NEW DIRECTIONS FOR INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH, no. 151, Fall 2011 © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/ir.400 6 Using a Sequential Exploratory Mixed- Method Design to Examine Racial Hyperprivilege in Higher Education Nolan L. Cabrera After President Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address, MSNBC commen- tator Chris Matthews offered this reaction, “It’s interesting: [President Obama] is postracial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.” Immediately after the election of a person of color to the presidency, the idea of being “postracial” seeped into the national media, essentially claiming that racism was over. David Horowitz (2009) provided his own version of this sentiment, stating that for someone to argue that racism per- sists “is impossible to square with the fact that we have an African American president who was elected by mainly non-African American voters.” Despite this popular rhetoric, the United States is far from a “post- racial” society (Bonilla-Silva and Ray, 2009). Systemic racism continues to inequitably stratify society in favor of white people at the expense of people of color (Feagin, 2006; Omi and Winant, 1994), and this system of racial inequality is called white supremacy (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). Institu- tions of higher education within a white supremacist structure are not simply neutral arbiters; rather they serve as means of both reinforcing and sometimes challenging systemic racism (Cabrera, 2009). Racial ideologies are a central component of racial stratification (Bonilla-Silva, 2006); how- ever, both higher education and institutional researchers have spent little time examining how college affects students’ racial ideology development. In this chapter, I describe an intersectionality, sequential exploratory, mixed-methods inquiry into racial ideology formation of white male This chapter uses a mixed-method approach to critically examine white male college students’ racial ideologies and the experiences that influence racial ideology formation. It highlights both how racial privilege is recreated in higher education and how mixed- methods and intersectionality approaches to institutional research allow more robust analytical possibilities. 77