University of Denver Winter 2023

BIGGER THAN THE 'BAD APPLES' : HOW DATA GETS TO THE ROOT OF INEQUALITY

By Heather Hein

That led to a second study, which dug into the question of who was telling and hearing the jokes, their racial and gender attributes and the impact the jokes had on them. “Kids in my residence hall are always joking about me being Asian, and the shape of my eyes or whatever,” one Asian American student told them. “I know it’s all in good fun, but it does affect me.” These types of interactions are always uneven, Byron says, because the victim is often fearful of speaking up and, as a result, just goes along with it. They don’t want to look like they’re too sensitive or complaining, and it could be socially damaging to say something.

Could a college dining hall full of undergraduates inter mingling and eating lunch together hold the key to racial understanding and equality? Reggie Byron thinks we have a lot to learn from that everyday setting, and his research aims to inform practices and initiatives that foster equity and inclusion on college campuses, in workplaces across the nation and in society at large. An associate professor of sociology and criminology, Byron came to the University of Denver from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, to direct the University’s new Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) program. He has spent nearly two decades conducting research and publishing on the topics of

As a result, the perpetrators—mostly male students—perceive the joking as not harmful. Byron and his colleagues call this “neutral ized hegemonic banter.” The students

employment discrimination, public accommodations discrimination, criminology, college campus cli mates and JEDI (justice, equity, diversity and inclusion). Across these spheres, his work exposes and examines the embedded racism and sexism in U.S. social institutions. But what do interactions in

neutralize the harmfulness of the joke and also get positive attention from peers for telling the joke. This reinforces what’s known as “hege monic masculinity,” or the idea that certain performances of masculinity are more rewarded than others, which makes them feel good about themselves. The research team also found that female college students who

a dining hall, of all things, have to teach us? In one of Byron’s racial climate studies, conducted at Southwestern, he and a colleague looked at microclimates across campus— classrooms, residence halls and the dining hall. The latter turned out to be the one environment that students considered to have a positive racial climate, specifically because it offered the opportunity for them to eat together—and authentically connect—across racial groups. That caught Byron by surprise. “You’d think it would be the classroom,” Byron says. “But students have really divergent experiences in the classroom— some are eye-opening and life-changing, and some are negative, filled with microaggressions and problematic.” As one student in the study explained to Byron, “In the classroom, we have to be politically correct. So, we can’t talk about race in a candid way, even though professors think we are. We’re worried about saying the wrong thing or being made fun of. But we do that in the lunchroom. We do that with our friends who are sitting with us; we can joke about things and learn about each other.” Joking, of course, can go too far, as Byron and his colleague discovered when students in the same study repeatedly reported the prevalence of racialized joking.

witnessed this type of joking reported feeling that they wanted to intervene but didn’t know how. Byron argues that, until we pay attention to

these nuances—how microaggressions reward some people and silence others—the harmful jokes and behavior will continue. From microaggressions to macro understanding It’s not hard to imagine the campus climate findings being a microcosm for how society at large grapples with issues of race and equality. “Today, many people have a ‘colorblind’ ideology, where they dismiss these things, say it’s not a problem, that it’s relegated to history, we shouldn’t be talking about this as an issue anymore,” Byron says. “Our work is to document these incidents to show they still exist. Because when we talk to people, that is their lived experience.” The big-picture goal, he says, is to get people to see beyond individual incidents of racism and inequality and, rather, see how these are embedded at the institutional and organizational levels. The neutralized banter noted earlier, for example, was most prevalent in male-controlled fra

28 | UNIVERSITY of DENVER MAGAZINE • WINTER 2023