What Do ‘White Guys’ Think About Race? This Professor Is Trying to Find Out

What does it mean to study racism on college campuses? Mostly talking with white students about race, says Nolan L. Cabrera, an associate professor in the University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education. One might think they wouldn’t have much to say, but do they ever. In one case, a young man was so intent to continue the conversation that he followed the professor into the bathroom.

After more than 100 interviews, Cabrera is at work on a book, White Guys on Campus, coming out this year from Rutgers University Press. He has found that while white male students often refrain from commenting on matters of race publicly, in a research environment they’re eager to express their opinions about affirmative action, racially themed jokes, and perceived racism against white people. Their views on race are impassioned, he says, even though they can go weeks at a time without thinking about race at all.

Cabrera, who is Chicano, says he is often called racist for his work. Just naming whites as the dominant social group, he says, can launch questions like, “Why are you being so racist?” and “Why do you hate white people so much?”

He spoke with The Chronicle about what it’s like to be a person of color researching race, how he interviews students, and what they say about race behind closed doors.

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What is the interview process like? Is it hard to have these discussions?

It’s actually really easy to have these conversations in a research environment. The students have a lot of opinions about race and racism, but they don’t feel they can share them publicly. You know, interviews that were supposed to last for an hour go on for two, three, almost four hours. What it speaks to is that students want to talk about race. They feel that they’re being censored, even if they can’t really put a finger on how.

There’s this idea that white people don’t necessarily spend a lot of time thinking about race. But your research seems to show that these young men do have views that are tightly held.

Well, there are actually two separate issues in the question you just posed. Yes, they absolutely have very deeply held beliefs about race. Do they think about it regularly? No, they actually don’t. I’d have guys say that they can go weeks without even thinking about issues of race. And it’s just like, How can you only think about this once a month? And they will be like, Because it’s not that big of a deal. Not “it’s not that big of a deal to me” — it’s always universally just not that a big of a deal.

So then, implicitly, if I am experiencing it as a big deal, there is something wrong with me.

Sometimes when people of color talk about whiteness, they receive a lot of hateful messages. Have you experienced that?

Oh, absolutely. It’s that concept of white fragility: Everything is hunky-dory until whiteness is challenged. The underlying irony is that people of color who actually experience oppressive racial circumstances are continually derided as playing the victim, being snowflakes, making a mountain out of a molehill, making excuses for their own failure, when in fact the deck is stacked against them.

White guys and this imagined racism against them is actually one of the core themes of the book. What’s really fascinating and frustrating is that these guys live in this imagined racial reality. When you start probing just a little bit, the foundation of all of their racial beliefs just completely falls apart. For example: “I don’t feel like I can speak on racial issues in class.”

“OK, that’s interesting. Why do you feel that way? Have you had an experience? Was there a tense situation?” And it’s always, “No, it’s just kind of a feeling I have.”

I say this probably a little flippantly, but it’s almost as if they feel like Reverend Sharpton is lurking in the bush right around the corner, waiting for them to say something politically incorrect. “Ah, gotcha!” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Why document this?

There’s a number of reasons, but at the core of it is that in terms of racial discrimination and racial oppression, there are two sides to the coin. You have the marginalizing experiences of students of color on campus, and then the question of how exactly that is being fostered. Because we believe the idea that racism is largely a thing of the past, and now it’s only a few fringe individuals. What seems like a more likely premise to me is that a lot of campus-based racism is derived from the unconscious habits that a lot of white students have developed and internalized, and they don’t even realize the harm that they’re causing to their peers.

There was the Yale graduate student who called the cops on her black peer — it’s one of those things where she is not consciously thinking, “Wow, I’m going to be racist right now.” She’s thinking there’s a threat. So then we have to ask, Well, structurally, why would someone see this black person as out of place in this environment? And then you have to ask, individually, why would you see this as unusual? Why would you see this as potentially harmful to the point that you would even call the police?

The point is that it’s not like the grad student is donning a Klan hood or running around with tiki torches at an alt-right rally. Her action is much more normal. It happens on a regular basis.

So the reason why I interview white guys is I really want to get to the bottom of this. The negative effects of racism on college students of color, how it occurs, and how they experience it are actually really extensively documented. What’s not well understood is why white students are engaging in this behavior. And so then the question becomes, How can ostensibly good people be engaging in this really oppressive behavior?

At the same time, that research can be validating for communities of color, because everyone around you may be saying, “Racism isn’t that big of a deal,” but you keep having these racially marginalizing experiences.

Someone could start to feel gaslit. But your work offers a “This is what white guys are saying.”

Absolutely. I mean the piece I’m working on right now, which is probably the most frustrating I’ve ever done, is white guys and the use of the N-word. More than 90 percent of the last sample of white guys I interviewed either hear or use the N-word on a regular basis. Two-thirds of them don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. And a third of them either hear or use the N-word with a hard “r.”

I was taken aback by this. They’re like, “We’re just hanging out at my frat house, and you know, Obama comes on the screen,” and they’ll be like, “Oh, man, that cocky N-word” (with a hard “r”). But there’s a structural component to it, where they never ever say it in front of black people. It’s among other white folk. And then they say, “Oh, yes, it’s totally fine, because we’re not really being racist.”

So what do you do?

For social progress to occur, it’s not absolutely necessary for every white guy on campus to change, to have a racial awakening. We offer them opportunities to participate in a larger anti-racist program. If they’re wholly resistant, that’s fine. We will make social progress with or without them.

I get into conversations all the time like, “You know, you didn’t convince me that this is really racist.” I say, “That’s fine, I don’t have to.”

I’m not going to sit here and get into a two-year-long debate about the nature of racism with someone who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about and doesn’t really want to learn. If you really, honestly want to have that conversation, I’m more than happy to.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.