Facing Slavery as Saving Face: Racial Cynicism in Student Perceptions of Universities Studying Slavery

As institutional reckonings move from the margins to the mainstream, an increasing number of colleges and universities have sponsered efforts to examine their institutions’ involvement with enslavement. Despite this trend, little is known about how key constituencies, including students, receive these projects. We examine students’ responses to universities’ efforts to engage its history with enslavement and its effects. Qualitative, thematic analysis of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 111 undergraduate students at a private, selective, southern U.S. university reveals that students overwhelmingly understand university motivations for this work as reputation management. While students of color were overtly cynical, frequently associating a university’s reputation-management efforts with student recruitment and financial gain, White students balanced both cynicism and hope, differentiating between altruistic individuals and insincere institutions. We offer the concept of “racial cynicism” to theorize these responses, illuminating the interpretive processes sustaining the well-documented gap between diversity programming and racial justice.