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Description
White education institutions embed hegemonic ideologies within websites, public space where the values, beliefs, and practices conveyed uphold White normalcy. Diversity, inclusion, and equity are among those espoused ideals, neatly situated within campus website diversity pages, public spaces where ideologies and rhetoric merge to form and shape identity. An essential part of identity holds an immutable ontological core unaffected by discourse. The remainder has pliability, able to shift and realign to accommodate different discursive perspectives within the various spaces frequented by an identity (auditor). Auditors who navigate White digital space may encounter disparate ideological perspectives and thus choose to reject, resist, or align with the values and beliefs embedded within diversity webpages. Auditors who align with those values, beliefs, and practices constitute an embodied community emboldened to act in White space. Auditors who reject or resist those perspectives struggle to find a sense of belonging and reconcile dueling ideologies, uncomfortable in White space. This thesis interrogates the language, images, and hyperlinks within three university diversity homepages using a critical, interdisciplinary lens to understand webpages as discursive texts that attempt to elide race within racialized institutional contexts. Together, notions of ideology, identity, digital White space, and rhetorical understandings converge to argue that colorblind language, white-centric images, and duplicitous benevolence cumulatively substantiate a circular logic that reifies whiteness by excluding race, the fundamental warrant for campus diversity and inclusion efforts. Such elision serves to exclude potential and matriculated middle-class African American, Black, Indigenous and students of color while normalizing whiteness within Hispanic Serving Institutions’ diversity webpages. Keywords: rhetoric, cultural studies, critical race theory, whiteness studies, digital media, antiracist education
