A Whitened Rainbow: The In/visibility of Race and Racism in LGBTQ+ Higher Education Scholarship

Abstract

Scholars critique LGBTQ+ social movements for failing to understand how oppressive systems like racism inform the experiences of LGBTQ+ community members. To investigate whether LGBTQ+ literature in postsecondary education reproduces this same pattern, we used a critical summative content analysis approach to examine research published on LGBTQ+ people between 2009 and 2019. Guided by a conceptual framework mobilizing notions of colorblindness and queer of color perspectives, we found that the 97 articles in the sample largely minimized the role that racism, anti-Blackness, whiteness, and settler colonialism plays in shaping LGBTQ+ realities in higher education. Implications for future scholarship are offered.

Keywords

• LGBTQ
• racism
• anti-blackness
• Colorblindness
• queer of color