Handling Whiteness with Kid Gloves: The Experiences of White Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Cocurricular Educators

This critical narrative inquiry study examined how whiteness functioned in cocurricular diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) education by exploring the experiences of white DEI educators who facilitate these learning opportunities in their campus communities. Although there has been a focus on white educators who facilitate conversations in the classroom about race, racism, and antiracism, research on the experiences and applications of white educators who lead these conversations outside the classroom has remained insufficient. There also have been a number of studies on higher education practitioners that have engaged whiteness, but these analyses typically have examined the relationship between students and student affairs practitioners. By focusing on the experiences of white DEI educators, this research study sought to address empirical gaps in the literature on whiteness, white educators, and DEI work(ers). Informed by the work of four critical race and whiteness theorists, I used a thinking with theory approach to unearth how technologies of whiteness operated through participants’ experiences. Fifteen white DEI educators located at historically and/or predominantly white institutions from across the country participated in the study. Data collection included three interviews with each participant conducted between October 2023 and February 2024 and two optional focus groups with participants conducted in May 2024. Findings highlighted how participants understood and described the function of DEI education as a corrective whiteness project focused on addressing learner harm and institutional image management. In response to the research questions guiding the study, participants’ narratives illuminated the role of racial anxieties in their work; the social rules around embodiment, emotion, and discourse informing their praxis; and the challenges of being answerable and accountable in ways that did not reify participants’ white exceptionalism. The study’s implications provided considerations for DEI educators to better attend to how whiteness informs and influences their praxis and the overall project of DEI education. Although these implications may be relevant to all practitioners and researchers engaged in the DEI enterprise, these implications have utility for white DEI educators and educational researchers who study whiteness and white people. The final assertion for the study invites those invested in the DEI enterprise to reconsider and reconceptualize their commitments to DEI in education by interrogating technologies of whiteness in their work.

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