The Enlightenment Narrative: White Student Leaders’ Preoccupation With Racial Innocence Zak Foste The University of Kansas In a supposed colorblind, postracial society (Bonilla-Silva, 2013; Johnston-Guerrero, 2016), racism and White supremacy are located in only the most overtly bigoted White people. However, critical whiteness studies (Applebaum, 2010; Leonardo, 2009) challenge us to consider how all White people, regardless of intentions, contribute to the maintenance and production of Whiteness and White supremacy. Drawing on critical whiteness studies and guided by narrative inquiry, this article reports on the nature of students’ cocurricular involvement and how these experiences shaped and informed their engagement with racism and Whiteness. The results illuminate what I call the enlightenment narrative, or a particular discursive strategy concerned with presenting oneself as a racially conscious and progressive White student leader. The narrative underscores how these White student leaders were more concerned with a presentation of the self as racially good and innocent than any meaningful critique of racism and White supremacy. Further, by situating themselves as racially enlightened and aware, participants located themselves outside of the problem of White supremacy, instead understanding themselves as educators for other White students. The results from this study offer an important contribution to the literature on Whiteness in higher education, as White student leaders, by virtue of their positions on campus, have a dispropor- tionate influence on the institutional racial climate. Keywords: Whiteness, higher education, critical whiteness studies, student leadership, White college students On February 16, 2018, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story reporting on the increase in campus hate crimes on college and university campuses in 2016 (Bauman, 2018). The story followed a year of headlines documenting overt acts of racism on college campuses, including White supremacists marching openly in Charlottesville, Virginia, the hanging of nooses in public cam- pus spaces, and racist tirades captured on the popular social media application Snapchat. Although institutions of higher education have long been defined by legacies of White supremacy (Patton, 2016), these outward expressions of bigotry and hatred appear to be gaining increased visibility in the national discourse. Indeed, in recent years, two major professional associations within higher education, the Association for the Study of Higher Education and the American College Personnel Association, have both centered racial justice in the goals and mission of their respective organi- zations. Further, a recent special issue in this very journal exam- ined the rise in student activism in response to such racist institu- tional climates (Rhoads, 2016). At a time in which overt racial hostility and racism appear to be garnering increasing attention on campus, it is important that educators not lose sight of how all White students contribute to the perpetuation and protection of Whiteness and systemic racial priv- ilege. Although the hanging of a noose outside of a sorority house is undoubtedly a grave matter of concern, we must not restrict discussions of racism and White supremacy to such overt acts of hate. To locate racism in only the most explicitly racist, hateful individuals serves to camouflage the reality that all White people contribute to the perpetuation of Whiteness and White supremacy (Ahmed, 2006; Applebaum, 2010; Leonardo, 2009; Sullivan, 2014; Yancy, 2008). Further, such thinking reinforces a false sense of arrival among those students who believe themselves to be “good.” As Sullivan (2014) noted, false beliefs in any sort of arrival serve to demarcate “the ‘good’ White people whose good- ness is marked by their difference from the ‘bad’ White people who are considered responsible for any lingering racism in a progressive, liberal society” (p. 3). Consistent with Sullivan’s thinking, educators must not allow for the horrifying images of White supremacists marching openly in the streets of Charlottes- ville to distract us from the more insidious ways in which White- ness manifests in supposedly well-intentioned, good White people (Applebaum, 2010; Leonardo, 2004; Sullivan, 2014). As a number of critical whiteness scholars have documented, Whiteness offers both structural advantages and material privileges to White people (Applebaum, 2010; Leonardo, 2009; Levine-Rasky, 2013) while also serving as a racialized interpretive filter through which we view both ourselves and People of Color (Frankenberg, 1993). As such, locating racism in only supposedly bad, racist White students on campus does little to combat and disrupt systems of racial inequity, because all White people, regardless of intention, are implicated in its maintenance and reproduction (Applebaum, 2010). This article was published Online First March 14, 2019. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Zak Foste, Higher Education Administration, Educational Leadership & Policy Studies, The University of Kansas, 409 Joseph R. Pearson Hall, 1122 West Campus Road, Lawrence, KS 66044. E-mail: zfoste@ku.edu This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education © 2019 National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education 2020, Vol. 13, No. 1, 33– 43 1938-8926/20/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000113 33