Exploring Emotions of White Community College Administrators Around Race

The higher education problem addressed in this study was racial inequity in student outcomes in California Community Colleges. The purpose of this narrative study was to explore the feelings White administrators had about race and describe the emotional management White administrators engaged in to uphold and/or transform racist structures. Hochschild’s (2012) Managed Heart theory of emotional labor, the epistemology of ignorance, and affect theory provided the conceptual framework for this study. The study’s philosophical assumptions of were grounded in a transformative framework. The study was set in California Community Colleges, and participants were White community college administrators. Data was collected through dialogic interviews, interactive journal entries between the researcher and participants, and the researcher’s journal. Data was analyzed through memoing and coding to elicit themes in participants’ stories. Socially unacceptable feelings about race and whiteness occurred more frequently than socially acceptable feelings in the data. Themes that addressed research questions about how White community college administrators felt about race, how administrators’ emotions were affected by feeling rules, and how administrators managed their emotions emerged in participants’ discussions of feelings. Additionally, three themes emerged related to how the emotional management of White community college administrators around race supported whiteness and how it resisted whiteness. The final chapter includes a discussion of the study’s findings as well as implications for the field of higher education and recommendations for higher education practice, policy, and future research.