about white men on campus, but we very rarely talk about them as white or as men, right. We don’t, we’re not looking at their their gender or their race. And then people of color have a race, women and trans folks have a gender and, you know, that just, it defines the norm. And then anyone that deviates from the norm is then defined as deviant, right. And these systems and structures in place. So our task here is to talk about white men as both white in the context of systemic racism and as men having a gender in the context of patriarchal society. And with the, with the aim, I think for all of us of greater justice and equity. So thanks for, for setting us up with that, Rachel. Nolan, you wrote this great award winning book White Guys on Campus summarizing your research. And a lot of what you’re talking about is the challenges that white men present on campuses and the challenges to reaching them. Could you share with us a little bit about what you’ve been learning and what you’re thinking?

Nolan Cabrera:
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thanks for the shout out on the book. I know my publisher will be very happy for that and I don’t have to do the self aggrandizement uncomfortable. Hey, look at this. So appreciate. But actually there’s a really nice continuity with what Rachel was just saying. And your follow up on that is that you have these unmarked norms of, of whiteness and masculinity among these, these guys, because if I’m, if I’m being completely accurate, it’s part of the use of the term guys is tapping into more of a normative sense of masculinity and more of that, what Connell refers to as the hegemonic masculinity as well. But again, these are very much unmarked social categories.

Nolan Cabrera:
It’s just sort of a given of who these who these guys are. And so part of that theorizing, I’m going to get uber-nerdy and then a little bit more pragmatic in a second.

Keith Edwards:
Our audience is full of student affairs uber-nerds So your nerd out!

Nolan Cabrera:
Yeah, I was you know, thinking about a social norm and also what is the consistent conversation it’s always about? Well, cause it’s very much a race book and I want to be clear, the gender based analysis is weak in it. Like that’s my own admission, it’s there, but it’s, it’s not cutting edge by any stretch of the imagination. Many people do a lot better work in that, but you know, it is race by gender. And and with that, the, I guess when white privilege conversations come up the number one way that I see them continually disrupted, especially by the guys who, who I interviewed for this book and continually to engage with over the course of the last decade or so is that if I can find a place where I’ve struggled, my family struggled, you know, then therefore I’m not privileged because there’s an implicit component to it.

Nolan Cabrera:
That privileged means socially elevated. And there is something to that. But again, if we’re talking about the norms of society and we take it outside of whiteness and we look really deeply at what Peggy McIntosh was saying, you know, I can walk into a store and not be followed or assume I’m going to steal things. I won’t have my intelligence question because I’m white. That doesn’t necessarily elevate her as a white person. It means that there’s a disparate impact of systemic racism and white supremacy on communities of color. And so it’s not so much that whiteness is privileging her in elevation. It’s that it’s, that they’re that she receives a, basically a white immunity. And that’s sort of a concept I’m playing with is that there’s a – that systemic racism, white supremacy creates a social inoculation around that social norm that protects them and insulates them from receiving the disparate treatment that communities of color receive on a regular basis.

Nolan Cabrera:
Now how that relates directly to the resistance is these a lot of the guys who I would interview come from a very strange – well to be technical epistemic orientation, or just looking at their worldview that if I have this immunity, but I don’t really see it as immunity it’s just should be normal. I mean, we’re describing how all people should, should, should be treated. There’s this logical misstep that they do. And it’s, if I don’t see something as a problem, it’s not a problem. If I don’t see racism as a problem, it’s not a problem. And then what ends up happening because of that is that the whole conversation flips around and it becomes, look at me, look at the injury that I’m receiving because of this affirmative action that’s going on. That’s keeping me out of places. And, you know, they, they, you know, they have a bBack student union in it and and and and a Hispanic student union, but they don’t have a white student union.

Nolan Cabrera:
And I’m saying, you do it, it’s called the student union. Like that’s your white student union. And – but they don’t get it because it’s so divorced from their experiences, but they dig in hard. There’s this weird inverse relationship where the less that the guys I interviewed know about racism, the stronger their opinion is, and the more angry they are about it, the more that they do this, this basically subscribing to the, the, the ideas of reverse racism that, you know, that really. And I actually have one of the guys in the book, George says it directly, and I almost dropped my microphone. I was, he says, the only racism that’s still allowed is that against white men. And I was like, excuse me, I think I must’ve missed something. Can we back up here? But that’s really what ends up happening is you have the, you know, you have multiple layers of social insulation where it actually takes them a lot of work to really see an alternative reality that would actually sort of disrupt that.

Nolan Cabrera:
Now there were some you know, opportunities for people engaging across race, but they tended to the guys that I interviewed, but they tended to be very few and far between, because again, as Rachel was saying, it’s not just that I have these beliefs and ideologies, but that there’s a structured environment in place where it’s just normal, where they have a majority of white friends and they receive a curriculum that reflects themselves in it. And they don’t really have to get these challenges. And Oh, if I want to go do a diversity training, that’s okay. But fundamentally I can just stay over here in my fraternity house and keep it basically what happens is there’s a structured echo chamber

Nolan Cabrera:
where the white norms of a campus are, keep them insulated, remove them from being systemically challenged. And then it’s not surprising that as Rachel was saying earlier, they become a problem group because for that exact reason that they don’t see racism as an issue. And so therefore they’re just, they’re not going to engage it. And when they do, it’s always from the perspective of that reverse racism. So it’s structured on many, many levels is, as you said earlier, it’s complicated.

Keith Edwards:
[laughs] Well, wonderful. I appreciate that explanation of that. And you know, Rachel alluded to the beginning of the impacts of this right: alcohol use and abuse, sexual violence, vandalism, these things that we see and also disruptions in the classroom, right. I, as soon as my experience is not centered, I get defensive and want to recenter that and seeing that, that resistance. One of the things that, that I learned took me a long time to learn it though, was the better I understood my whiteness and the better I understood my gender, the freer I got from the systemic oppression. Right. and you know, Harry Brod, I think talked about how, as, as men, we get concrete and real privileges, as a result of the way the system is set up and we might be better off on a humanity level if we didn’t get them right.

Keith Edwards:
That we would regain our humanity, our integrity, our relationships there’s a societal cost we pay. And so that liberation I think there’s a lot of resistance to it, but there’s, there is liberation on the other side of that. But a lot of the men that you studied weren’t even anywhere close to that. And so Jörg you’ve got a new book out right out this year, I believe in January, Got Solidarity? Challenging Straight White College Men to Advocate for Social Justice. And so you’re really exploring less the resistance, but how do we reach them and how do we engage them share with us a little bit about what you’ve learned about how we can be effective, more effective.

Jörg Vianden:
Yeah. Thanks, Keith. I think before we start about, start talking about strategies of how potentially to involve white men and, and my focus was on straight white men to engage in these conversations or to begin getting more active around social justice. I want to sort of set a couple of things up in that. Number one is in the book. The main audience that as I’m seeing it are straight white men educators who identify like me because some of the things that I will be saying, I wouldn’t say to BiPOC peers, or to women, or to folks with diverse genders or sexual orientations because of the triggering that Rachel talked about earlier that white men can be. So I want to make sure that folks understand that, that the audience are straight white men or white men educators who need to be doing this work clearly and who need to be doing it more often.

Jörg Vianden:
And there’s lots of scholarship out there about this idea of ducking diversity that, that men faculty do specifically without then getting evaluated more poorly, but people of color or BiPOC faculty and women always tend to be evaluated more poorly by, by students in classrooms where diversity or social justice are content areas. So I think Nolan talked about this, that the men that I studied most of them from the Midwest, but also from some other areas grow up completely racially isolated from peers of color and Bonilla-Silva and others have talked about this, this idea that we live in a multicultural society for these men, or for many white men is not happening because they’re either in small towns in the Midwest, or even in larger communities where they’re living mostly among white people and their schools are also continuing to be extremely segregated.

Jörg Vianden:
It’s another sort of piece that comes out of the literature pretty clearly that we are not sort of at this level of integration where we may have been in the eighties, that there’s actually been a strong turn towards more segregation of schools. So that’s sort of the background in which these white guys grow up then the, the other one is, I think you mentioned this earlier, Keith, this, this idea of what I call the, I don’t want to be that guy syndrome because white men, or at least the, the, the folks that I studied or that we studied, they weigh the consequences of engaging in this kind of behavior against the potential sort of outing from the friend group and this connection that they want to have, or this affirmation that is emotional, even though we’re sort of taught not to share this emotion, they’re not going to risk that by engaging in something that other people might find stupid or nerdy, as we talked about earlier. So they’re going to weigh this, the social consequence pretty heavily before they engage in something like this.

Keith Edwards:
So you’re saying that white men, some white men who may want to engage in the diversity training or things like that may choose not to do it because they’re fearing consequences from their friends.

Jörg Vianden:
Sure. Yeah. And also specifically in, in confronting inappropriate language or behavior from family and peers, which is something that they I mean, there’s a whole chapter in the book about the it’s hard to speak because they simply just cannot, they cannot confront on these issues as much as they might want, because they noticed that oppression is going on, right. Some of them do right. But confronting that is really difficult. So last year, last sort of point about the premise of the strategies that there’s this, even though I’m not a sociologist, this book is written from a sociological perspective and Nolan and set this up earlier racism in the U S especially by white people as seen as an individual pathology, it’s psychological, right. Even though we know that it is not, it is sociological or systemic. And so these, these white guys that we interviewed had a really hard time seeing themselves as a group of white men, they saw themselves as individuals who don’t participate or contribute to racism because they themselves are good whites, right.

Jörg Vianden:
As, as many of the scholars out there have put out. And so, getting them to think about, and that’s one of the strategies getting them to think about as part of an intact group that is an actor in a system that is racialized and sexualized in genderized. Is it, is it, is it incredibly difficult, especially in these times where politicians and leaders or so-called leaders are putting it out there that this fight against whiteness is something that needs to, we stopped. Right. and so this, this idea of I’m good, or I’m an individual needs to be interrogated. Okay. So in this book, I’m talking about like nine or 10 strategy, even 10 strategies, even though I’m not an expert or in any of them one of them then that’s important is I think you need to think about white men in sort of intact groups.

Jörg Vianden:
If you can have them athletes teammates, residence, hall, floors, fraternities in classrooms, if you can use sort of, it needs to be done carefully, but sort of race based caucusing and then intergroup dialogue afterwards. Because I think in a large group, men, white men will continue to show this resistance in these focus groups that we did. It was very little resistance to at least sharing openly some of this stuff. And so I think that that’s sort of the first one strategy. One of them, I called join don’t disassociate. I think we have a lot of white men educators who, as Rachel said earlier, we are, are triggered. Many other folks are triggered by white men, but we also have white men educators that are triggered by men and say something like I can’t work with them. And what they’re forgetting in that is that it potentially used to be there where these white men are right now. So, so, you know, I was incredibly triggered by many of them, but then to say, I’m evolved or I’m better, or I’m somehow further developed than they. And because of that, I can’t talk to them or I can’t teach them or I can’t reach them. It is something that I don’t think I can say. So even though it’s difficult that joining, I think gets us farther, white male educators are white men educators, gets us farther than sort of pushing them away.

Keith Edwards:
Well, and if we’re not taking that on, then it falls on women and trans folks and people of color to take that on, or it goes on unaddressed. And and I think you’re mentioning this wanting to I can’t deal with them. I’ve certainly felt that in my life. And one of the things that I’m learning is that a lot of times when I want to do that, I want to distance myself to be exceptional. Right. I can’t stand them as a way of me saying I’m better than them. Right. I’m the good guy. I’m the good white person and really learning that, that was really about not them. It was about, I can’t deal with this previous version of myself that said, or did those things I just can’t be with that previous version of myself. What’s, what’s another, what’s another, are you calling them strategies that you want to mention?

Jörg Vianden:
I call them strategies in the book? But as soon as you hand something like this and you go, Oh man, maybe I could have had a better word. Right. I think another one that, that I’m talking about is Joe Feagin especially a sociologists at Texas A&M and other institutions has talked about this, that appealing to their humanity and their sense of fairness, fairness, and their sense of understanding or their, their sense of sort of loving thy neighbor or loving others is the sense that they have a really hard time achieving or reaching any kind of empathy about the suffering of others. And they think of themselves as also suffering. And many of them may be, but not because of their race or their gender, right. Mostly because of socioeconomic or ability or disability sort of identities that they may hold or, or other minorities, but it is not because of their racial background or their gender.

Jörg Vianden:
And so this idea of Bryan Stevenson calls this getting proximate and that, that is to facilitate an understanding of the suffering of others without asking them to do the labor of educating for you. So trying to get as close to the experiences of folks who are minoritized, and trying to, without necessarily asking them what it’s like, but trying to get proximate. So increasing the proximity to that to try to understand them a little bit more or a lot more about what folks are going through. And that’s really also difficult to do in this context of, “I don’t see racism.”

Keith Edwards:
Go ahead.

Jörg Vianden:
Last one. And Sean Harper and Frank Harris, I’ve talked about this before and others, this idea of productive masculinities. It’s, I think it’s important, even though it seems really farfetched at this moment in time with everything that we see going on that we need to trust, or at least I, as a white man educator needs to trust white men, that they are not incapable of, of becoming aware of themselves or becoming more active in this process. And I think focusing on focusing, rather on focusing on the barriers of the guys that can’t do this also sort of talk about the folks that are able to do that and have done it. And there are some in our sample, but not as many as we would have wished, but there are some, and sort of building on them to be sort of peer leaders and peer educators and bring other folks along. So I’ll stop there then.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. I’m just hearing in so much of what you’re sharing this notion – we have one task to educate these white men about racism, about gender, about other things. And that’s a challenge, right? To raise their awareness about what really is going on. And then there’s a whole second task that’s completely separate is how do you motivate them and inspire them and give them permission to act because you’re talking about men who sort of get it, whatever that means or are getting it. But they still don’t want to speak up about things they see as injustice and inequitable, because they’re afraid of the consequences. So they’re performing through silence Nolan, I imagine this makes you curious, what are you curious about as we’re, as we’re having this conversation?

Nolan Cabrera:
Within my work, probably one of the biggest frustrations that I’ve had is that from any kind of a meaningful, empirical sense, the, the guys who I talked to are not accurately reflecting reality, they’re accurately reflecting their reactions to situations, but in terms of a space, like if I let me put it this way, if I interview, when I, when I was doing some work on Latino campus racial climate, and students said, I really felt marginalized by X. They would say stuff like when my roommate asked me if I was an anchor baby, like they, there were very detailed, specific things about this. But when I would talk to these white guys about, again about like really engaging, where does this reverse racism since come from? What have you experienced? And your point really set off a lot of thoughts in my head about not wanting to rock the boat because I’ve asked a lot of them, well, what did you do?

Nolan Cabrera:
What did you say? What was the, what was the difficult situation? You know, because they feel, again, they feel marginalized by affirmative action, which is ironic because at one of the, the institution that I interviewed where they felt the most oppressed by affirmative action actually didn’t have affirmative action protocols. They felt oppressed a social program that didn’t exist. You know, they felt attacked by political correctness, but I would ask them, where does this happen? You know, they hear their friends use the N word, and I don’t want to speak up because I might get, you know, I, I might get shut down. It’s too uncomfortable, but they never though the ones who would say this, there was a distinct characteristic that a, they never tended to speak up. It was. And so it was more of this imagined, like my friends will shut me down, but they didn’t actually take that step.

Nolan Cabrera:
Or number two, when it came to political correctness, it was this sort of imagined norm on college campuses that they had heard a lot about. And, you know, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re talking about Fox news or bill Maher everyone’s railing against it, but they don’t have like a specific example of it. And so what was frustrating for me, again, getting back to the barriers was just, it seemed like they were reacting to this what Joe Feagin refers to as an imagined racial reality, that it just eat it, you know, or I’m sorry. So like incorrectly sincere fiction. It’s sincere that they believe it, but it’s a fiction that it really exists. So I guess what I wanted to throw out there to both Jörg and Rachel, and also Keith, if you, I’m sure you probably have some thoughts on this, It’s pretty clear that this is how white men are feeling frequently about issues when diversity race, racism come up, but do the white men you interact with actually have real life experiences it, or is it basically what the Ghetto Boys say that their mind’s playing tricks on them?

Keith Edwards:
Well, you’re reminding me of Michael Kaufman who talks about the paradox of masculinity, which is objectively we know that men are in positions of power and privilege nut subjectively they don’t feel that way. Right. And individually they don’t feel powerful. And so I guess the question I’m hearing is this, this fear of consequence, is it an anticipated consequence or have they experienced some of these consequences? Let’s see, give Jörg a chance to respond to that. And then we’ll hear from Rachel too.

Jörg Vianden:
I have a, I have part of a chapter where they’re talking about reverse racism or affirmative action. And I have sort of a piece of the youth, the apparent ubiquity of race-based scholarships, which also doesn’t exist. Right. they, they have the ones that have experiences have experiences like I’m from California and this guy from Iran who was absolutely the same as me in test scores and everything else that they got into this, this institution that I wanted to get into. And I didn’t, and they have this name and I have this Italian name and white bashing faculty in, in college classrooms. It’s the sense that they get from either others or from the media or from their parents or from their peers, that society is this specific way towards white people. And they sort of take that on without, like you said, Nolan have, have, have made an important sort of self life experiences with this kind of stuff, which most of them have not. And the white bashing in college classrooms. So when we asked about that the faculty were, I mean, maybe some were more passionate than others, but the faculty were pointing out things about American history that were white people and white men clearly have made grave errors over hundreds of years. And that was what they considered sort of they’re bashing me. Right. So, so yeah, I echo that that came out in, in my, in our study very strongly.

Keith Edwards:
So some anticipated consequences. And so how do we give them permission, right? How do we give them permission to to speak up? Rachel, what are you thinking?

Rachel Wagner:
Yeah, I see a lot of this across gender. And so I do think there’s a piece of that’s particular to whiteness around it. Cause in, I teach a social justice and inclusion course with masters and doctoral students. And the conversation will often degenerate into, at some point we’re in a dialogue and the mostly Black People of Color in the room are talking about real, as Nolan was saying, like visceral, empirical, distinct experiences of violence and harm. And the white students in the room are talking about, if I, if I say something that you code is racist that could potentially hurt me when I try to get a job in 15 years. Right? So the specter of how this might impact my reputation and how I’m perceived is set up as an equivalency, right? With violence, reduce life chances and actual death. And that I do think that there’s ways in which that’s attributable to, to racism, how I think the gender, one of the ways that gender into this and thinking about like notions of self policing this is where Foucault, I think is really helpful in terms of how modern society has kind of positioned to us too,

Rachel Wagner:
to attend to and police ourselves before even it gets into a space of a, of a interpersonal interaction or an interaction outside of the self. And that played out over and over in my dissertation, right? Like young men told me about making decisions from everything, from which you’re an old they took and whether or not it was the one right next to another guy to whether or not they carried an umbrella or owned one on campus too. Wearing flip flops and, and, you know, Massachusetts, when it’s 20 degrees outside to how fast they drank, how much they drank and how much, how quickly they were supposed to bounce back after drinking all night. Right. And, and how many of those decisions were influenced to some degree by what their friends might say or what might provoke their friends to call them a name, right.

Rachel Wagner:
Whether or not that had actually happened. And then they also told me stories of like pretty intensive gender policing that happened from the time that they were like four and seven, right? So the guy whose dad knocks on the back door and beckons him over to sit when he’s six years old running around the back yard saying “come here, that’s not how boys run. Boys don’t run that way.” He was flailing, he was running, he wasn’t thinking about his form, his stride, whatever. And his dad literally took time out to correct him to say that’s not how little boys run. And when I asked him, well, what, well how do you run? Is running gender? Like, tell me about that. Right? you know, your, your hands or your arms are supposed to be close to the body. And the, the goal is to get there first.

Rachel Wagner:
And so your form has to be tight and has to be controlled and running is not about an expression of bodily freedom or joy. It’s about winning. Right. And that, that was taught to him at six. And that someone’s watching, someone’s watching you to correct you for when you step outside of hegemonic masculinity. Right. So I think there’s ways we have to think about how each of these, like, you know, it’s all intersectional, but we can also like maybe zoom in and foreground or particular theoretical analysis that can help us to dissect a piece of it.

Keith Edwards:
Thank you for that. Rachel those are some stunning and glaring examples. And I also can tell you from my personal experience, can corroborate your research findings because I have heard or thought those things or been told those things explicitly and sometimes not not explicitly, but I still got some of those messages. So isn’t it amazing the self policing that goes on and that’s, and then that’s for me where the liberation gets at. And when I can notice where I’m self policing and like all of that, I get a little bit, a little bit free from that. And I’m a better person for the, for the folks in my world.

Keith Edwards:
This, this podcast is called Student Affairs Mow. So as we come to a close, I’d love to hear from each of you what you’re thinking now, I mean, you did this research, whether it’s dissertation or these research projects some time ago. But what are you thinking about this topic now what’s sort of on the edge of your learning or your curiosity, or maybe something that you’re just thinking about now, as we’re having this conversation, who’d like to jump in first on that one. What’s the cutting edge of your thinking about white men on campus today? Go ahead, Rachel.

Rachel Wagner:
I think that what I’m thinking about is how sex doesn’t determine gender and gender doesn’t determine desire, but there is so much within our particular cultural milieu that reinforce that that progression of binaristic determination, and any ways in which we can trouble it, subvert it find ways to turn it inside out and make possible more expressions and, and more possibilities for how people live and, and manifest in the world. That’s how we can, we can move towards liberation. Like I’ve been thinking a lot about how do you trouble ideologies and one of the ways that you do it is you, I think you have to understand them. You have to begin to describe them and name them and see the patterns, but also look for ways to subvert them.

Rachel Wagner:
And, and, you know, I was, I was ordering an ice cream cake for for an event. And I asked, you know, they’re asking me what, what I should what kind of cake I wanted and what kind of writing on it. And at one point, the young person behind the counter said what color icing do you want? And I was kind of stymied because the possibilities overwhelmed me for a moment and seeing my, like my hesitation said, well, is it for a boy or a girl? And I was like icing isn’t gendered, right? But there’s so many ways we could trouble that on a regular basis, especially for those of us who are walking through the world and, and noticing the incredible ways gender regimes are functioning. Right. And so I invite people to do that whenever and however possible.

Keith Edwards:
Thank you for that, that your expression of the many more possibilities of gender beyond the binary is beautiful. And it sounds great. And how do we move closer to that collectively, and then in our own lives and knowing what’s on the edge of your curiosity?

Nolan Cabrera:
That’s, that’s a tough one. So there’s a couple of different things that are going on right now. I think that you know, having talked with white guys on college campuses for so long, there seems to just be an upward trajectory of racial hostility. Like, you know, I mean, things were Black and white guys on campus, and that was even right before Obama got elected. And it seems that things are just continually amping up. So I’m very concerned about that, but I’m also thinking along the lines of a lot of our work around whiteness is exactly this interviewing white people about, you know, and and I’m trying to figure out cause so much in this goes back to Rachel’s point about there’s so much that’s ideological and organizational. And, you know, I really liked where Victor Ray took his thinking around racialized organizations.

Nolan Cabrera:
And so, you know, I’m trying to think about where is whiteness in within institutions of higher education from more of a structural organizational perspective, because the the white institutional presence was – the white institutional presence was incredible, but that was also back in 2010. And then I think, you know, so that’s worth an update, but then I also think that it’s going to be important to figure out ways to create institutional structures that actually norm the non-normal group in society. And for me, what’s the most exciting area for that right now is around this resurgence in ethnic studies. So being in Tucson, I got to be involved in the band in the banding, the controversy around Mexican American studies here. But then because of that involvement, I’ve been able to see this amazing resurgence and Renaissance of really critical ethnic studies in a K-12 environment and slowly but surely higher education is catching up to that.

Nolan Cabrera:
And that to me seems to be one way to institutionalize a nonwhite organizations within institutions of higher education. And so for me that’s what really gets me going. It also, it also fills me up because emotionally studying whiteness drains me in, you know, I, I was, I was watching the the movie Bamboozled the other day and the main character is like, I don’t want to see anything Black for at least a week. And there are times where I would be doing these interviews and like, I don’t want to see anything white for a week. Just stop. I can’t, I like, I emotionally can’t take it, but ironically, I wasn’t able to take those time outs when I started doing this work because of uninterrogated masculinities and not allowing myself to be hurt in that process. So for me, the emotional and spiritual and communal uplift comes from the validation of what is not normal knowledge outside of the academy knowledge, the community knowledge of communities of color, and figuring out ways to bridge that into higher education and really disrupt normative whiteness in the process.

Keith Edwards:
I just want to repeat that “my uninterrogated masculinities didn’t allow me to be hurt in the process.” That’s what we’re talking about, for sure. Jörg, what’s on the edge of your curiosity?

Jörg Vianden:
That’s hard to follow. And I don’t think I have any sort of coherent sort of thought about this, but what, what strikes me when Nolan talked about sort of institutionalizing these, these issues, what we have always talked about in this research team and what I’m trying to write about in this book as well, is that we are expecting social justice behaviors, prosocial behaviors, and advocacy from 18 to 30 to 40 year olds who we should expect it from our campus leaders that are making decisions about who are also white men. We’re making decisions about social justice initiatives, curricula COVID response. There’s a whole heck of a lot of oppression roped into the way that we think about this global pandemic, right. And, and who gets served and who doesn’t. And so on the one hand – well, it’s not exciting.

Jörg Vianden:
It’s sad to see that this kind of topic continues to be and continues to be in a growing way relevant. Because we have continued, we have still not figured out as, as white men how we actually institutionalized this stuff. And, and this content and this work. And when I look at folks at our own institution, it’s, it’s no different. And so how do we translate the expectations or the like the strategies as I call them? How do I, how do we translate the strategies of reaching and teaching and guiding and challenging straight white men in college to reaching and teaching and challenging and holding accountable white men who are presidents, deans, provosts, board members yeah. And so it’s not coherent, but I think that’s a major question that is unanswered.

Keith Edwards:
Well, we’re talking about institutions and institutional leadership and our own work. And thankfully there’s plenty of work to be done, plenty of progress to be made in our own work and in others. I’m grateful for all of you for your time today, as guests on Student Affairs Now. We’ll close out.

Keith Edwards:
You can receive reminders about this and other episodes by subscribing to student affairs now, newsletter or browse our archives tax Studentaffairsnow.com. Please subscribe to this podcast, invite others to subscribe, share on social or leave a five star review. It really helps conversations like this reach more folks, which clearly is needed and build a community so we can continue making this free for you. Thanks to my panelists for being awesome and thoughtful and sending me off in many different ways of thinking again. I’m Keith Edwards. Thanks again to the fabulous guests today and to everyone who is watching and listening, make it a great week.