Applying White Dialectics: Exploring Whiteness and Racial Identity among White College Athletes

This article seeks to synthesize and apply White racial identity theory and concomitant research to the interaction between athletic and racial identity, specifically as it relates to the experiential variations of how race impacts White athletes within the college sport environment. White dialectics, or the tensions that White Americans experience as dominant social group members, serve as the guiding theoretical framework and provide a theoretical lens through which the experience of White college athletes is examined at each distinct dialectic. Through this article, the application of White dialectics offers a theoretical foundation for developing a better understanding of how White college athletes not only make sense of their racial identity, but also understand their racialized experiences within intercollegiate athletics.