By drawing on a theoretical framing based on the geography of encounters, this article examines how students give meaning to racialised encounters on campus. These encounters are mediated by long established notions of difference based on power inequalities where race remains a powerful source of difference. However, race is not simply enacted but produced as it weaves through student friendships, heterosexual partnering and through language. By focusing on the construction of race in student encounters on campus, the article uncovers the points at which students produce relations of inequalities, their contestations and the continuities in racialised power structures. The article concludes by pointing to the value in understanding the race-friendship-heterosexual-language tension, which might help work towards understanding and addressing inequalities based on locally relevant interventions on campus.