Anneliese Singh:
I think I’ve gone in this journey and the practices that I’ve written about are really ones that I use every day because I want to move beyond surviving as a person of color. I do want to be in thriving and I do believe that all of the freedom fighters and racial justice movements have fought for this moment, they’ve dreamed of us, our ancestors dreamed of this moment of us actually having this conversation and then making these commitments. It’s not that we’re not on the streets anymore. It’s just like liberation is a very inside job. And, you know, Rosa parks knew that as she did yoga and Asana, I mean, there are so many people and the racial liberation movements who knew that there was something really important about nourishment, about building trust and about actually healing from racial trauma, so that we’re not continuing to enact the wounds as a white person, you know, acting out of the wounds of numbing and then enacting white supremacy or in being an agent or as a person of color as a BiPOC person acting out of our own internalized racism or, and or the distrust that we can have of our own selves. So I think the most powerful DEI work we can do in our campuses is really when we create spaces where people do learn to trust themselves, they learn more about their fullness of their identities and about history. You know, as I said earlier, everything about racism and white supremacy and cisgender ism, it will just be confusing unless you know, about history.

Raechele Pope:
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs Now the online learning community for student affairs educators, I’m your host, Raechele Pope. 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 hope that you’ll find these conversations, make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. So find us at studentaffairsnow.com on YouTube or anywhere that you listen to podcasts.

Raechele Pope:
Stylus is proud to be a sponsor for the Student Affairs NOW podcast. Browse their Student Affairs, Diversity, and Professional Development titles at styluspub.com. Use promo code SANOW for 30% off all books, plus free shipping. You can also find Stylus on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter at @Styluspub.

Raechele Pope:
Today’s episode is sponsored by LeaderShape. LeaderShape partners with colleges and universities to create transformational leadership experiences, both virtual and in-person, for students and professionals, with a focus on creating a 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 https://www.leadershape.org/VirtualPrograms or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Raechele Pope:
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 associate Dean for faculty and student affairs and the unit diversity officer for the graduate school of education. I’m also an associate professor in the higher education student affairs program.

Raechele Pope:
UB is situated on the unseated ancestral Homeland of the Haude and Shawnee people. As many of you know, this is my inaugural episode as a host for Student Affairs Now, and I am thrilled, absolutely thrilled to have Anneliese Singh as my first guest. Anneliese is an associate provost, a counseling psychologist, a scholar, and activist, a consultant. And before all of that, she was also the director of multicultural affairs at Agnes Scott College. So she clearly knows student affairs. Anneliese, thank you for joining me today for this episode of Student Affairs Now, and welcome to the podcast. Can you begin by telling us a bit about you, your current role on your campus and a bit about your pathway through student affairs, maybe, and certainly counseling psychology and into the DEI that diversity equity inclusion work that you now do?

Anneliese Singh:
Yeah. Oh, thank you, Raechele. It’s so good to be with you. Thank you for all the work you do in our field. And it’s a real honor to spend some time with you today. My name is Anneliese Singh I use the she and they series of pronouns and I am in New Orleans Chitimacha other indigenous tribes lands that were also unseated and often stolen. The, the original indigenous name for New Orleans was Bulbancha. And so if you just even say that you feel the power of this land, that is very black and indigenous and the roots of what we’ve come to know as New Orleans today. I serve as chief diversity at Tulane University and you’re right. I’ve had kind of this interesting winding road through student affairs. I did my training as a counselor and psychologist, but when I was kind of done with a practicum and counseling at Agnes Scott College they asked me because I did a lot of work, not in the counseling office, but to do I think if you do good counseling center work you’re out on the campus.

Anneliese Singh:
And so they asked me to come in and do the director of multicultural affairs, which was actually just 20 hours a week. And I knew I would be there just a year. And I was like, Hmm, I have some privilege I can spend here. I was like, I’ll do it for a year if you let me work so that this is a 40 hour position and you actually hire someone. So I learned so much in that year. And when I went to the University of Georgia and became an assistant professor there, I worked in a doctoral program that blended school counseling, community counseling and student affairs. So we had this social justice discussion from K through 12, all the way to higher ed and beyond, and really like, what are the things that in higher ed, we need to know that happened in elementary.

Anneliese Singh:
What are the gaps and how does white supremacy work in middle school? And how does that impact what we see in universities? And so I think in terms of my work, the last 20 years has really been focusing mostly on trans and non-binary community members their experiences of resilience a liberation not your everyday resilience. I think sometimes we’re like, no resilience. It’s a bad thing. Like it’s resistance. Yes. But I don’t study everyday resilience. Like what happens when you don’t get your coffee just right in the morning? And you’re stressed. I study the resilience that and trans people of color develop to navigate societal oppressions. And so a lot of my work has focused on race and racial justice and diversity equity and inclusion. And so then I landed in an associate Dean position for diversity equity inclusion in the college of ed at the University of Georgia.

Anneliese Singh:
And in that work my Dean had asked me to come in and he said, we need a scholar to do this work. And I was like, really? Okay. and you know, in my head, I was like, I don’t want to do this work. I’m a faculty member. I have freedom. I want to be in community. I wasn’t trying to spend time honestly, in the university, but there was something in my heart that burst open and said, yes. And I think for many of your listeners, I’ve come to learn and really have so much respect for people in student affairs. Who’ve had very specific pathways into the profession that there is a calling. And I guess I heard it that day and I was invited into the full. So again, it’s such an honor to be with you all and excited about the conversation

Raechele Pope:
Your, your pathway. Surprisingly enough, it’s like so many in student affairs, you didn’t know the field existed necessarily like in my case. And then when I found I was like, I was home, but that this work is so much broader than any one single functional area, you know, so want to talk about this work that you’re doing with DEI, you know, for decades, campuses have been discussing and programming around and providing interventions on diversity or inclusion or multiculturalism or racism, the more recently using the language of white supremacy yet research has shown that the impact of these interventions has been limited, not much has changed. Why do you think that is?

Anneliese Singh:
Such a good question, Raechele. I mean, in some ways, you know we’ve done really important work in DEI, but we, we also have been a little upside down in the work we’ve in many ways in student affairs. I mean, so many of your listeners know where we’re almost begging a system to change as opposed to the system coming to student affairs saying and saying, I want to change. And so I know this research gets called a lot but you know, if you look at the kind of histories of white supremacy in historically white, and I say white spaces that are most universities, unless it’s an HBCU or HSI you know, there hasn’t been a clear mandate to address white supremacy. So what I found is it’s not that the DEI work doesn’t work, it’s that actually at the very top middle and on the ground, we don’t always have the people that are all in, in the same direction.

Anneliese Singh:
And so in student affairs, we’re constantly working against white supremacy, cisgender supremacy, able-bodied supremacy, male supremacy. And then, and then we do these interventions and we study them and we’re like, Oh, that didn’t have the impact. I hope it helped. It did well when you don’t have everyone in, that’s going to be an issue. If you think about just admissions, you know, everyone’s in, on getting a new class in, right. And so it happens. And I think one of the things we learned this last year during COVID-19 and the multiple pandemics of racism, sexism, and so much more is that we learned that university administrators, we met at 7:00 AM. We were meeting at 8:00 PM. We were meeting daily multiple times a day to tackle “COVID-19”. If we studied that related to dismantling white supremacy, we’re going to be good, but that’s not where our studies have really tracked. And in our field,

Raechele Pope:
You know, I, I said something similar to someone I said, universities, in a sense played themselves when they responded so completely. So thoroughly, so systematically to COVID-19, you know, all units were involved every so now we know it can happen. So when there’s a will, there’s a way, you know, so, Hey, you know, something I noticed about your work, much of your work has focused not only on the systemic stuff, and I’m going to come back to that, but it’s focused on healing, racial, healing oppression, healing, and liberation. How is that different from some of the traditional DEI approaches that we have been seen in combating racism? Or how was it similar?

Anneliese Singh:
Yeah. I love that question, Raechele, because I mean, if we think about, you know, historically white institutions, one of the things we know is that it was black student activists, young people who were suing universities to gain access. Right. And so a lot of times we’re doing DEI work a historically. And so we were not grounded in black liberation and black student advocacy and young people’s advocacy, right. We’re not open to that reverse mentoring. So for me, when I think about DEI, we’re often doing social justice work. We strive to do that. We want to do it well. And a lot of times we are, but when it’s social justice, I do find it’s almost this debate about how much, and if we can do it, and if it’s actually part of our job, I think liberation is a bigger goal than social justice, social justice advocacy is a part of that.

Anneliese Singh:
But liberation, you know, if white supremacy harms BiPOC folks, black indigenous folks of color, we know that white folks are also acting out of their wounds, their wounds of supremacy, of course. Right. but for me, we, if we don’t have that conversation about our field is grounded in black student activism, which means we have to care and be our ultimate goal has to be black liberation. It just has to be nothing else will make sense in our work, unless everything we do is kind of moving in that direction. That’s the birthright of our profession, of our yeah. Of women who DEI work. But I think the other piece around healing is that, you know, whether it’s black student activists then, or now in 2021 or other BiPOC student activist or BiPOC professionals or white anti-racist student affairs professionals, we’re often our jobs are about helping other people.

Anneliese Singh:
And we’re really good at that, but we often forget that we’ve internalized a lot of the same toxicity. And so I really think the H word is important healing. It’s not like something that happens in a moment. It’s not one act, but again, as we kind of position ourselves towards liberation, we start to be able to reclaim parts of ourselves that we actually cut off a long time ago, way before we got to student affairs. Often when we were little, when we were young little Raechele and little Anneliese who learned that, you know, really to survive in a white, straight CIS able-bodied world, what did we have to change or cut from ourselves? So DEI work, I think it has to be grounded in black liberation, but it has to have an aim of wholeness for all of us. It’s just true. For instance, you know, white student affairs professionals, administrators are just not going to have access to their wholeness unless they have the history of the roots of DEI, because we will be confused about black liberation if you don’t know that, but also what that very personal connection is, what it, what it means to move through our lives and not care about those things.

Anneliese Singh:
So I hope that makes sense, but I think traditional approaches are like, Oh, let’s support this one group that has marginalization. But as we look at that group that is experiencing the marginalization often folks of color, and trans folks, disabled folks, we’re looking away from the supremacies that are setting up the culture that creates the push out that creates the harm. So it’s almost like we’ve got to a student affairs professionals train ourselves to like identify many different directions at once under the umbrella of we’re doing this higher ed thing, because we care about liberation for all people. So I have lots of strong opinions on that, but that’s great because some of the research we don’t see, we don’t see the research where we want it to be.

Raechele Pope:
Right. I think that that’s such a key point. It’s similar to me in that we were talking about competence, multicultural competence, the work that I do, I do with Amy and all of this stuff, and it, lots of other people. And that came out of the work in counseling psychology talked about multicultural competence. And then my field, it almost shifted on a dime, started saying, let’s talk about social justice, but they still didn’t have the competence, you know, when you had the new language. And so it’s like that. We want to now focus on structures and systems, which I absolutely, to my core believe we need to be focusing on my work on organizational development. We have to change structures and systems. But and I have this quote of yours that I thought was just so powerful. If we really want to change the world, if we need to dig into our own healing from oppression and injustice only then can we begin to interrogate the systems and structures that maintain these inequities? And that’s exactly what you were just saying that we need this racial healing and liberation before we can even begin to tear down these structures because we can’t see them.

Anneliese Singh:
Yeah. They’re inside of us, we’re soaking in them. And in institutions, you know, we’re in buildings that have names of white men and other people who’ve done a lot of harm. They’re those macroaggressions or environmental racial microaggressions as well. But then you’re right. I mean, if, if we don’t have that clear kind of compass of why we do the work, it’s easy to get lost. And it’s really easy to get frustrated. I mean, I know people have a lot of feelings about Dr. King and I do too. And I think, you know, he said something very important in a speech to the American side, like association in the sixties, he said, you in psychology, you have this really important word maladjusted use it all the time. Like in psychology at that time, it was like helping people adjust, which meant helping people adjust to a white individual kind of mental health.

Anneliese Singh:
Right. And he said, actually, we should always be maladjusted to the madness of militarism to oppression, to racial injustice, to things that take luxury. Is from the to poor and give it to, you know, the privilege. So I called Dr. King’s quote and kind of what you’re saying, because you know, black women is important liberation for all people is important. I personally think if we’re working to build a world that is supportive of black liberation work, we’re working for liberation of all people. But if we haven’t made that personal connection of how we’ve internalized, anti-blackness how we’ve internalized, anti-transness or just so many other toxic stereotypes and messages. We haven’t really, slowed down to think about what that does in our body. And I, I do think we’ll find over time, we, we know from the neurobiology of racism, for instance, that for white folks, it creates a lot of money.

Anneliese Singh:
You know, when you saw the you know, the film of Derek Chauvin, murdering George Floyd, that’s one thing, a lot of us, especially in black communities, but in a lot of communities don’t want to watch. Right. But you know, one of my mentors, he recut the video and it only focused on Derek Chauvin’s face for that entire time. And you see the NAMI, you see the indifference. And so when white folks heal, when they realize they have a race and that racism is internalized and white supremacy is real, then it is like, it’s like getting your breath back. Right. and I think for BiPOC folks, it’s literally, you know, yeah. It’s about time. So yeah, I think this is stuff we’ve got to keep talking about in DEI work because we’re missing some of our roots and that’s very common across a lot of disciplines actually in psychology.

Anneliese Singh:
We believe that William James, I started psychology. It’s an utter lie. He coined the phrase, psychology had to be birthed and metal health had to be burst in the continent of Africa. That’s where all people can. And that’s just the story we don’t have at all. But when we seek to reclaim that story and tell the whole truth of history, then we become whole and we heal again. And that’s a lot of what’s in the Racial Healing Handbook. It has very specific steps in practices that we can use every day to keep us anchored in that goal of liberation.

Raechele Pope:
I am so glad you brought up the book, Racial Healing Handbook. I absolutely love this book. So one of the primary reasons why I was excited to talk to you today, you know, during this last year, I used your book in two different ways in the fall, in my multicultural competence and change class that I teach in student affairs. I use that with my students and we used it as a beginning to understand social justice and oppression and healing, racial healing, and liberation. And it was really a fantastic experience for me to watch my students go through with that. The second thing that I’m really excited about was my program faculty have been using it as a part of our discussions on becoming an anti-racist program and helping us to have these deep conversations where we meet in both racial affinity groups and then come together as a larger group, a multiracial group of faculty to begin these conversations, not always easy. Sometimes it’s really hard and difficult and want to quit, but we keep coming back because we believe that this gets us through and allows us to then start thinking about ways to be different. So I am really thankful for this book, but for those who don’t know it, why don’t you tell us, tell our listeners what prompted you to write this book at this time and what you hope that this book can contribute to this anti-racism work and the healing and liberation that we all need.

Anneliese Singh:
Yeah. Thank you, Raechele, for that question. I think one of the reasons I wrote it is because, you know, I had done community organizing since I was young and racial justice and immigrant rights work, women’s reproductive justice work HIV and AIDS. And I would find a very common story. You know, we’d be almost on the verge of some liberatory event or some success in our communities. And then there’d be like almost a tearing down within our movements. And I, I went to seek a counseling and psychology degree because I thought that would help me understand why we did that to each other. And then when I got my counseling program, I was like, ah, not getting the help I want. And so I went back and I started studying liberation movements and racial justice from pre civil rights abolition all the way to black lives matter and other racial liberation movements today.

Anneliese Singh:
And I looked at the, whether it was the neurobiology of racism and just what we know about white supremacy and research. And, you know, I knew from my own story as a mixed race, South Asian, and I say white adjacent person cause I definitely benefit from what people kind of project on to me. Sometimes I’ll call myself a racial because I’m very clear that I know who I am racially and then people will project onto me what they need me to be in that moment. And so that’s happened my whole life. And so I grew up with a dark skinned, Indian Sikh, turban wearing father and a mother from the South. And, you know, I saw her passivity and her confusion when my dad would be called a terrorist. And, you know, he experienced physical and verbal violence regularly.

Anneliese Singh:
And I saw his inability to really say what was happening to him because it was so traumatic, right? These things would happen and I’d witnessed them as a young person, or I would be the target sometimes like I’d be called the N word or, you know, a neighbor or, you know, just I’d see things happening. And my dad, wasn’t able either as a immigrant to this country, say on Anneliese, this is white supremacy. And so I think for my whole life, I had been searching for that. Why I knew my dad happened to teach us Xavier university and HBCU. And I knew as a young young child, when I was in a HBCU environment, my dad wasn’t being called a terrorist that I wasn’t in danger. But when we stepped out into white community in New Orleans, that’s when it would happen. And so I think I’ve gone in this journey and the practices that I’ve written about are really ones that I use every day because I want to move beyond surviving as a person of color.

Anneliese Singh:
I do want to be in thriving and I do believe that all of the freedom fighters and racial justice movements have fought for this moment, they’ve dreamed of us, our ancestors dreamed of this moment of us actually having this conversation and then making these commitments. It’s not that we’re not on the streets anymore. It’s just like liberation is a very inside job. And, you know, Rosa parks knew that as she did yoga and Asana, I mean, there are so many people and the racial liberation movements who knew that there was something really important about nourishment, about building trust and about actually healing from racial trauma, so that we’re not continuing to enact the wounds as a white person, you know, acting out of the wounds of numbing and then enacting white supremacy or in being an agent or as a person of color as a BiPOC person acting out of our own internalized racism or, and or the distrust that we can have of our own selves. So I think the most powerful DEI work we can do in our campuses is really when we create spaces where people do learn to trust themselves, they learn more about their fullness of their identities and about history. You know, as I said earlier, everything about racism and white supremacy and cisgender ism, it will just be confusing unless you know, about history. So that was probably a long answer. I wrote the book for a lot of reasons.

Raechele Pope:
It was a great answer, you know, and I think about those things, I think about the timing because as healing, you know, we have gone through a very difficult periods, not to say there weren’t other difficult periods or that we won’t be going through more periods in the future, but there is something unique about this period. At least in my lifespan, I am hearing from so many BiPOC folks in particular who are talking about the incredible stress that they’re under feeling that their body is letting them down, that they’re having issues with panic attacks or, or high blood pressure at a time heart responses at a time that they have never experienced before. And talking to psychologists and physicians, they’re saying, turn off the news, get off social media because there’s so much coming in and we’re pushing it down. And so there’s, and so when you were mentioning some of the, the healing with it, the healing that Rosa parks knew to do, because you can’t keep giving it out, you know, without it affecting you internally and figuring out some ways of responding. So I loved that, that you’re focusing on healing because we need it. Right. We, it is needed. So

Anneliese Singh:
Yeah, thank you for that. And I think, you know, some of that goes directly back to my training in Traumatology. So I had the real honor of not only, you know, being in student affairs environments, but also being able to talk openly about healing and wellness. You know, I don’t think we’re always able to do that in our DEI work. It’s more like ingesting our banking, like concepts, structures, ideas, words, all important. But I think what we really are needing is for instance, is it about a good and trans one-on-one, you know, a good one-on-one on white supremacy? Or is it kind of thinking about like what you learned about your own gender and sexuality as a cisgender or straight person that doesn’t suit you as a white person, how you were, may have been taught to, to numb, to the impacts of white supremacy and how does that feel to have that numbness in your body?

Anneliese Singh:
And so I think racial trauma is you know, it’s, the field of epigenetics actually says that, you know, trauma goes back 14 generations. He wrote a fabulous book called My Grandmother’s Hands, talks about that. And so you can kind of think like a lot of the things we’re trying to process in our body, we may be in a DEI training, but what we’re really trying to process in our body is like kind of getting these toxic and unhelpful ideas about who we are and the labels that we use to get that kind of literally off of our hearts. I mean, as you were saying before for BiPOC folks, it kills us. And I’ll go back and say that I do believe that our freedom finding ancestors did fight for this moment, for us to not only have this conversation, but to live.

Anneliese Singh:
There’s so much of what we’ve learned over the last year and since the murder of Trayvon Martin in the birth of the black lives matter movement, which is really just an extension of the civil rights movement. Right and abolition is, we’ve learned that we’ve got to talk about black and Brown death, but there are metaphorical deaths that we see in our, our higher ed kind of units and settings. And so how do we create higher education environments where black and brown people get to live, where they get life. And so I think that it goes back to your question about DEI research and if it works, or if anything’s changing, I think our interventions are really centered on BiPOC life. Then we’re probably heading in a good direction.

Raechele Pope:
Well, that just really moves me into this other question. I wanted to ask you that so much of this DEI work seems to be centered, and it seems to be white centered, you know, helping white people to understand how, and I think that that’s important work, but it doesn’t really allow for the healing and liberation of BiPOC folks. And in some ways it prevents BiPOC folks from seeing themselves in the work. I was even looking at a review of your book online on Amazon. And someone wrote, well, you know, as a BiPOC person, I was really excited to read this and it’s not about me at all. I’m thinking I’ve been reading this book and working it with two different groups, my students, and I see me all in it, but I have to be willing to be, to get in there and acknowledge that pain and how I respond to it. So, you know I think your book does that well, what do we need to do to change that focus?

Anneliese Singh:
Yeah. Well, first of all, Raechele, you’re exactly right. That a lot of DEI work just as you know about multicultural competency, the birth of that work was really to help white folks know how to work with BiPOC folks. And so what we were left with in student affairs and counseling and other environments is, you know, BiPOC folks, we didn’t have competencies, but how to work with white folks, what happens when they’re microaggressions and our, our work setting. And so, you know, DEI efforts are constantly working with folks who have privilege, and that is important to some extent, but, you know, I go back to her work center the margins yeah, I mean, she’s given us the liberation equation and just a few words that if we center the liberation of BiPOC folks, then we’ve got to have black healing spaces.

Anneliese Singh:
We’ve got to have Latin X empowerment spaces and not just the student organization or, you know, it’s actually creating environments and asking folks like, what do you, what is missing? And not only putting those answers on the backs of BiPOC folks to answer, I mean, there should be places we can give feedback. And, input but it is, it is creating spaces that I would say are safer for us as BiPOC people to look at what we’ve internalized. I remember there was a time I was in Atlanta. I’d been in Atlanta for like five years and like living in the black mecca. Right. It’s, there’s a lot I can say about the black mecca that Atlanta, it’s not the black Mecca, it’s the black mecca in numbers, but not in terms of economic advancement housing, and a lot of other things, but regardless, I’m living in the black mecca, I’d been there for five years and all my doctors were white.

Anneliese Singh:
I was like, just hit me one day. And I was like, Oh my gosh, what? It just happens. It’s so insidious. And so I had to get busy at like reconnecting, reorganizing my life and making sure I had excellence in my life and my health care. And I share that story only to say that, you know, those moments when we as BiPOC folks, whether we’re black or non-black folks of color, it is painful for us to look at what we’ve internalized. You know, I try to look at that all the time. Where’s the next layer of anti-black racism. I’ve internalized, how do I heal from that? Not for black folks, but for my own humanity, when I do that, it’s going to make a world better and helped me work for black liberation. But the other thing I would say is that if you look at racial identity development one of the things you’ll find in the racial identity development of people of color is that, you know, when we experience racism, we try to tell white folks or other people, really white folks about it, and then were not believed.

Anneliese Singh:
And then we get and we need to set boundaries. And I call it the, I can’t trust white folks kind of schema and racial identity development, but we don’t always, we’re usually like, yeah, we get that space. We’ve been in that schema, but we don’t often talk about what does that do to us as humans, right? There’s some heartbreak there. That’s so deep. Like the fact that I grew up with a white mother who wasn’t able to name racism, and yet she was so courageous in so many other ways and in terms of how she stood by my father’s side and how we had strong black communities that we were, we were safer. What she taught me about, like the inability to act in dismantling white supremacy that is incredibly painful to look at and incredibly important. And then I think for all BiPOC people, a lot of times in student affairs and other settings, we’re busy advocating for other people and we’re creating safer spaces for them and what our space, what about our needs?

Anneliese Singh:
What, what part of ourselves do we have to put away? When we leave our homes to go to work, to adjust to a white space that demands a space for exploration and healing. So we can actually push against that. We know we’re surviving, we know why we do it. And we know why the most painful thing for us to talk about as BiPOC people is when we align with white supremacy, right. And when we don’t challenge it, and then we carry home that guilt and that pain and that shame, and it’s not ours, we didn’t create it. And yet we’re questioning ourselves. Right? So I think your question is really important because it really demands that we think about are we doing DEI work for white folks, are we doing it because we actually have folks that we need to center to make sure that if these folks have empowering liberating space, then actually our whole community has that as well.

Raechele Pope:
Right. You know, we’re seeing that in numbers, I think historically black colleges this year well for this coming year their applications to the campuses have skyrocketed. There are more people who are saying, I can’t be on these campuses. There are tons of people. In the Twitter verse saying things like DEI work is all about white people. I want no parts of it. This is why it’s not working. And you understand the sentiment, but we realized that we’ve got to make these changes. Now you don’t have to make them today. That’s okay. Somebody’s got your back. I’ll pick it up today. Somebody else needs to pick it up tomorrow, but it’s got to happen in these spaces. And it doesn’t have to be you making that happen. You know, when you’re protecting yourself getting a different kind of space. That’s okay. Right. I do look at safe spaces though. And it makes me nuts because I’ve often said I’ve never felt safe. You know, you still have to stand out there and your risks, what you’re going to say in the space that you’re going to say it, you try to say it in a way that you’re proud of the way you said it, when you, when you go home, you know, I said it in a way that was honest so that it could be heard, but at the same time, I know I wasn’t safe saying it.

Anneliese Singh:
Exactly, exactly. And that’s that gut check. And, and so yeah, I think it’s just probably a conversation we’ll be having in student affairs for the rest of our professional lives. Because if you kind of look back at kind of the evolution, I love that you know, about organizational development, because, you know, we started off as these segregated places and universities, then we became more passively tolerant, and then we became more quote, unquote, multicultural. And then we’re at this place where, okay, are we going to be passive and tolerate and be multicultural? Are we actually going to connect to liberation and say, Oh, this is the, and this is the path. And maybe that path we were on was making it okay for white folks to have BiPOC folks and the environment, as opposed to BiPOC folks, being a standard defining element. And having input to whether an environment is actually quote unquote, safe, safer, whatever words we want to use.

Anneliese Singh:
I mean, that’s the work of abolition, right? I think as we look back at our histories and student affairs and in DEI, I think this is where right now we’re having a really important conversation about reparations, about really, you know, what harm our universities have done and how we might repair. And there’s so many to me, I’m excited about this conversation. I know is scary for a lot of white folks, it’s going to be okay. But if we can act in the ways we’ve acted to address COVID as a nation, we can address what we have done in this country. We now call the United States descendants of the East Atlantic slave trade it’s the time is overdue. And so to me, that is the work in student affairs in DEI that I, you feel it on campus, even in a virtual environment, it’s coming, it’s been here and the conversation is going to continue to escalate until I think we finally deal with it. And when we address reparations, I think then we will start to see the DEI work. That’s not banking. That’s not about like, only like teaching you a few new words. But you’ll really see the transformation of our environments and of higher education. I am here for it. I’m ready for it. And we’re all working for it.

Raechele Pope:
And I think people think that’s going to be a smooth transition. It’s not, there’s going to be frustration and disappointment and pain and hurt the fear. And if we can push through it, we know that when we push through that, we can get to a better space and the better space is coming here. It has to there’s too many people saying that.

Anneliese Singh:
Yeah, well, I think you’re right. I think student affairs professionals, I always see us as like the heartbeat of a university. Like we know where the pain is, but we know where the hope and liberation lives, right? Like I just came from an event that was BiPOC LGBTQ+ disabled faculty and staff. And we danced, we hugged, we loved on each other and we nursed each other and you know, that’s going to keep us going for a long time, but it’s really the white folks that are going to need to get into those DEI trainings and teach one another accountable and, and find ways to, I love that you’ve created those racial affinity groups in your teaching because many people haven’t had an experience of that. And if you haven’t had an experience of you really don’t understand what it’s like to work with. If you’re white, worked with other white folks to dismantle racism, or if you’re a non-black folks of color to look at, Oh gosh, like we experienced our own racism and now we’ve internalized this.

Anneliese Singh:
And then black folks, I mean, there’s a ton of black pride and black joy and black brilliance. I’m here for all that. And still black folks experience like utter pain and, and internalized self doubt, like all that stuff. Imagine people come to be with us for four years, for six years, for seven years. And by the time they leave, you know, the thing we know that’s going to happen is they’re going to go into the world, call the United States of America, maybe somewhere international, which is great. And they’re going to experience more of the same. Right. But what if, when they came to be with us, they actually learned how to have the conversations they started learning and what liberation felt like, like deep down in our bones, that they got a felt sense of, of this work, that they can never shake out of their bodies and that they didn’t even know they need it. Right. That’s the DEI work we’ve got to be heading towards. And I get so excited thinking about that world. I want to live in that world. And, you know, today at that event, I did get to live in that world

Raechele Pope:
And look at you, that world co-create at world, but that’s something really amazing, you know, and I can do this all night, you know, and I would love that opportunity, but I think we’re coming close to the time when we need to end. And so I’m wondering if there were some final thoughts that you’d like to share with our listeners, something else that you didn’t get quite a chance to say or something you’d like to expand upon.

Anneliese Singh:
Yeah. thanks Raechele. I think number one, I think in racial healing, racial justice, DEI work, all the work we do in student affairs. So important to tell the truth. A lot of times we have, we kind of bend over backwards or we try to, you know, kind of become a pretzel to make things okay for senior administrators, for whoever appearance, a student, you know, but I think if we can tell the truth and continue to tell the truth, that this is something we haven’t gotten yet, we’re trying to figure it out. And it’s so important. We don’t know exactly how racial liberation works, but we’re going go for it. We have we have a sense of what it’s like on campus when it’s actually experienced by BiPOC students, faculty, and staff, and that when you come into our communities, you’re going to experience possibly some disorientation.

Anneliese Singh:
Isn’t that what we tell new community members, things all the time, you know, you’re going to come to college, you’re going learn new things about yourself and you’re going to grow and it’s going to be hard. Well, you’re going to come to our campus and you’re going to talk about racism and you’re going to get sad and angry and defensive. And then maybe you’re going to start to really imagine world that we in student affairs, weren’t even trying to imagine when we were in grad school or like even last year that we’re gonna dream build together this campus, this community where we can actually be who we truly are. I think when we do this work, we get to know each other’s families. We get to know each other’s strengths, our growing edges. And so that would just be the final thing I would say is tell the truth. Don’t carry other people’s water for them, carry your own, do your own individual work. And when you get worried about how to give other people feedback on racism and other systems of oppression, ask yourself how you would want that feedback. Do you want it in little spoonfuls or bite sized pieces or big chunks? Like I think having a lot of cultural humility in the work is so important can do so much Raechele for tonight. It’s always good to spend time with you. And yeah.

Raechele Pope:
Thank you. This has been so amazing. I am so grateful for your time today. Anneliese and I know that your calendar has been overwhelming. So I really appreciate you making yourself available and sharing this time with me and with our listeners and folks I’m telling you, if you have not picked up the racial healing handbook, do that. It’s it’s, it’s sort of life-changing and Annalise’s other book, a newer book, the queer and trans resilience workbook. I’m saying, pick them both up, check them out for our listeners, just to remind you, you can receive reminders about this and other episodes by subscribing to the Student Affairs Now, newsletter or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com. Please subscribe to the podcast, invite others to subscribe, share on social or leave a five star review. It really helps conversations like this. Reach more folks and build a learning community. Again, I’m Raechele Pope. Thanks again to the amazing, amazing Anneliese Singh and to everyone who is watching or listening. What’s next.

Websites

Anneliessingh.com

Books

The Racial Healing Handbook

The Queer and Trans Resilience Workbook