Raechele Pope:
If you were to wake up tomorrow, if all of us were to wake up tomorrow and the culture of nice had disappeared. How would our campuses be different?

Carlton Green:
We would actually be centering the experiences of the most marginalized people on our campus. Because, because again, right, the culture of nice success center, those with power, it’s seeks to center. Those who already have voice it’s seeks essential. Those who make decisions, it’s seeks to center, those who have access to resources.

Raechele Pope:
Hey Fam, welcome to Student Affairs NOW. The online learning community for student affairs educators, I’m your host Raechele Pope. Today. We’re talking about so-called nice racism and the harm and trauma that it unleashes. We’ll discuss how this plays out in student affairs and in higher education and what we can do to stop it. We’ll discuss this and much more with Dr. Carlton Green. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairs NOW.com. You can find us on iTunes, YouTube, or anywhere that you listen to podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Stylus, visit styluspub.com and use the promo code SANOW for 30% off and free shipping today’s episode is also sponsored by LeaderShape, go to leadershape.org to learn how they can work with you to create a, just caring and thriving world.

Raechele Pope:
As I mentioned, I’m your host, Raechele Pope. My pronouns are she her and hers and I’m broadcasting from Williamsville New York near the campus of the University of Buffalo, where I serve as a senior associate Dean of faculty and student affairs and the unit diversity officer for the graduate school of education. I’m also an associate professor in the higher ed and student affairs program. The University of Buffalo is situated on the the unseated ancestral Homeland of the Haudenosaunee people. So let’s get to today’s conversation, Dr. Green. Carlton, Thank you. Thank you for joining me today for this episode of Student Affairs NOW, and welcome to the podcast.

Carlton Green:
Thank you so much for having me.

Raechele Pope:
Can you tell us a bit about you, your current role, a bit about your pathway through student affairs, higher education counseling into the work that you’re doing now in launching now?

Carlton Green:
Sure. So thank you again for having me. I’m Dr. Carlton E. Green. I’m a licensed psychologist in the Maryland and the DC, Maryland Virginia area. We call it the DMV. I am also seated on the unceded lands of the Skidaway people here in Largo, Maryland. And so we definitely want to pay our respects to them. With regards to my journey into this work, I am somebody who started out as a student activist as an undergraduate student, and that kind of got me into student affairs. So I worked for about 10 years at a large regional institution down in Texas, Sam Houston State University, where I did student affairs stuff, went to graduate school to study mental health counseling, ended up pursuing a PhD in counseling psychology. And while I was there, certainly at Boston College in that context had a lot of opportunities to work continuously with undergraduate students, be they in residence life or students who were coming out of the office of AHANA student programs, or even what student athletes did quite a few things while I was at Boston college and then left there to be a intern at the University of Maryland counseling center to finish off my counseling psychology program, worked for a year at the University of Houston in the counseling center there as a postdoctoral fellow, and then came back to the University of Maryland to work in the counseling center for about five years.

Carlton Green:
Most recently the work that I’ve been doing is the director of diversity training and education at the University of Maryland where I did that for about three years and then have subsequently left that work to go full-time and independent practice for myself doing private individual and couples counseling with folks here in this area, as well as serving as a speaker consultant around diversity equity, inclusion related issues. In addition to doing some consulting with mostly with higher education organizations and sometimes with mental health settings in nonprofit organizations as well.

Raechele Pope:
Wow. You know, you have done so much to so much that is so typical of folks who begin in student affairs. So I can’t say that all roads leave lead through student affairs to do this kind of work a lot of them.

Carlton Green:
Yes, yes. I totally agree with that. It’s interesting too, to just think about how I ended up being a counseling psychologist as well. And they’re there at one point in my career very early in my career, I was looking at the counseling psychology stuff and then noticing that there were a lot of counseling psychologists who were in student affairs types of roles, whether or not they are vice-presidents or serving on some of the talks about director capacity. It’s just really fascinating to think too about the overlap and the skills that are common to both student affairs and counseling psychologists.

Raechele Pope:
Right. Yeah. we have so many shared histories and counseling psychology in particular. You know, I was listening to you as you talked about your role as a therapist, but also as a speaker and consultant, and I’ve seen you in those roles and certainly heard about you in those roles. I know in the fall of 2020, which seems a long time ago, thanks to that, but it’s Just a year ago, a year ago you came and you spoke to the entire graduate school of education at my institution, the university of Buffalo, about the inherent and insidious harm and trauma of racism, especially when it’s dressed up in this culture of nice as you called it. And I have to tell you, our students, our faculty and our staff are still talking about that conversation. I still see it show up in papers occasionally. So I’d like to begin there, please share with our audience, what is this culture of nice as, as you frame it and how does it play out in higher education, particularly at historically white institutions?

Carlton Green:
Well, it’s such a good question. I come to this work certainly as a counseling psychologist, as a trainer of other therapists. And I always like to tell this story, because I think that it helps us understand how the culture of nice can play out right under our very noses, even if we aren’t paying attention to it. So as a, as a therapist trainee I remember being a master’s level mental health counseling student at Boston College. And one of the ways that we train when we are in school is that we have so like a basic skills course where there’ll probably be 60 of us in a course. And that’s how many students were in my cohort. Probably about 50 of us were white women. And then about 10 of the remaining 10 of us was some combination of black women men, men of color, right?

Carlton Green:
So in our 60 person, course, we go and we learn things like how to rephrase statements or how to practice empathy or how to restate, right. You’re, you’re practicing some really basic micro skills of counseling. And then from there you leave the lecture and you go into what we would call a skills lab and the skills lab. It’s probably about 10 of you, right? And you get a chance to practice in different ways, whatever you just learned in the lecture, you’re supposed to be practicing in the skills lab. So in my skills lab, I think there were probably about six or seven white women. And then the rest of us, there were a couple of men and maybe a couple of women of color. In those labs, you practice. One of the ways that you practice is what we call a fish bowl and the fish fishbowl, what happens is that there can be two people in the center of the class or send to the center of the circle, right?

Carlton Green:
One playing the therapist and other playing the client. And that therapist is trying to do what we were just learning in the, in the lecture, right. When we would have those, this is inevitably what would happen when the fishbowl would con would conclude, my colleagues sitting in the room would say to the person playing the therapist, that was amazing. You were so great at that. How did you learn how to do that? I wish that I could be a therapist as good as you, right. It would be all of these, these really this high praise, a few simply high praise, right. For us who are like first year students in the middle of counseling program, but we’re doing that. Right. And I would often be sitting there a little bit in confusion because I would be thinking in my head, but they didn’t actually practice the skills that Dr.

Carlton Green:
Sparks has told us to practice. Right. You didn’t do what we were supposed to, what we were supposed to be doing. And so I remember being kind of befuddled by that for a little while going through the first few weeks of the program. And then at one point I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I was having a conversation with my then advisor, Dr. Janet Helms. And we were having just a brief conversation, maybe it just to check in. And I was sharing with her about this particular phenomenon. And she looked at me after I told the story and she goes, she says, oh, you didn’t know, we have a culture of nice and higher education. Right. We don’t give hard feedback to people at all. Right. And something about that just really turned the light bulb on for me.

Carlton Green:
Right. And I didn’t really think too much about that until years later, when I started talking to folks about racial trauma and really trying to understand what makes this so hard for us to talk about. Right. But if we come back to thinking about this culture of nice, the way that I’ve talked about it, and I really borrow that from a from an author Lasha MacDonald, she wrote an article called when nice won’t suffice for a trade for a teacher or trade organization, or teach a teacher trade magazine, I think a few years ago and what, the way that she described it she, she kind of outlined the phenomenon that occur around us. Right. And certainly at this point, the way she was writing about it in secondary education, among a group of teachers, the phenomenon that she described, it was really that they focus on in, in their, in their interactions with each other, right.

Carlton Green:
Either with teachers or with students, what they generally do is they focus on compliments or strengths. Everything has to be positive. Everything has to be positive, right. They make sure that they avoid conflict at all costs in order to preserve some semblance of harmony, even if there is disharmony occurring, or even if people are having really strong, negative reactions to something, there is a, a concerted effort to avoid conflict. Right. what she also described was sort of like, we stay at the surface level with our conversations. We don’t allow anything to really go deeper or to probe into anything that could possibly make us vulnerable. Okay. and then the final thing that she pointed out, which I actually really appreciate it. Cause I think this is, this may be so like the hallmark of what happens, especially in higher education around this.

Carlton Green:
And she says that even if something negative or something that doesn’t feel so harmonious breaks through the perceived difficulty is blamed on the other, right. It is never really somebody, almost like in the immediate conversation, but there’s a way that it has to be located on somebody outside of this immediate interaction. For example, she was talking about secondary teachers and the teachers were trying to, this is actually, she was describing professional development among them. And so the teachers are talking about their lesson plans and maybe about how a particular lesson plan didn’t go over well and are in a classroom, what the teachers who are mostly white. Right. We know that 80% of teachers are white, especially at the secondary and elementary level, what the teachers would do when they talked about this lesson plan, not going so well is they will blame a particular student in the person’s class.

Carlton Green:
Right. There was no accountability on the teacher’s part or there was no sense of asking. So like, oh, so let’s talk about maybe what about the lesson plan didn’t work or let’s talk about maybe about the delivery or nothing about the teacher. It was always about something about the student, right? So those four elements to me really stand out when I think about the culture of nice and higher education. Now we see this in whether or not you are in student affairs or you in some, some academic space, right. How it is, especially I would, I would say from my student affairs days, we can be in some ways the heartbeat of the institution, right. We provide a lot of support. We provide community. We are always trying to build relationships helping students to build relationships. What can often happen in the context of student affairs is that we will not risk talking about really difficult things.

Carlton Green:
Because we want to say focused on helping people to move forward. We want to help people to focus on their strengths. We want to help people to really develop in ways that feel like it’s positive, right? Without the acknowledgement that actually you can develop in a very positive way by working through difficult things. Right. but we stay away from anything that could feel challenging or difficult or upsetting anything that might actually that our students, right? This is, this is accurate, probably a really good way of thinking about it when our students who are always trying to help us perfect the institution, always trying to help the institution be the best institution that it can be by reminding us of the values that we say that we embrace, or by reminding us about why it is that we brought these students here, right?

Carlton Green:
When our students have demands of us, we can get really pejorative towards those students. And we can blame those students for not being successful, or we can blame those students for not behaving in ways that are consistent with the university’s values. Right. We don’t necessarily want to hear these demands because that feels like it’s getting into something conflictual and we don’t want that right. In academics. And so like in the classroom settings, or even if you think about in a faculty meeting, for example, right, faculty could be talking about their difficulty with recruiting or trying to talk about the recruiting numbers, whether or not that’s recruiting, graduate, students of color are recruiting more faculty of color. There’s a way that we won’t actually dig into the culture of the department or the culture of the institution and what makes that difficult.

Carlton Green:
We will instead say something like, there are not enough of them. There are not enough qualified people out there, or we offered it to this one person. And folks went somewhere else because they, they, they just had more opportunities or they went to a city and we were in this area. Nobody really wants to come to this area. So it’s just difficult for us, right. Without having a real honest conversation about what’s actually happening here in this setting, that we could be much more accountable for. It would risk us being vulnerable to talk about our own own accountability.

Raechele Pope:
So the interesting thing that I heard you talk about Carlton, is this, this pervasive, this culture that we add in the components of race or other social justice issues, and that changes the, I was gonna say the complexion of it, cause it, it really complicates It. Right.

Raechele Pope:
And so I, think about that. So what is that culture of nights when it’s connected to race, what’s going on there that play out? And I know you gave us a couple of examples of that. What happens to this culture of nice that we’ve created and how it harms us, keeps us from moving forward, keeps us from growing, keep, it keeps us from changing our institutions. What does adding the race as a component of this? How does that change?

Carlton Green:
Yeah, it’s a, it’s also a really good question. So one of the things that I commonly talk about right, is that when race drops into a conversation, even among well, meaning really intelligent people, it actually fosters a sense of anxiety among folks, right. And people lose their minds literally. Right. You’re the part of your brain that would work to sort of like communicate and make a decisions and and be present, right. It w that part kind of goes out of the window. Right. and so when race becomes a part of it, what people will default to is to me is really trying to foster a sense of harmony, right? We are all here together. Let’s not focus on anything difficult. Let’s not focus on anything negative. That’s really focus on the relationships that we have. Can we, can we affirm each other that it’s okay for us to be here in this space or that we are in this space in a way that is actually free of conflict.

Carlton Green:
That’d be that’s actually what, what people are trying to do. Like, we don’t want the conflict here, or it could be that people are showing up in ways. There’s, there’s a great slab. And I’m thinking out for, for presentations when I do them sometimes, and I’m seeing the words right now in my head people want harmony and they don’t want to tell the truth. That’s one of the pieces that, that, that comes out of this people really want to continue to focus on transactional types of relationships. Let’s just get the business done rather than focusing on what would be transformative in this conversation, because that would actually mean some work has to go in. And so, and if work has to go in, that means that we’re really going to have to roll up our sleeves and really dig in here together.

Carlton Green:
Right. let’s just say transactional, then let’s keep it right. The other thing that that happens, and I think we’re certainly going to dig into some of these a little bit later. The other thing that happens when the culture of nice collides with race is nobody wants to talk about the fact that somebody has been harmed, right? We don’t want to talk about harm. We don’t want to talk about the impact. We don’t want to talk about the negative outcomes for people of color in these situations. So if we, as a country have not been invested in really acknowledging that racism is harmful, even though people can talk about how it is that people of color encounter racism, right? And, and, and, and, and racism can really affect us, right. Without going into the details. Right. We definitely don’t want to say in a meeting, oh, our department has participated in racism, or the department of residence life has done something that was racist, or the director of fraternity and sorority life was complicit. Like we will not have that conversation. So what we will do is that we will raise it back up to the top and let’s be nice. Let’s be nice to each other, right. Such that we don’t have to talk about the harms and how we were complicit in harming people. Right? So to me, that’s one of the ways that it, that it really functions. It, it kind of absolves people of any responsibility of talking about how it is that we either actively or passively participate in harm.

Raechele Pope:
Well, what’s fascinating about that to me, is that it perpetuates harm our refusal to acknowledge or talk about the harm that’s been caused. And we think we’re being nice and, and just keeping the conversation, civil. We never get to them saying, Hey, when you act in this way, this is the harm that it causes. And so I keep getting harmed and you keep acting in that way. And so you’re also being harmed. And so that goes to this question, what, what harm does the culture of nice cause to both white folks and BiPOC folks, you know, and it causes harm in different ways. And I was wondering if you could share with us some of those ways, what does it, what is the harm it causes to white people around race. I’m really talking about this cultural nice as it as it’s dealing with race and racism on campus. And what does this culture of nice around racism do to BiPOC folks?

Carlton Green:
Let’s talk about white folks here for a second, right? The way that I think about doing this is that when the culture of nice shows up, what it is actually trying to do is center the experiences of white people, right? The moment in a race-related conversation or in a racism related conversation that we begin to center the experiences of white people, what we’ve been taught is that white people have to be comfortable. White people can not be upset, why people should not be made to feel shame or guilty. Right. And in some ways, when the culture of nice gets enacted, what it does is that it actually stymies the white person’s capacity to be able to have access to their own humanity. Right. to be able to even have access to this part of me that says, oh my gosh, I heard another person.

Carlton Green:
Let me, let me sit with that. Or let me, let me acknowledge that I have heard another person. And then let me shift to focus on the harm that I’ve caused on this other person. Right? Because in some ways that is what we all kind of learn and into kindergarten or first grade, right? You harm somebody, you apologize for the harm that, that your cost to them, what, over the course of, of our lives, we get socialized, especially around race to ignore the harm, but to focus on, especially when it comes to white people. Well, it wasn’t my intent to do that. Right. And so w when we, when we, when we sent her intent, we are automatically centering the person who is causing the harm. Right? So that’s one thing that it does that it denies the humanity of white people.

Carlton Green:
The other thing that I think that it does is that if we, if we, this just seems logical, if we deny the humanity of white people, then the next piece is that we’re going to stymie the development of white people. We’re not going to give white folks the opportunity to continue to actually develop as racialized beings in the society who can not only be accountable for how it is that racism harms people of color, but we also don’t give them, or we don’t set them up to also be in relationship with other white folks to talk about how racism harms them as well. Right. So there’s a way that we stymied their own progressive development. And then if we’re stymieing people’s development, what we are, what we’re ultimately doing is we’re them from the pain and from the fear that goes along with, with racism we are shushing them, right?

Carlton Green:
Technically and we’re shushing those feelings. And what we know, what I know as a psychologist is that you can not have good strong relationships with people without acknowledging your humanity without recognizing that the relationships ebb and flow over the course of time. And without acknowledging that vulnerability is an important part of deepening relationships. Right. and so the culture of nice sets us up really to have white people frozen in a certain aspect of their, of their being. And it doesn’t give them the opportunity to get unfrozen from that. Right. and so what we have when, when we talk about harm is underdeveloped white folks who continue to do harm without any acknowledgement that they continue to harm people of color in ways that continue to be deleterious to society.

Raechele Pope:
Right. Yeah. You know, it’s this what we think. And I, and I understand that people are learning this really early. Don’t talk about race because they’re, don’t notice race as if it’s a good thing. And then how it really does psychological harm to themselves, the same culture of nice and race and racism also does harm to BiPOC folks kind of harm.

Carlton Green:
Right. If we, if we think about race, if we think about the culture of nice being a product over racism, right. It’s just one of the ways I’ll use Robin D’Angelo’s language. Cause I think that, that when she talks about this, she says something like, what is the function of this niceness? What is the function of your silence? What is the function of the smile in the face of somebody saying that I’ve been racially harmed? Right. I think that what she’s trying to get at is that it actually keeps racism in place. The culture of nice keeps racism in place. And so what we have to really be thinking about is that not only we have to, it’s almost sort of like the, the associated principle. It’s not necessarily the culture of nice that continues to be harmful. It is how racism is harmful, right.

Carlton Green:
And racism harms us in ways. That actually in, in the context of higher education, right? Students can’t focus, students, can’t really students, expe students experience either race-related stress or race related trauma and that stress or trauma manifest in. So like poor academic performance, because you can’t focus, you can’t sleep, you’re not eating well. You’re not able to have the types of relationships you lose self-confidence in, in who you are. Right. So it has really negative impacts, but maybe within classroom settings, within meeting settings, when the culture of nice evidences itself, what it does is that it actually can silence people of color. Right. Because we know that if a white person shows up and they act nice and, and I should, I’ll, maybe we’ll come back to this later when a white person shows up and they act nice. And if a person of color, what a challenge that then the person of color is seen as being an aggressor or a problem, right.

Carlton Green:
Within that setting, because this person was just being nice. Why are you responding that way? Right. We certainly can not talk about the pain that we experienced. And so in some ways we have to be silent about our pain around how it is that the culture of nice and racism affect us, because there are very few spaces in higher education where people of color get to say, this is harming me, right? This is actually hurting my capacity for being able to function. And to me, that is about fundamentally higher education, us not seeing that black people in particular, but other indigenous and people of color are actually human beings with feelings, right. We actually perceive black indigenous people of color communities within the context of higher education as being E I, I was trying to think about this the other day. We either perceive black indigenous people of color as being subhuman or superhuman, right.

Carlton Green:
Either, right. You are deficient and so you should be grateful for being here. And so, and therefore, it’s just a part of your struggle. You just gotta, you just gotta work harder. You just gotta get over whatever it is that you think is hurting you or happening to you, because that’s just the way that you’re expected to show up here, right. Or you’re superhuman. Right. We can think about black women, faculty members who are doing miracles on campuses, right through their scholarship, through their service. They are mentoring loads and loads of students that are not actually their own. Right. So they’re, they’re out here being superwoman, doing all of these things. And so for super woman to come and say that something is hurting me, hurting her. Right. That, that also is unheard of. Right. And so the culture of nice through racism, right? Silence has people have called it, actually be able to talk about our pain. And so we end up feeling the really intense trauma and terror of racism in our bodies and of the course of time. Of course, that is going to have repercussions for how it is that either we continue in higher education or we get out of higher education right there with the pandemic has shown us so many, so many faculty of color. So many student affairs, administrators of color are now saying enough. I just can’t continue to do this anymore.

Raechele Pope:
Right. Well, the thing that I think, you know, you talked about how we’re not allowed to talk about that or, or that we don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about that. But the other thing is that we’re punished for it.

Raechele Pope:
Hey, this hurts, or this was wrong. And someone might try to appease, you know, that situation, but later you’re labeled as a problem, you had mentioned labeled as an aggressor or any of those other words that we use for people, troublemaker, whatever it is to stop those conversations

Carlton Green:
Or somebody who is at odds with the institution. Right. You know, or you’re just, you’re just angry all the time. Right. Again, what that is trying to do is, you know, in some ways people might think, well, that doesn’t fit with your definition of the culture of nice, which says that, you know, you would blame the other, right. But in that setting, in that particular setting, if there was a group of white folks who are a group of people who have bought into right, this white supremacy way of being in the institution, then what they will do, they may not do it to that person’s face, but they may ice that person out. They may limit that persons. But they may take them off of email chains or they don’t invite them to meetings or they don’t, they don’t, their voice is not exactly. Right. Right. So that’s a way of othering people.

Raechele Pope:
That’s right. Far too often, I was thinking about another way that the culture of nice plays out. And I think you may have implied it, but I think this one needs to be stated real clearly that by not giving people good information, let’s talk about these, the BiPOC folks who aren’t getting information that you’re not doing this correctly. You know what I mean? This can be done that isn’t done your presentation. Well, you can do better work than that by this failure to call that out. But having it in your head, the person’s not going to be seen that. First of all, they’re not able to grow. They’re not able to develop the skills that they need. They’re not able to be challenged because they’re hearing from people. If you’re doing a good job when they’re not doing a good job. So for example, if I’m teaching a class and I’m the one that calls this student now, particularly a student of color is, you know, they’re like, nobody else has a problem with my work. I go, shame on them.

Raechele Pope:
Should have, this is not, is you can do this better. And let me figure out how to do it.

Carlton Green:
And it’s, so it’s such a great example to Raechele, because I actually had that experience as a doctoral student teaching a course at Boston college, I was teaching about, I think, 45 students in an adult psychology course. And, you know, Boston college is a historically white institution. And so there were probably maybe four or five students of color in a class of 45 people. And there was a particular black woman student in my class who was struggling. She had some, she had a lot of issues going on that semester. And so there, I was giving her some grace, right. And at the same time I was trying to expect excellence of her. And so I was giving her some feedback about her writing. And one of the things that she said to me was nobody has ever given me this feedback about my writing before.

Carlton Green:
Right. And it wasn’t so like and nobody’s given me this, thank you for this. It was, it, wasn’t a very angry way. Like what are you doing here? Right. and I, and I just simply said to her like, well, you’ve never had me as an instructor before. Right. and so what you, what you’re highlighting is that even in a situation like that one, the culture of nice prevails because more often than not faculty who can have low expectations of people of color. Right. do not rise to the occasion to actually give meaningful feedback that will support that person’s development. Right. Because they fear that they will be racist and there is nothing more terrifying for a white person in this country than to be called racist.

Carlton Green:
Called a racist. Exactly. Right.

Raechele Pope:
Yeah. I’ll do race racism. That’s okay. But don’t call me.

Carlton Green:
Right, right, right. Because I think that what you’re highlighting that people don’t actually get is that to not give the feedback is a racist act, right. To not give the feedback is a racist act, because it is embedded in a culture of or a theory of low expectations that people of color just don’t perform well. So this is the best that I got from them. So this is all they’re really capable of. Right.

Raechele Pope:
So then they can’t develop the skills to then be the person that you really recommend because you think they’re that good. And you want them to be good.

Carlton Green:
Right. One other way that this shows up. I mean, it could for people to be able to understand that this isn’t just about students, this is also about faculty and staff, right? So a person of color staff member does something they post something on social media or they show up to the office in a way that doesn’t necessarily comport with white supremacy. So like professional standards, right. Instead of somebody saying, Hey, can we talk about this? So that, so that I can get an understanding and, or I need to give you some feedback about how this is affecting your perception of you, or even your opportunities for advancement or in your development here, what people will do is they’ll just go silent, right. And then eventually right. Deny them opportunities for advancement, or they begin to leave them out of conversations, or they don’t facilitate professional connections for them. Again, having sort of like these really white standards about what professionalism can look like. And we don’t necessarily have honest conversations with people because we’re afraid of the conflicts that might come from that, or we’re afraid that that will, that will be labeled racist again. Right. That is also a form of niceness that then sabotages the professional trajectories of faculty and staff of color. Right.

Raechele Pope:
And again, I’m denying that of their own agency. So I tell you what the culture around here is like, what people consider professional. Now you make your own decisions about how you’re going to dress or act or whatever, but I want you to at least have the information and withhold the information and then hold them accountable for it.

Raechele Pope:
That’s really powerful. So let me, I have just two more questions for us. The first is, and I don’t know, I just think it’s a sort of fun question because I often believe that if we don’t know where we want to be that whole, say it, if you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know when you get there. Right. So I have this sort of miracle question. If you wake up tomorrow, if you were to wake up tomorrow, all of us were to wake up tomorrow and the culture of nice had disappeared. How would our campuses be different?

Carlton Green:
I think that maybe this is, this may be a way of summing it up. We would actually be centering the experiences of the most marginalized people on our campus. Because, because again, right, the culture of nice success center, those with power, it’s seeks to center. Those who already have voice it’s seeks essential. Those who make decisions, it’s seeks to center, those who have access to resources, right. But if the culture of nice were not there, and we were more free to talk about harm, to talk about inequitable outcomes, to talk about the pain that we know, our black women, faculty and staff are experiencing to talk about. The difficulties of indigenous people are even getting into our institutions. We would actually really be talking about those and not only talking about those, but integrating those into how we think about our strategic planning for the institution. Sure. We would be redoing our course curriculum to say, there’s been a time. There was a time for us to talk about these classics and these white men. Right. but we’re moving towards a different society. What would it be like to teach the voices of Harlem, Harlem Renaissance poets and in the classroom. And that’s what, that’s what we were teaching right.

Raechele Pope:
Not as the elective, but as the required course.

Carlton Green:
Right, right. What would it look like if in fact we said to our students, you have to take courses on anti-racism because that is what will actually help you to move through and become good citizens in the world. Right. What if we said right to our faculty, that it is your responsibility, not only to show up, to teach about theory, but you’ve got also figure out how to teach about practice. I know this has not been what you have have you had, you have done across the, the course of your career, but we need to be switching some things to give people strategies and practices for being able to engage across difference. And not only are we going to do that, but we’re going to center the experiences of those who are oftentimes harmed in these conversations, right? It is the culture of nice again, that actually keeps our current functioning in place.

Carlton Green:
One of the things that, again, to Robin D’Angelo’s work is that she highlights that individualism. So like lies at the heart of the culture of what she calls nice racism. But I said, the culture of nice, right. Individualism really lies at the heart of that. We have allowed our institutions to really focus on the needs of the individual without thinking about the needs of the communities that are being harmed, the communities that are being left behind, right? The communities that are suffering because of economic walls or mental health crises. We have not actually been, been talking about those not only in a way that says we have some responsibility to those communities, but also let’s talk about the strengths of those communities, right. Because we just don’t think in that type of way, when we’re talking about people’s experiences, we have reverted to the individual.

Carlton Green:
And as long as we keep centering the individual, we will always focus on the intent of the individual, which means that as long as an individual is being nice, we won’t necessarily see them as being harmful. In situations we won’t hold them accountable for how it is that they participate in racism or other forms of oppression. Right? So the miracle would be, we would say, we would, we would reorient ourselves to how we actually do higher education. We will center the most marginalized, and we wouldn’t actually center the needs of the individual. We would be thinking more in terms of what are the needs of our communities, right.

Raechele Pope:
That is so powerful. That’s so powerful. You know, I’m looking at the time and thinking we need to end. And that’s, that’s almost, you know, that’s not your final thought. I’m scared because that was so deep, but I wanted to give you a chance to say, you know, like what, what is something we maybe didn’t get to something else you’d like to add to this conversation, but I have to go back and say how powerful that was. That was just amazing.

Carlton Green:
It may be actually just building on that. Right. so many of our institutions of higher education have actively begun to talk more about our histories with both colonization and slavery. Right. really trying to acknowledge that we sit on land that was stolen from indigenous people that we have as institutions been actively participating in erasing indigenous people, that the hands of the enslaved built many of our institutions, even as we were denying those enslaved people or their descendants access to education. Like we have been doing a good job of that. Right. Which in some ways could be an indication that we’re violating the cultural nice, right. Because we are implicating ourselves historically, and a lot of these harms and we are implicating ourselves actually in racial terrorism. Right. I think though that the next big step for institutions, which I think will be really hard is first to talk about how it is that we are currently complicit in racism, not historical, right.

Carlton Green:
There is a way that these historical efforts actually seem to be like, oh, look at what we’re doing now. Right, right. Let’s give ourselves a pat on the back because we have acknowledged the history of slavery. Well, because we’ve created these scholarships for black and indigenous people, because we are bringing back the descendants of the folks who built the institution. Like, like we’re good right now with looking back on the, on that historical pieces. But in order to really disrupt the culture of nice, it becomes really important for us to talk about currently how we, and our positions of leadership are complicit in creating alternative spring break programs. That’s still going in and basically colonize people of color communities. Right. Without actually holding our students accountable for doing the necessary self-reflection about after exactly. Right. About how not only right.

Carlton Green:
Racism was present, but what have you been doing that has been contributing to this over the course of your short life? Right, right, right. If in fact, we don’t invite our fraternities and sororities into conversations about not only how historical racism has been present, but what are we doing to limit the participation of black indigenous other people of color in some of these historically white organizations. Right. there has to be a way, and I want to be really be clear about this too. It’s not only the organizations in the departments, right. Leaders, right. Have to step in and say, that was a bad decision, right. That came from my own racialized perspective. And now I recognize how I was complete. I was complicit in racism when this occurred. Right. That what I think would begin to revolutionize this, this culture of nice, because part of what is happening, I think is that nobody sees models for how that can be done.

Carlton Green:
And if we don’t have people breaking ranks to say, actually I was complicit, I participated, I unintentionally did this, but nevertheless, I did this. Right. if, if we don’t have that occurring in higher education, we’re still going to be stuck. And the culture of nice will still be pervasive. I want to say one other thing to Raechele, because I think this is also important. We also have to recognize that it’s not just white people who participate in the culture of nice. Yes. We have to recognize that as people of color, some of us with less racial consciousness, underdeveloped racial identity perspectives, we actually support and affirm and actually emboldened the culture of nice because white folks can look around at us and see that we are also trying to be smiley and nice in the face of racism. And they think, well, will that black person did it?

Carlton Green:
So it’s, so it must be okay right. In the face of racism. Right. Or we have to also really recognize that when we have senior leaders who sit either at the presidential level or the vice-presidential level of the institution, there is a way that we need to really understand that we have dangled the carrots of white supremacy in front of them. Right. And they are going to, in some ways, be intoxicated by the accoutrements of, so like being in those spaces, these institutions are historically white. They have been built on white advantage, white benefit. Right. sometimes trying to say, we are doing the people of color, the favor by bringing them here. Right. but more often, but, but these institutions are historically white and that’s a part of the culture. We need more people of color leaders at the senior level who are also willing to buck a lot of the culture of nice to really bring attention to how racism functions as a system on our campuses.

Carlton Green:
If in fact, we don’t if those folks who move into those presidential roles or those vice-presidential roles certainly are a lot of the CDOs out there tend to be people of color. Right. And there are some who are actually out there doing some really good work, but there are also some who don’t necessarily call attention to the systems of oppression, the systems of harm that are really endangering people of color. What they do is they trade in the culture of nice in order to keep their white colleagues comfortable in order to keep their jobs, which in fact, harms our people of color communities on our colleges on our college campuses. So that’s also a big shift that has to occur.

Raechele Pope:
Right. That, that racism affects us all. And for BiPOC folks, it’s an internalized racism. We learned about ourselves when we learned about others and what we learned about appeasing the system. There are times when we need to state what we see,

Carlton Green:
Right.

Raechele Pope:
And it’s our roles or responsibilities say, this is how we can respond to this. This is how we can fix this. We have to be the truth tellers.

Carlton Green:
We have to be the truth tellers in the room. Right. I think that there is, I, I just want to follow up on your word. Not only do we appease white people, right? Not only are there folks in those roles who appease white people, there are folks who are taking care of white people, right.

Raechele Pope:
Instead of taking care of the most marginalized, we’re spending more time taking care of those with, with power.

Carlton Green:
Exactly. We are actually colluding with them. One of the ways that I’ve been thinking about this and I, and I, and there’s an article out that I really want our Chatbook tap graph that I want to get to. Pretty soon, this is talking about CEOs. And I think that that person might be using the the analogy of being an overseer. And you might even know which article I’m talking about. Right. There are ways that people of color who show up in these senior leadership positions with their underdeveloped racial identity perspectives, their internalized racism, what they actually do is they function as overseers. And they actually quell the energy, the perspective, the ideas, the liberatory ideas of people of color, right. In favor of just maintaining the status quo.

Raechele Pope:
Right. And then it’s so dangerous.

Carlton Green:
It is so dangerous.

Raechele Pope:
You pointed that out. I’m so glad, you know, actually, I’m just so thrilled to been in conversation with you to share this space. I do know that if I had a little bit more time, I would go back to something that you dropped in the just your introduction and talking about how Janet Helms.

Raechele Pope:
She was your dissertation advisor and what an amazing experience that was. And and, and her work so entered into the work of student affairs and counseling psychology. Thank you for this conversation. You always fill up my brain and I’m so grateful for your time and your contributions to this conversation, you know, to our listeners. We hope that you found this conversation and all of the Student Affairs NOW conversations, they make a contribution to the field and that they’re restorative to the profession. If you’re listening today and are not already receiving our weekly newsletter, please visit our website at studentaffairsNOW.com scroll to the bottom of the homepage to add your email to our MailChimp list. And while you’re there, check out our archives. And if you found this conversation helpful, please share, share, share, share it on your social media platforms and share it with your colleagues and students.

Raechele Pope:
Also, please subscribe to the podcast, invite others to subscribe, share on social media or leave a five star review. It really helps conversations like this, reach more folks and build a real learning community. I want to also acknowledge and send real appreciation to the amazing and unflappable Nat Ambrosey, who does our behind the scenes production. Thanks, Nat. I really appreciate your work. Finally. I want to give another shout out to our sponsors. We really appreciate your support. Today’s episode was sponsored by Stylus and Stylus is proud to be a sponsor of the Student Affairs NOW podcast, please browse their student affairs, diversity and professional development titles at styluspub.com and use the promo code SANow for 30% off all books plus free shipping, you can also find Stylus on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter @styluspub. LeaderShape, our other I’m sponsored today. Partners with colleges and universities to create transformational leadership experiences, both virtual and in person for students and professionals with a focus on creating more, just caring and thriving world. LeaderShape offers, engaging learning experiences on courageous dialogue, integrity, equity, resilience, and community building to find out more, please visit www.leadershape.org /virtualprograms or connect with LeaderShape on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Raechele Pope:
Again, I’m Raechele Pope. And thanks to Dr. Carlton Green. You should really check out his work. He’s incredible consultant speaker, and I want to thank everyone else. Who’s watching. You know, Charlotte Chisholm has been on my mind lately, and especially this quote, you don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas. Folks, let’s get to it. We got some ideas to implement. Till next time.

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