When Push Comes to Shove: (Dis)junctures in Utility, Purpose, and Meaning in White College Students' Intra-Racial Conversations About Race

Abstract: Prior scholarship has documented the experiences of white students engaging in racial dialogues in curricular and co-curricular contexts, however less research considers their conversations about race within their white peer and family networks, specifically within the context of anti-racist practice. This constructivist grounded theory study examined what white students' experiences having intra-racial conversations about race mean within their anti-racist practice and what, if anything, these conversations do. Our analysis revealed participants' divergent understandings of anti-racist practice and the various meanings they ascribed to their intra-racial conversations within that practice. Most participants operated through a lens that evaded the role of socially constructed power and de-centered People of Color, which significantly influenced how they conceptualized their anti-racist practice, the nature and purpose of their conversations, and their experiences within these conversations. Findings from this study extend existing literature by suggesting white college students' systemic understandings about racism do not necessarily generate conversations that disrupt white supremacy. These findings prompt questions about how anti-racist praxis among white students can move forward when they (a) remove POC from how they even conceptualize the purpose of intra-racial conversations about race, and (b) idealize their conversations in ways that obscure these absences.