Unveiling Whiteness in Higher Education

Being a scholar of color in predominantly White institutions of higher education is a peculiar sensation. It comes with the realization that, while university settings represent one of the valued destinies for what W. E. B. Du Bois once called the “talented tenth,” ¹ they are a space where scholars of color struggle to reconcile two warring ideals in one body. In fact, historically White colleges and universities heighten the racial contradictions that scholars of color face when they insist on being both a person of color and a scholar. Like Du Bois’ own fond but critical recollections of his time at Harvard as the first Black person eventually to earn a doctorate from one of the most storied universities in the world, scholars of color today face a double consciousness no less intense. ² Although we face harsh conditions, from microaggressions ³ to intellectual guerilla warfares, ⁴ scholars of color in White institutions know that universities have much to offer in terms of dialogical spaces for deliberating the important themes of our time, as well as becoming agents within those public spheres as subaltern voices and alternative visions. In short, we necessarily color the university, forever altering it, and we are transformed by it in return. As peculiar bodies within the university, scholars of color exist in two worlds: the first within their lived knowledge of the racial world, and the second within the confines of a racialized epistemological standard in White institutions.