Exploring White Racial Identity Development within Christian Colleges

Authors

Glen Kinoshita, Biola University

Abstract

Racial identity development is a growth process in which many college students engage as they regularly interact with peers and instructors from diverse backgrounds. As compositional diversity, as well as diversity of thought, lags at Christian colleges, the purpose of this qualitative, narrative study was to understand how White students who have undergone significant progress in their racial identity development, describe their process while attending predominantly White, evangelical, Christian colleges. Three participants from three Christian colleges/universities were interviewed, a total of nine, White student participants. One college was located in the Pacific Northwest and two colleges were located in Southern California. The participant’s narratives revealed that there were factors that facilitated their growth process and factors that impeded their growth process regarding racial identity development. Each factor had external and internal dimensions. Four major categories were identified as the factors that facilitated and impeded racial identity development were combined with the external and internal dimensions. The content and figures in this article were developed from the re- searcher’s doctoral dissertation (Kinoshita, 2018).

Recommended Citation

Kinoshita, Glen (2022) "Exploring White Racial Identity Development within Christian Colleges," Growth: The Journal of the Association for Christians in Student Development: Vol. 21: No. 21, Article 3.
Available at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/acsd_growth/vol21/iss21/3