Ali Michael:
I mean, it’s a life giving process for me, identifying as white naming my whiteness and naming racism is my problem too means that I get to be part of the solution. I get to be part of multiracial communities that are puzzling over this, that I get to be that it’s not something that exists outside of myself. It’s liberating to see myself as white, which means I’m part of this whole racial puzzle and there’s something that I need to do about it.

Raechele Pope:
Welcome to Student Affairs NOW, the online learning community for student affairs educators, I’m your host for Raechele Pope. The term anti-racism has become part of the everyday lexicon in the media organizations, schools, and higher education. Unfortunately, for many individuals and organizations, this is simply involved replacing the word diversity with the word anti-racism what’s really needed is for white individuals to more deeply understand their role and their responsibility in first evaluating their identity, privilege, and power, and then committing to creating anti-racist structures, cultures, and campus environments. Today we’re discussing anti-racism. What does that mean? And what does it mean for white people in particular? How does one become a white anti-racist? We’re joined by Dr. Ali Michael and Dr. Stephen Brookfield. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of student affairs.

Raechele Pope:
We hope you’ll find these conversations, make a difference and contribute to the field and are restorative to the profession. We release new episode every week on Wednesdays. Find us at studentaffairsnow.com on YouTube or anywhere that you listen to podcasts. Today’s episode is sponsored by Stylist. Visit stylistpub.com and use promo code SANow for 30% off and free shipping. The episode is also sponsored by Simplicity. Simplicity is the the global leader in student services, technology platforms with state of the art technology. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Raechele Pope, my pronouns are she her hers and I’m broadcasting from Williamsville New York near the campus of the University of Buffalo, where I serve as the senior Dean of faculty and student affairs and the unit diversity officer for the graduate school of education. I’m also a professor in the higher education and student affairs programs and UB, University of Buffalo, is seated, is situated on the unseated ancestral Homeland of the people. Ali and Stephen, thank you for joining me today for this episode of Student Affairs NOW and welcome to the podcast. I am so excited to have you here. Can you begin by telling our audience about you, your current role, how you related to campuses and a bit about your pathways to the work you to your work now and your journey to becoming anti-racist. Ali. How about if you start us off?

Ali Michael:
Thanks Raechele. Yeah, it’s, it’s so good to be here with you and with you, Stephen. I am the co-director of the Race Institute for K12 educators and my pronouns are she her, I live on the land of the Lenape people here right outside of Philadelphia. And the work that we do at the Race Institute is to try to make the research that exists on race in education, more accessible to K12 educators. We find that so much. We actually already know so many of the answers to questions. We’re asking about racial inequity in schools. But it’s often very inaccesible, it’s written up in academic journals that teachers can’t get to, even if they wanted to, even if they knew it was there because it’s behind block walls, you have to pay for it. But even once you get there, it’s often not directly connected to the daily work of educators in the classroom.

Ali Michael:
So the work I do is to try to make that that research accessible to educators, not just to put it in their hands, but to create workshops in which teachers are able to actually process the emotional impact of learning about race and racism in their classrooms, where they might not even think that it’s there and then overcome some of their own internal resistance to doing something about it. So that’s what I do and I do it. I do it in these workshops that we offer through the race Institute. I do it around the country and I work on multiracial teams to publish books that will, and articles that will enable that will support educators in the same thing.

Raechele Pope:
Great. Thanks Ali. Stephen, introduce yourself.

Stephen Brookfield:
Yes. Yeah, sure. Hi everyone. So I’m, I’m Stephen Brookfield and I hold a part-time position as distinguished scholar at Antioch University. I also do adjunct work at Teachers College where I spent 10 years as a professor back in the eighties and early nineties. And right now I’m in Tucson, Arizona escaping the Minnesota winter where, where I am most of the year. And I think there’s 22 different tribes in the Tucson, federally recognized tribal nations in the Tucson area alone. But the lands that I’m on are the Taodo Odom and the Yaki tribes, those two tribes, my pronouns, he, him his and and I think I, I got into this work by having the very fortunate experience of co-teaching for about 10 years in Chicago as part of a program I helped set up and I co-taught with two African American women.

Stephen Brookfield:
One was an Afrocentric theorist and the other was a critical race theorist the late Elizabeth Peterson. And that was just an invaluable experience for me. It was a real gift. It definitely heightened my awareness of what my own white racial identity meant. And it played out in the three of us talking about the racial dynamics that we experienced as a team, as we made decisions and the ways in which deferrals to white supremacy still were in the room, even though my colleagues considered themselves. And I certainly considered them as way more knowledgeable and evolved in this area than I was. And so that, that really got me into this. And then, so since I’d say the kind of mid nineties, it’s been a, a real preoccupation of mine, but I, I tried not to, to write or speak about it for about 10 or 15 years.

Stephen Brookfield:
I felt I needed to learn before doing anything. And, and I as Ali says, you know, the, the accessibility of this material is so important. So most of my work is out in the field working with colleges and universities, but also corporations. I got something with the military later this week you know, all different kinds of organizations, predominantly white ones, trying to figure out how do you get people to understand what it means to be in a predominantly white organization, the white supremacy that lies behind that as the idea and the practices that it enables and, and and just what it means to have a white identity. So working through that practical dynamic is a something that I find honestly, fascinating and, and frustrating at the same time.

Raechele Pope:
Sure. Well, you know, it’s so funny to me to have you both introduce yourselves, first of all, because both of your names are so well known in in higher education settings and K12 settings and in the world, you know, your books and how you’ve really influenced so many me included. So I appreciate you doing that, and then just getting those glimpses of you and how you get to where you are, which sort of leads me into this next question. Stephen, when I read your book you talked about you speak so much about the importance of stories and of our learning and sharing these stories and Ali, having heard you speak and looking at your materials as well, stories about this journey of how you came to where you are in looking at being white, talking about this white identity and talking about being anti-racist. And I was wondering if you could share with our listeners your own story about learning and unlearning racism why and why it’s important for white people, especially to understand this journey as they strive to be anti-racist. I’m going to ask you to start off again, Ali.

Ali Michael:
So I think this is a great question. You know, I talk and write a lot about whiteness today and about race and about racism. I’m a co-editor of this book, the guide for white women who teach black boys. And I always think like the things I say, like the words I just said in that as sentence are words, I could not have said when my first year in college going into college I came from an almost all white community. It was 99.8% white when I lived there and we never talked about race and it wasn’t until I got to college. And I was asked to be in a class I wasn’t asked to be in it. I mean, it was required. This is a required course, but it was, it was a class where we had to talk about race and racism.

Ali Michael:
We had to talk about whiteness, white people. I remember somebody saying white savior mentality and thinking, I think they might be talking about me, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure what they’re talking about, but I think it might be about me and was in that class that I realized how bad I am at talking about race. And I, I remember going home to talk about it with my parents and having them say, we don’t, we don’t talk about, we are color blind, that we’re not supposed to talk about this nice people don’t talk about race. And so it wasn’t until I was forced to do it. And, and then I was reflecting on it in the, with the people who socialized me that I realized I was actually socialized not to talk about race. And when somebody asked me that year in that class, what, what is your racial story?

Ali Michael:
I remember just bumbling and fumbling over my answer, because in my mind I was thinking, what would it be like white people don’t have racial stories. Do we like what we didn’t use the N-word. So is there any other racial story a white person could have? And what I’ve realized since then is like the fact that we didn’t talk about race is part of my racial story. As a white, I was socialized to be color blind, to see talking about race, as rude as that something racist do. I was socialized to believe racism was something that existed that bothers and bugs and, and hurts people of color, but that has, as long as I’m not doing it has nothing to do with me. I was raised to believe and not by my parents, by my whole society that I lived in an integrated community, because there were a couple people of color in my community and we all lived together.

Ali Michael:
So segregation itself was a stereotype. I had that, you know, that it would look like the Jim Crow south. It would look like signs that set over water fountains. The fact that we were almost a hundred percent white living, 10 miles away from a community that was almost a hundred percent black, was not enough to help me see that we actually were segregated because it didn’t look like what my image of a segregated community looks like. And so it was in the course of that first year where I started to I, it, you know, I was just on the edge of seeing these things. What I was, what I was in touch with as a freshman was my extreme discomfort in conversations about race, the lack of knowledge that I had, the fact that I heard peers of color talking about experiences of racism they had had in their lifetimes that I thought were like, I considered like historical relics.

Ali Michael:
I could, I didn’t imagine that people, my age were having these experiences. And it wasn’t until I think 10 years later that I could have that I could start to summarize these things like I just have in terms of being racial messages, because at the time, again, I just thought a racial message is when someone teaches you to hate right. Based on race. And I couldn’t see all the other aspects of the racial messaging that I got. And so that was kind of the beginning of my path was this was this course requirement. And the, you know, during that class, I started to kind of come outta my shell a little bit and try to say things. And I found that the more I talked, the more, I became more comfortable with the conversation and I’d start to, I’d say stuff, and it wasn’t always re right.

Ali Michael:
And it wasn’t always pretty, but the more I talked, the more comfortable I got with making mistakes with having this conversation with saying words like white and black, that I had literally been taught not to say. So it was almost, you know, it was like I was going to class every day and breaking these rules that I had internalized about how to be a good in person. And realizing that actually what happened when I broke those rules was I, I found greater freedom, greater facility. I was able to hear more of the truth from the people around me. And and it enabled me to touch this piece of our society. That in, in some ways had been helped held at a distance because of color blindness, like racism is my problem. As a white person, people of color can’t stop racism without white people.

Ali Michael:
This is something James Baldwin tells us, like, racism’s actually a white person problem. Just like women can’t stop sexism without men. It’s not their problem. You know, cisgender folks are needed to fight transphobia. It trans people can’t, can’t fight transphobia by themselves. It’s not their problem. So seeing like racism is a white person problem. And then and then my lifelong inquiry inquiry over the last 25 years, since that time has been all right, so this is my problem. So what do I do about it? How do I do, how do I stay in my lane? Because as a white person, there’s a lot, I don’t know about racism and can’t, and can’t know because I don’t experience it the way people of color do. And yet there’s, there are a lot of ways that I’m in rooms with all white people or I I’m in spaces where I have to do something about it and where people are gonna listen to me differently. And so that’s my ongoing inquiry. How is racism? My problem? What can I do about it?

Raechele Pope:
Wow. How is racism my problem, and what can I do about it? Two important questions for, for folks I, and we can delve into so much that you sit there, but I wanna, I wanna give Stephen first a chance to talk about his journey and what led him here. And then there’s so much to talk about now.

Stephen Brookfield:
Yeah. I mean, I would say, first of all, that, that what Ali just did in terms of using narrative, it’s so crucial in workshops, just make that meta comment or in conversations or in meetings around race. Because if, if there is any sense that as a white person, you are coming in with what you assume to be expertise, racial cognizance, and you are going to enlight and bring others to your own point of evolution. If you give any sense of that, I think you’re dead in the water and people will justifiably feel resentful. And who the hell do you, do you think you are? So it’s it. And I’ve seen, I’ve been in workshops as a participant where people have come in and have skipped the, kind of all to biographical modeling that Ali was just doing. And it’s an absolute disaster.

Stephen Brookfield:
You, you cannot not begin with story, you know, which of course is a basic tennent of critical race theory. But I it’s, it’s just, I think also as an adult educator, good adult educational practices, and as someone who studies leadership, it’s a good leaderly behavior beginning with, with your own narrative experience and you know, so much of what you say, Ali applies to me. I think the biggest change from me has has been moving from of an intellectual understanding of this, to an emotional comprehension of the rawness of the work and that you can’t do this. You can’t initiate this conversation without the emotional tone, just becoming much, much more uncertain, contentious, uncomfortable for many. And I think for many of us when, when that emotional tone lurches over into anger, expressions of righteous, anger people crying the level of voices going up, many of us who are white, at least, well, I was speak for myself.

Stephen Brookfield:
I used to think, man, I’ve really lost the plot here. Let’s take a break reconvene until things have calmed down. It’s also a very patriarcal thing. Okay. Let’s, let’s let things calm down. And then when you are calm, we can talk about this.

Stephen Brookfield:
You know, you can’t put up with you know, I get impatient with stuff. This is what I want to do, but it’s hard to learn the kind of radical patience that you need sometimes in some settings to say, people are not at the place you want ’em to be. You can’t wish them to be at that place. Right. Have to find a way of bringing them there. And I think the narrative modeling that Ali did and, and that you’ve encouraged issue is, is, is something that does get people there. And, and that starts them off. And now I mean, part of me still shrinks from an open display of emotions because that’s partly Englishness where I was born and grew up.

Stephen Brookfield:
It’s part it’s very much patriarchy. You know, you we, we should not let women have access to the reigns of power because they’re likely to make emotional decisions. Right. And then presenting men as emotion less, which is so, so crazy when you think about it. Right. So anyway, I’m rambling now, but one of the things I have, maybe we’ll get into intersectionality a little bit more later. I, I’m always trying to, to make connections between something like white supremacy and patriarchy as dominant ideologies. Cause I’ve grown up in a critical theory framework and I’m more used to thinking systemically it doesn’t freak me out as much as it does some others it’s still difficult. But I have to understand that I’m one of a very small minority who thinks that way. So when I go out into rural Minnesota, I have to understand everybody is in a deeply individualistic paradigm.

Stephen Brookfield:
And it’s very strange for me to come in to them. It’s strange for them, for me to come in and say, well, we’re going to talk about what it means to be white. And even if I start with my own whiteness, my own story, and then have some digital testimony on it it still goes a lot slower than I would like and learning to acknowledge and live with that and not let it demoralize and frustrate me to the point of thinking. I’m done that. That’s I think part of the learning that goes with this work is, is, is learning to accept that, you know, truth and, and awareness, they have their own rhythms and you cannot like, you can’t force someone to trust you, right. That needs time for that thing to just stay. And, and I think being trustful of the person who’s doing the work is an enormous enormously important dynamic to, to consider what does it mean for me to be trusted? Is that the same as me being liked, which I don’t think it is. What does it mean to be authentic? When does use of narrative become performative and a display of how woke I am? So even doing something like I’m talk doing now has its own dangers. Cause it presents me as a fully evolved racially cognizant person. And I’m not, I’m just struggling with like most people with my own learned white supremacy. That’s the only thing I have experience of is struggle. That’s about all I could say.

Raechele Pope:
That’s, it’s, it’s really interesting. Some of the points that you got at, and I think that this speaks this will also speak directly to our audience that and it is one of the the frustrations that folks of color, you know, and BiPOC folks experience is that it becomes this intellectual exercise for so many and they don’t step out of that. You know that it’s not right. You’ve read the books, you’ve got this, but, but there is a real component to this. And until you’re willing to get inside and look at yourself and tell your story and recognize that you’ve worked, if you have to be to move from here to there, and that there is still more to the journey, that whole cultural humility part that I heard in both of your conversations. Now, one thing I wanna get back to is a little different and it, and I I’ve heard you both speak about this in different ways.

Raechele Pope:
Right now we are seeing legislation. We are seeing policies and we’re hearing lots of people bloviate about discomfort, you know, like these, we don’t wanna talk about these things in class because it’s making white people uncomfortable. And so therefore are, we shouldn’t be talking about these things. We shouldn’t talk about critical race here. We shouldn’t talk about racism because it makes white people uncomfortable. And yet Ali, your story was so powerful about your discomfort in that class as a first year student on college and, and, you know, and in a class. And it was because of working through that discomfort and trying and talking about race when you’ve been taught, not to talk about race that made all the difference in terms of you now saying this is an important topic. And so if there hadn’t been that discomfort, everything we know about how people learn, if there is not this discomfort, there’s no reason to change. So I was, you know, that was so powerful to me to hear in two different ways from both of you about this one, it is gonna be uncomfortable how we can mitigate some of the discomfort, but how it’s necessary to get to the next stages. Thoughts on that.

Ali Michael:
Yeah. Yeah. It was, well, it’s funny listening to both of you because I love Stephen’s ideas about you know, the, of moving from thinking about this in our, in our heads and to feeling about it in our hearts. And I, and, and so then listening to your question Raechele, I thought, wow, it’s, it’s almost, we’re saying we should not feel, it’s almost like people are saying don’t let the students feel. And, and because I really think that’s the work of anti-racism is to get in touch with the reality, the truth, and to be an empathetic connection with people of color and native people, for me as a white person to, to be able to like instill the noise in my brain about what’s right, what’s wrong, all the rest. And here, what is, what is it like to be a person of color, a native person in this country?

Ali Michael:
And what has it meant historically? And my colleague, Dr. Elliot Nora Bartely, always she and I are, co-writing a book right now. And she keeps saying the, the, the one thing we need is that empathetic connection, because all action can come from the gut. Once the gut is informed by truth, but we don’t get there because we block the empathetic connection with fight flight or freeze, and what’s happening nationally right now is fight. We don’t wanna feel, we don’t wanna know because that stuff, because then we have to do something. If I know, if I am an empathetic connection with people of color and native people, their struggle is my struggle and I have to do something. It doesn’t mean I have to like give up everything I have. It doesn’t mean I have to, you know, like, I think we, people fear that doing something means that they can’t continue to live their lives, but doing something just means saying, looking at the situation, like looking at our country, truthfully and, and then kind of saying, where do we go from here together?

Ali Michael:
And the discomfort, like you said, I mean, the thing about discomfort, I grew up actually in a house with a lot of emotion where we weren’t afraid of conflict, where we had healthy conflict and where we you know, where I feel, I feel very able to stay in deep, emotional relationship with people. But I was cut off from the, from emotional connections with people of color and native people because they weren’t in my life. And so what we, what we had in our community was just stereotypes of different groups. Native people were invisible, completely. They were care, archers cartoons. They didn’t exist as real people. They died long ago. That was the narrative. And then like black people, I didn’t know, black people. And so what I had was like scary black communities in Pittsburgh that we don’t go to.

Ali Michael:
That was my, that was my stereotype, my impression, I didn’t know, real people in those communities. So I didn’t know people were like going to school, going to work, you know, being crossing guards, you know, sitting on the stoop, talking to neighbors. All I had was like the, the stereotypes I got from the media. And so I have, I, it, I wasn’t even able to begin to form empathetic connection because I didn’t know people. And then when I did meet people, I had these lenses, these lenses informed by stereotypes that made it very hard to see people clearly. So that’s been, my work is like unlearning all of, all of those layers of stereotype that I still have. And that’s when, you know, when Stephen says I’m still unlearning white supremacy, that’s what I really hear. And, and I think, you know, there a number of people Reverend angel, Kyoto Williams and Rezma Manka, Dr.

Ali Michael:
Rezma Manka talk about the ways in which we white people in the us were cut off early from being able to really kind connect to, and feel empathy with, or resonate with black pain. Because there was a critical thing in order for enslavement to be possible in the US, as you know, or for the genocide of native people to be possible. We couldn’t native people on black was human beings, because if we did then, then their pain would resonate with us in a way that would make it impossible for us to witness what was happening. And so I have inherited this numbness to black pain and native pain and really a, a vacuum when it comes to their history to those histories and, and realities. And so part of my work as anti-racism sorry, Raechele, you know, when, when we say like, what is an anti-racism practice, part of it is being able to, to, to understand, to hear the, is from people from those groups. And and then to be able to resonate empathetically with those stories. I mean, and, and that can take a lifetime to, to cultivate that. And not in a way that’s like, I’m just gonna keep going and there’s no reward. I think every step you take there’s reward in connectivity, in community and in seeing this whole reality that you might not I have been able to see before that I certainly hadn’t been able to see before. But I’m also aware every step I take, how much further I have to go.

Raechele Pope:
Yeah. Well, I think that that’s really powerful to talk about that, and that’s something you both talked about, making sure that you can hear the stories, not being afraid of the emotion to get to the emotion that’s important, but I don’t want people to think, I don’t want white people to think that that’s the place that it ends, right? That’s the, that’s the beginning, right? That’s when we strip it away, we get to the beginning, I can hear someone’s pain. And I also wanna talk about the experiences of joy, you know, really reminds us that the total experience of black people is not paying the total experience of native folks are let’s an ex folks is not paying that there is joy that there is conquest, that there is all of these amazing things, but that that’s not where it stops.

Raechele Pope:
It starts there, but then it’s really moving to how do we change structures? You know, like one of the things that I think about is that many white educators have supported this whole idea of anti racism, but do little to challenge the structures and the ideologies of racism or any of the other areas of oppression you know, years ago, the Angela Davis said that it wasn’t enough to be, to not be racist, right. That you had to be anti-racist. And then we more recently have re-popularize that idea. And that statement. And so what I’m trying to figure out is how do we help white people understand, get to it, get to the emotional reaction, but not leave that as a place to be, and not just keep looking for BiPOC folks to share their pain, but instead to say, here’s my own pain now how do I move to this?

Raechele Pope:
I have to move from this recognition, this intellectual recognition from my own understanding of the emotional reaction to all of this, to changing systems and structures. And I’m wondering where you think, how do we help people move from this intellectual understanding and then getting to emotional connection, two changing systems and structures in a, in as a white anti-racist. I’m wondering Stephen, if Stephen, if you can start there first.

Stephen Brookfield:
Yeah. I mean as Ali, and you were having that exchange, one of the things I was thinking is how on campus, we are so soaked in U Eurocentric epistemology, right. And we don’t name that very much, but it it’s you know, years ago in teaching to transgres bell hooks talked about quorum as the norm in, in meetings and advisement and classrooms, and so on. And the privileging solo scholarship, the privileging of text, the denial of all of personal narrative. Well, you know, we are just soaked in a system, which makes it very hard to get to this point of acknowledging emotion, right. And actually, and acknowleding emotion is derived as touchy-feely right. Or, you know, that’s not really academic or rigorous, it’s non rigorous. So, so we’re fighting a whole epistemology, this part of white supremacy here.

Stephen Brookfield:
So you know, it, it’s tough to, to get to think through, all right, how do we get to taking action? But I think one thing that we do is listen to BiPOC communities. What is it that people say those who in our heads we’re, we are trying in some way to be an ally or support to, which is very problematic in itself, maybe will get to talking about that, but just listening to those voices on campus, how do they experience the campus and centering that, but without making them go through testifying to all the traumatic stuff, that’s happened to them again and again and again, which is why I think digital narratives are for me a very important sort here instead of requiring my colleagues to testify yet again, to the things that they’ve experienced here.

Stephen Brookfield:
But I do think that’s where you start. But then you have to think of white only spaces for this to happen, because in my experience my, my students and my colleagues of color get so sick of hearing whites come to wokeness in front of them. And, and so if a and I kind of talk about our journeys and that takes up the space, right? Our colleagues of color are thinking, well, what the, what the hell is going on here? You know, it took you this long to, to realize this. So, so I’m always thinking about, all right, number one, let’s work on white spaces. Let’s name white supremacy is the problem, not diversity. Let’s reframe DEI, as you were saying earlier, as racism and white supremacy, that’s what we’re getting to. So we have the testimony of the folks on campus.

Stephen Brookfield:
We have trying to name what we you know, what we’re trying to do in terms of racism and white supremacy, and most institutions will say, we want to be anti-racist well, then you have to use that language and that mission and reframe it as, well, that means we have to look at racism, not at an inclusion, but we have to look at racism, which is a system of exclusion. So you do all that. And then I think you start drilling down, particularly into the reward systems that are happening on campus. So what is it that we’re rewarded for, if we are truly anti-racist, what does a good student affairs professional, what does it look like to be a good professional working in an anti-racist mode? Does it mean you’ve read Kennedy? Well, no, it, I mean, that’s good. Wouldn’t want to say don’t do that, but that’s not really what it’s about.

Stephen Brookfield:
It’s trying to affect some change in the way that meetings are run within your unit. Do you institute an equity clause every time a major decision is made programmatically, do you, do you say, all right, let’s, let’s think about, who’s not in the room here. Do you get the president and the board of trustees to come out from their positions of senior leadership, particularly the governors or trustees who are always behind the scenes. We need them out publicly in front modeling a conversation on, instead of having a convocation or state of the university address, let’s have the trustees engage in a conversation about what it means to be white in my own life, how I’ve negotiated my whiteness and how I feel it has framed the way I take decisions and so on need to build networks with people across your own institution.

Stephen Brookfield:
Cause if you just do this work alone, you, you will be picked off and quietly removed gaslit. So you, you need, you need networks. You need to notice who is talking about this stuff at faculty meetings at receptions, who is, seems to be gravitating towards certain kind of exhibits and so on. And then you need to build alliances, particularly outside the institution. And I’ve found that if alumni of color, raise a question about how they experience the institution, that is incredibly powerful. So I’m always looking all right, what is the external support we can get here? So change. So it’s that kind of daily, weekly examining very specifically the structures that are in the institution, getting a lot of modeling from the top to set the tone. And the modeling from the top is not modeling, which says, look how racially evolved

Stephen Brookfield:
we are it’s modeling that says, look how difficult it is for us to do it, but we’re willing to come out here publicly still, and talk about that struggle. So, you know, those, those are some of the, for me, some of the starting points that just just occur in response to that question, moving to action, because totally that’s anti-racism is the taking of collective action. I mean the, the, the individual stuff is important and you need to feel that emotional shift to get to the point as Ali says of spurring you into action, but it can only really happen collectively by definition. I think of anti-racism as collective. And so that’s always where my head is, how do we get collective pressure to try and change the structures and policies and, and what gets rewarded around the institution and, and how it’s constantly modeled and using the mission language to hold people accountable. So they can’t dodge it. Right.

Raechele Pope:
Right, right.

Stephen Brookfield:
It’s hard to dodge when your own words are quoted back. I, you,

Raechele Pope:
That is very true. Very true. Ali would you add anything to that?

Ali Michael:
Well, I love, I love the image of collective anti-racism. I, I absolutely agree with that. And I think that, you know, to take it back to something that we were talking about earlier, in terms of how can white people help other white people engage in anti-racist practice. And Stephen was saying, if you come in and you just try to start lecturing and say, you know, you know what, you know, you’re dead in the water. And when you start from a place of telling your story of racial humility, of what you, of what, you know, bringing what you know, and also ringing what you don’t know you have a much better chance of helping people come along. And one of the things I think in terms of anti-racism is that for a long time, I had the misperception that what it meant was if I’m anti-racist and this guy’s racist, then my job is to take out this guy.

Ali Michael:
And, and to just underscore what Stephen’s saying about collective anti-racism the way I think about it now is more like if I’m anti-racist and this guy says something racist, my job is to approach this guy in a way that’s gonna support them to take the next step on their anti-racist journey. And I picture this path. It’s like, we’re, it’s like, I, my job is to get as many white people to climb onto an anti-racist path and walk it for their lives. Like Stephen’s saying it’s about week in, week out changing the structures. And, and one of the things that happens with institutions is we take some anti-racist action and we start to, we should be done now, like we did this, why are we still having to do this? And the more you take anti-racist action, the more you get an institution that becomes closer to realizing all the deeply embedded ways that white supremacy exists there.

Ali Michael:
And then you have to, so then you, you see more that has to happen. And in some ways the task becomes bigger. The more action you take and that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re doing it right. But it’s the reason why we have to be engaged in this as an ongoing practice. And so, you know, this white guy over here, white, I mean I don’t mean to gender it like this white, this little guy, this little white person, if, you know, if I shame them or I you know, marginalize them or I approach them in a way to say I’m anti-racist. And so therefore you’re the wrong one. Then suddenly what I, if I do that to enough people, then we have an institution where I’m the, I’m the anti-racist white person. I’m the best one.

Ali Michael:
I’m the good one. And I’m all alone. Right. And we do that to each other so much as white anti people trying to be anti-racist partly because we’re still internalizing this notion that that competition is the arbiter of who, of what’s good rather than collective interdependence. And yeah. And so I, I, you know, I, what I think is that we need not just like one great anti-racist white person per institution, we need millions of white people to walk an anti-racist path for their entire lives and to teach their children to do it because it’s gonna take eight generations to really root racism out of our systems as that’s according to Dr. Menekin. So, so, you know, my, the way I wanna approach other white people is also recognizing that if this person says something racist and I can call them out or whatever, or I can approach them, whatever it is, whatever happens. I know what they said is racist. They don’t know it yet. We are both still very close to each other on a racial hierarchy in this system, that benefits white people, a racial hierarchy that puts white people at the top and black people and native people at the bottom. And so every action I take, like anti-racism means chipping away at this racial hierarchy. And I can do that in my systems. You know, it’s funny. I mean, like, it’s feels like it’s hard to change the system, but we’re all we all comprise the system. We all have a sphere of influence.

Raechele Pope:
We are the system,

Ali Michael:
Which we can change the system. But if I’m not changing the system, then this person next to me, like we are both still benefiting from white supremacy. So it doesn’t make sense for me to shame that person as if I’m not still benefiting, it might make me feel better temporarily, but in the long run, it’s, you know, the changing the system is gonna mean that person and also working in their sphere of influence to change what they can change. And that’s why it’s not, it’s not gonna benefit anybody for me to be in competition with that person or to be shaming that person, but rather figuring out with that person, like, what is it you need to know to take your next steps so that you can continue to walk an anti-racist path,

Raechele Pope:
Right? There are so many places there. And what we do is, you know, it’s, it’s really dismantling of a lot of different systems, right? It’s dismantling this need for competition. When cooperation might get us further, I was when you talked about this one person and what our role is, you know, like it’s really interesting coming from background of educators, you know, we are these educators. And so it’s all about how do we then share our knowledge so that we can then come to a more collective understanding of the issue and moving forward. But I was struck by a conversation I had. I’ll bring her up again. And we were talking about that. If we looked on a spectrum that there are probably few truly anti-racist people, you know, they’ve done all the work and they’ve been there, they still know they’re growing.

Raechele Pope:
And let’s say, I’m just gonna give that a number. She didn’t give it quite a number, but let’s say that’s 20%. And then we have at this other end, the 20% who are really proud to be racist, you know, like you know, like, and you’re not gonna change me and you’re not going to do this, but then there’s this. I guess I left myself what, 60% in the middle. And she says, we spend too much time focusing on that 20%, the 20% that we are not going to change, but this whole continuum now of this other 80%, this is who the person is that you’re talking about bringing along. This is who you’re talking about saying, and seeing them as you saw yourselves, when you first came to this understanding and saying, I needed help to get here, I needed really important people, challenging me, you know?

Raechele Pope:
So that’s, that’s one of those images that comes to when we talk about how we then moved. And then who knows when you’re outnumbered 80 to 20, at some point, there’s gonna be a few in that 20 who aren’t at the, all the way to the extreme. And so we can just keep pulling people in. The thing that you said Stephen, that really stuck with me too, is you started naming the structures because I listen to a lot of white people who say, I, you know, I wanna change the system, but they can’t name the system for me. And so it is in who we hire, who we retain, it is in the curriculum and the pedagogy, how we do this. And those are the pieces it’s in, who we reward. And you, and you talked about that who gets tenure, who determines what is rigor, right.

Raechele Pope:
You know, like this, this research that we do that goes into a journal that five of us read, you know, and three of those five are your friends, right? And then there’s all these other folks that don’t, but there are people who are out there doing work in communities who are out there doing work, that some of these most rigorous journals won’t publish around this stuff. And so we have to change how we reward. In terms of tenure, we have to change the environment. What does the the campus climate and culture looks like? So if we can help people name what those structures are that we’re trying to change. So we start with, we get here, we get out of our heads and head work is important. You know, we are we’re PhDs here, right. All doctorates here.

Raechele Pope:
So we know that head work is important, but then there’s the, the internal work that we have to do to understand. And then we start talking about changing systems and structures, but we have to name those systems and structures to be able to then alter them, change them, radically, dismantle them, come up, and then we have to be able to come up with something new. What will it look like when we’ve reached it? And, you know, at the, at the individual left level, it’s that question about what does success look like? What does success look like as we talk to people in these conversations, in these trainings that we do, what does success look like when we’ve changed tenure? So I’m going on, but I’m saying that there’s a whole lot there, and I wonder what you folks think about those, those pieces and where we head and can we name them and do we have examples or you know, our collective dreaming, you know, we need dreams to get us where, you know, to know where we wanna be.

Stephen Brookfield:
I mean, one, one of the things that as, as I think very specifically about hiring policies, if we’re really trying to get an anti-racist or let’s just even call it a diverse campus, we need to have cluster hires of people of color. So it’s not one black or brown or indigenous face or Asian face in there that we then plaster all over our brochures and on our webpages and feature in the alumni magazine and,

Raechele Pope:
And make, be on every committee that is on campus.

Stephen Brookfield:
So you, you need that, those that’s cluster to hires mean that stuff, that’s a fundamental change in hiring policy to be thinking, all right, if we really take this seriously, we don’t just dot individuals around our departments. We have to think of cluster hires here. Or if we’re thinking about running a, creating a diversity center on campus to spearhead this work and be a source of resources it is, I’d say 99% of the time, it’s always a person of color who, who heads that. And I understand the rationale for that because they are the only ones who have the experience of sustained racism as a recipient of it. Of course, I have the sustained experience of racism as an enacter of it. So when white people say, well, I have no experience what yeah. USA, right? Of course you do.

Stephen Brookfield:
You have a lifetime of internalizing and transmitting this. But I would love to see more multi a multiracial team head, a diversity center and model between them, what a conversation across racial identities will looks like and how they themselves deal with their own dynamics, because then you are providing a model for the whole campus of what facing this problem head on might look like in an authentic way. So, yeah, you’ve got to get right to the granular level of hiring practices. Let’s say there’s just one thing, amongst many, many in terms of how are we going to staff a diversity program? How are we going to bring up how we going to create supportive networks via cluster hires? Because there’s no point in bringing a body of color dropping into a white sea, having them do their best for a year or two, and then leave because they’re either informally given the sense, you’re not going to get your contract renewed, or they just get so burned out because there is no support for them within there.

Stephen Brookfield:
There are lots of words of support from the white power structure and from people like me, but, but there is not an experiential Alliance a healing experiential Alliance, a network that they have there. So I have found, I don’t know if you, you know, about this, the, the crossroads ministry in Chicago have this very great continuum of a antiracist organizations starting from, you know, fully exclusive on the left, far left, and then fully transformative on the far, right. And they break down the kinds of things that need to happen administratively on campus for you to call yourself as moving to in an anti-racist direction. So the more we give these specific, I mean, it, it might seem like getting too focused on concrete stuff and losing the big picture, but it’s the concrete stuff that helps us learn and reproduce these patterns of behavior so that they become unremarkable and not unnoticed. And just the way that things things are going.

Raechele Pope:
Well. I think it’s, it’s, it’s the nature of all of this, right? That we really need to have these DIIT or approaches that it’s, it’s the, both, and we need both the large men, a picture, a thousand feet up, but we also need on the ground, what does this look like at the granular level? So I think that’s it, you know, I really wanna point out that you know, we’re really, really getting to the end of this conversation. I mean, I, I could sit here and talk to you for two more days and, and maybe we should do that and then break it into 15 videos or something or podcasts. But what I want to do is I want to just see if to give you a chance for some final thoughts, you know, each of you just take, you know a minute or so to say, you know, here’s something else I’m thinking about this that we didn’t quite get to. And I’ll let you start there, Ali.

Ali Michael:
Well, I just wanted to add on to Stephen. I love talking with you, Stephen, because you are good at the, at the the micro steps that we have to take and the, and looking departmentally and looking at the structures on campus that, which I’m not as good at. So I appreciate being able to listen in. And when I think about success, I think about more broadly, you know, I think, I think it’s a question to ask people. I think when you wanna help people tap into the joy of what’s possible. I think that’s, you know, envisioning what could be possible, you know, healthy, multiracial community places where stereotype threat doesn’t exist, where people can be their three dimensional cells, the, a beautiful constellation of identities that doesn’t, that where they don’t feel like, well, I have to act this way because people are gonna see me this way.

Ali Michael:
And then where we like really dig into the anti-blackness in the content. And when we have psychology classes, we look at who even has shapes psychology, historically, what are the main questions in psychology? We could do this in any field where we look at the ways in which you know, in psychology we ask questions like, well, what’s wrong with black people who wanna escape slavery? That’s the wrong question to be asking. And, you know, what we want to be asking, we want to be looking at all of our fields and the ways in which they have been shaped by the racial hierarchy historically. And so success also looks like can, you know, changing our pedagogy, changing our assumptions, looking at our, the lineage of our academic fields and looking at the assumptions of the, and the racial hierarchy that are built into those.

Ali Michael:
And that’s why, I mean, like it’s an ongoing process and it’s a really exciting process. I mean, it’s a life giving process for me, identifying as white naming my whiteness and naming racism is my problem too means that I get to be part of the solution. I get to be part of multiracial communities that are puzzling over this, that I get to be that it’s not something that exists outside of myself. It’s liberating to see myself as white, which means I’m part of this whole racial puzzle and there’s something that I need to do about it. And so the other thing I would say is that when I think about success, I think about that song from Zootopia, Try Everything it’s from Shakira. So like try everything, you know, you’re gonna fall, you gotta get up again, keep going. We white people historically, you know, when you talk about that 20%, that’s 60% Raechele, but 20% of people were really like enforcing the violence of Jim Crow.

Ali Michael:
But 50% of white people were just bystanders. And that’s what we’re good at today. I’m a bystander sometimes because I’m afraid to do it wrong because the left is gonna call me out. I’m not woke enough. I don’t know. You know, I don’t know the perfect answer. The truth is there is no perfect answer. If there was everything would look really different, nobody knows the answer. But what we have to do is stop being afraid, take action, assert what we believe and, and just kind of put our voices out there. And to try things and then get feedback and people are gonna say, you know, what, that’s wrong, or that was oppressive, or that thing you did that carried a lot of white supremacy with it. And then we can say like, Stephen, I hear you saying like, yeah, okay. That, that shouldn’t surprise me. I know to expect that because of my socialization, I’m gonna change it. I’m gonna try something different rather than, you know, blocking us off ourselves off to the feedback, which is what we, we need to get it perfect. Because we don’t want feedback. Well, what if we just said, I’m gonna try, I’m gonna do it imperfectly. And then when people gimme feedback, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna take it and I’m gonna do better. Next time

Raechele Pope:
I’m gonna fail. And the next time I’ll fail better. You know the title that’s right. Travis, Travis. Now I can’t think of his name’s book anyway, Ali and Stephen, thank you so much. I am so, so, so grateful for your time. And for these contributions to this conversation, I know this episode’s gonna be turned around and aired rather quickly. So I wanna send my heartfelt appreciation to Nat Ambrosey, who does our behind the scenes production. Thanks Nat. I really apprecite it. If you’re listening today and not already receiving our weekly newsletter, please visit our website at studentaffairsnow.com and scroll to the bottom of the homepage and add your email to our mailchimp list. And while you’re there, check on our archives. And if you found this particular conversation helpful, please share it on your social media platforms and share it with your colleagues and your students. Also, please subscribe to the podcast, invite others to subscribe and share it on social media or leave a five star review.

Raechele Pope:
It really helps conversations like this reach more folks and build a learning community. Finally, I wanna give a heartfelt shout out to our sponsors. We really appreciate your sport. Stylus is proud to be a sponsor for student affairs. Now really proud to be a sponsor of this podcast. So browse their student affairs, diversity and professional development titles at styluspub.com. Again, use the promo codes SANow for 30% off all your books plus free shipping. You can also find stylist on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn Twitter @styluspub. Simplicity of the global leader in student services, technology platforms with state-of-the-art technology that empowers institutions to make data driven decisions specific to their goals. A true partner, simplicity supports all aspects of student life with technology platforms that empower institutions to make important data driven decisions, to learn more, visit simplicity.com or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Please take time to visit our sponsors and learn more. I’m Raechele Pope again, thanks to both Ali and Stephen today and to everyone who is watching or listening. I promise you a change is gonna come.

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