By: Nolan L. Cabrera

Nolan L. Cabrera is a professor in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona. He is an award-winning author, a recipient of the prestigious education early career award and the National Academy of Education/Spencer postdoctoral fellowship, and an expert witness in Gonzalez v. Douglas—the case that overturned Arizona’s ban on Mexican American Studies. He is the author of White Guys on Campus (Rutgers University Press, 2019) and most recently, Whiteness in the Ivory Tower: Why Don’t We Notice the White Students Sitting Together in the Quad? (Teachers College Press, 2024).

It’s back to school time! That means a run on school supplies and laptop computers, and of course, a new onslaught in today’s culture wars. Over the last few weeks, colleges and universities have been offering freshman orientations, and whenever these include race-conscious options offered to incoming students, there is a predictable response. Opportunistic right-wing commentators seize on these moments to frame higher education institutions as promoting the “self-segregation” of racial minorities, or even claiming that this represents a modern day “Jim Crow.”

These accusations are as ridiculous as they are predictable, but they frequently influence public discourse which puts institutions of higher education on the defensive throughout the academic year. For example, these same opportunistic commentators have been known use the existence of race-conscious organizations such as the Black Student Union and M.E.Ch.A. (El Movimiento Estudiantíl Chicanos de Aztlán) as a pretense to ask, “Why isn’t there a ‘White Student Union’?”

Newsflash, there is a White Student Union. It is just called “The Student Union.”

“The point here is not the salience of race-conscious university programming, but rather, the invisibility afforded Whiteness on campuses.”

The same rhetorical games arise during every month dedicated to a specific racial/ethnic group. In response to Native American Heritage, Hispanic Heritage, or Black History Month, a similar, predictable, and ideologically driven question is posed: “Why don’t we have a White History Month?”

Again, that’s easy. White History Month traditionally goes by the names of January, March, April, etc.

The point here is not the salience of race-conscious university programming, but rather, the invisibility afforded Whiteness on campuses.

From this perspective, it is worth taking a look at the empirical scholarship to see which group(s) the evidence indicates is responsible for campus segregation. Dr. Julie Park conducted an extensive review, which I corroborated, and we both came to the following conclusions.

First, it is clear from across a range of studies that White students have the most racially homogenous friendship groups and the lowest levels of cross-racial interactions on college campuses. Second, this segregation is particularly acute in both housed Greek letter organizations (i.e., traditional, largely White fraternities and sororities) and religious-based organizations. It is estimated that 750,000 students across 800 campuses annually participate in Greek life alone.

“Racial segregation remains a persistent issue on campuses, and White people are the primary perpetrators of it.”

Segregation in Greek life comes as no surprise because these organizations are structured that way. That is, Greek letter organizations are some of the few on campus that have the ability to actually exclude people from participation. By contrast, most colleges and universities require as a matter of institutional policy that officially recognized groups be inclusive in their membership. That is, if a White student wanted to join a university-recognized Black Student Union, they would have to be allowed to participate.

Now, let’s turn to the issue of the other perpetrator of campus racial segregation: religious organizations. Initially, this issue did not make sense to me because of the aforementioned requirements to be an officially-recognized campus organization. Then I remembered James Baldwin when he said, “I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday.” The sage wisdom of Baldwin continues to provide clarity. While the review I conducted did not provide sufficient insights into the “why” of this phenomenon, it did clearly show it to be problem within religious organizations that has persisted for decades, if not more.

Racial segregation remains a persistent issue on campuses, and White people are the primary perpetrators of it. It is curious, however, how the political discourse is so divorced from the realities of the situation.

“Campus segregation, if named accurately, is a distinctly White issue.”

For me, Whiteness operates according to a relatively simple logic. Prior to the Civil Rights Movement, Whiteness was discursively framed as a symbol of inherent superiority—a marker of the assumed genetic superiority of White people. The Civil Rights Movement destabilized Whiteness, and it was rearticulated from being a mark of inherent superiority to being a mark of normality. Since the Civil Rights Movement, it is precisely this normality that has allowed Whiteness to be rendered socially invisible, which then leads to the massive disjuncture between (racial) perception and reality.

These are what sociologist Joe Feagin refers to as “sincere fictions” that serve to perpetuate White supremacy. That is, systemic racism is so engrained in society, that a core mechanism for its perpetuation is the denial that racism is even an issue in the first place.

Thus, the empirical reality of White segregation flies in the face of three decades of culture wars and political posturing. Since the 1990s, the same tired arguments have been lodged that higher education institutions are bastions of segregation, and it is important to note that these attacks on higher education institutions are not based upon sound social science. They are, instead, based upon a commentator seeing an example of race-conscious social programming, feeling uncomfortable about it, and then making an argument to fit their emotional state.

However, and to ironically quote conservative polemicist Ben Shapiro, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” The facts point to one clear issue: that campus segregation, if named accurately, is a distinctly White issue.

Thus, while I greatly respect Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s classic text Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, I strongly urge us to rework this framing of racial segregation in educational spheres. Instead, I think we need to continually ask, “Why don’t we notice all the White students sitting together in the quad?”