More Than Words: In Conversation with the Language of Racial and Social Justice-Making

Source: https://americancultures.berkeley.edu/twtt/more-than-words Parent: https://americancultures.berkeley.edu/

[Best practices] is one of those terms that I do not like because it is fixed. It is embedded in whiteness...thinking about best practices, for whom? By whom?

Vice Chancellor Dania Matos

More Than Words | Teaching In Troubled Times

About

Commitments to the work that connects diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging/justice, anti-racism, anti-Blackness, anti-white supremacy, and abolition work, are deep and rich. Each of these terms also has motivations and genealogies. During this event, there was a discussion focused on unpacking the relationships between these frameworks and how they help us better understand and situate the work and the questions that they generate. When we think about the relationships that we hope to foster with and between students, how do we use these frameworks to inform our practice? How do these frameworks evolve and enhance our already hard-earned/created work? Or realize that we might move our practice forward in new and different ways of being? What kinds of knowledge are best revealed through each of these different frameworks?

Moderator & Panelists

• Moderator: Maggie Hunter, Senior Director, Centers For Educational Justice & Community Engagement
• Panelist: Amani Allen, Professor of Community Health Sciences and Epidemiology, School of Public Health
• Panelist: Dania Matos, Vice Chancellor, Equity & Inclusion
• Panelist: Mel Chen, Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture
• Panelist: Phenocia Bauerle, Director, Native American Student Development

To suggest that there is something wrong with the status quo is hard to grasp and even offensive to some ... It is going to take more than a pebble to cause rippling effects into a system that has been operational for hundreds of years.

Professor Amani Allen

Event Resources

Padlet

Padlet is a platform where users can upload, organize, and share content to a digital bulletin board. During the event, participants engaged with each other using Padlet to identify intentions and goals for the session, questions to share with the community, and resources. Visit Padlet

"Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coats

During the event, Professor Amani Allen recommended "Between the World and Me" to better understand racism before diving into anti-racism. The book discusses the identity of whiteness and the social construction of race, which is an illusion built upon prejudicial beliefs, which led to a system of social hierarchy that determines differences in life chances and opportunity structures between groups.

"On Being White and Other Lies" by James Baldwin

Professor Amani Allen also suggested James Baldwin's essay "On Being White and Other Lies" as a resource to better understand racism. The essay, originally published in the popular African-American magazine Essence in 1984, is a dramatic reminder that "becoming American" meant learning to be white in a new way for European immigrants.

Recommendations for Instructors

Overtime there has been a lot of iterations of language around justice, race, queer, and LGBTQ rights issues. The language might change but we are still doing the same work. How much does this language really matter? What is your perspective on this? (29:00)

Question 1 Time Stamp (29:00)

• The pro is that it can be a powerful communication tool to tell the world what we stand for as an organization and what we stand for as individuals. However, if left unchecked and left at that level, above the water and not going deeper, take action on those things, it really can fall flat and it can do an injustice to the work in this field because then they are just words that do not have meaning. (36:10) Amani Allen
• My hope is that these terms undergo their lives and changes. That is a good thing that is about reflecting sensitivities to what is happening around us. (38:23) Mel Chen

How has your own language changed over time? What are the words that you tend to gravitate towards to describe the work that you do in your own orientation to it? What are words that rub you the wrong way? (39:15)

Question 2 Time Stamp (39:15)

• My thoughts went to [the word] diverse. Because what happens across institutions of higher education, outside of institutions of higher education, but also at UC Berkeley is describing individuals as diverse. Diverse applicants, diverse students, what does that even mean? So diverse means different, different from what? This normalizes whiteness and fosters marginalization. (40:28) Amani Allen
• A term I gravitate toward a lot is equity. I make a big distinction between equity and equality ... When we say equity, often what we are talking about is equality, meaning we are giving everyone the same thing. In reality, we are not starting at a level playing ground. We are already at different levels. So equality, all that does is perpetuate inequality. If what we are really interested in is leveling the playing ground, then we must be focused on equitable interventions which means we have to give some groups more than others recognizing that we have for centuries taken more from some groups than others. (41:26) Amani Allen
• One term we throw out is best practices. This is one of those terms that I do not like because it is fixed. It is also embedded in whiteness, like inclusion, like a best practice of including others into a space that doesn’t work for them ... Thinking about best practices, for whom? By whom? I think about that embeddedness of anti-racism and all that work and how we throw out that term in ways that are sort of comparing ourselves to other structures that are still perpetuating those forms. I don’t talk about best practices and instead I talk about how we are transformative practitioners. (44:30) Dania Matos
• Diversity is a fairly superficial term. I am deeply aware of the ways that diversity has a different power or a different angle when it is used in an institutional context. So it becomes even perhaps more dangerous when it is an institutional term in the sense that I think it is much more likely to become a quantitative interpretation of diversity. When I do use the term I say diversity in a qualitative sense. (46:22) Mel Chen
• In terms of a word that has really stuck with me and that I use constantly, it is coloniality. I think colonialism is this framework. It is an ongoing process, unlike the illusion that colonialism ended. It is a way to think about the intersection of many of the terms that we have spoken about today. And it is also a kind of transnational history that set a lot of the terms by which racism operates in the US and into the place that they feel somewhat familiar. (47:20) Mel Chen
• I find that naming things as colonial or imperialistic makes people uncomfortable. And I think that you cannot move past. You cannot move into deconstructing certain tenants of white supremacy that are embedded in our society and our culture, and in the institutions that we work in without discomfort ... It allows us to be more critical and it opens it up to be seen. I am very much about looking at the margins and what is being invisible as in discussions of race and ethnicity, inclusion, belonging and who is not at the table because that allows us to see who are also tokenizing in those conversations. (48:49) Phenocia Bauerle

What is still inadequate about our words? What are we still unable to capture with the vocabularies that we have? What phenomenon are we not able to quite describe the way that we would want to? (51:41)

Question 3 Time Stamp (51:41)

• Some things that I think about are how can students feel comfortable in an institution where they are not? How many students are not getting the experience of being taught by someone who looks like them? I think what is missing from that too is how these institutions were never built for people of color. The conversation misses this whole piece of the settler colonial state that continues to invisibilize the system. The system was set up to uphold white supremacy in a very particular way, and it is cherry-picking people which is tokenizing. (52:29) Phenocia Bauerle
• One thing that has been my frustration, particularly around indigenous issues and is talking about the process by which people indeed to be deemed experts in particular kinds of knowledge in this academy to be able to teach. There are people who have indigenous knowledge that is just as valuable, just as important, that do not have that kind of education which makes that knowledge not valued. You have to have a particular kind of knowledge to teach that knowledge. This does not speak to the wealth of knowledge that exists in many communities. It is the language of white supremacy that we are using to try to dismantle white supremacy. (53:29) Phenocia Bauerle
• As you asked this I thought of another word I hate which is the misuse of intersectionality. I think oftentimes we think about building multiple identities versus how the systems of oppression work together. When I think about what is missing, that is a really big piece of it. I think what is also missing is recognition of the collective and we are still in that very individualized US concept of well it is not in my backyard and it does not harm me so I do not care. If we did care and we were working on that collective good and that collectivism that is not endemic to the genesis of the US, then I think we would be at a very different place because to eradicate this means that people have to give up power. People have to give up privilege and concede in ways that there has been a lot of gain from. For me this is a big missing piece and new word. (55:10) Dania Matos

When you think about some of these different words and the set of practices that are connected to them, how does some of that show up in your teaching or in your practice? (57:10)

Question 4 Time Stamp (57:10)

• What comes up immediately is the need to shift from being teacher centered to being student centered practitioners ... It is a practice of being mindful of reading the classroom. Of being connected to your classroom in a very communal kind of way letting go of some of that power and really allowing whatever emerges to kind of happen very organically, because the kind of learning that happens in the classroom is not just what is written in articles or what is written in textbooks but also the social experience of being in a classroom that matters. Sometimes we can miss that without recognizing that a negative social experience in the classroom can actually impede the kind of canonical knowledge that we are really trying to promote. (57:26) Amani Allen

• Being student centered and being human centered as someone who leads with the intentionality of love, recognizing that knowledge and all those things also come outside of the syllabus. Creating a space of vulnerability. A space recognizing that very existence is part of resistance, and that rest is a right, and that I honor and hold a space for all and that co-creation of agency. (1:00:00) Dania Matos

• One of my most powerful classes was recognizing an oral history and tradition that culturally I had been brought up with and that was just my grandmother’s story and how she experienced religiosity or Latin religiosity was being validated. But then I had to question why I have to wait for an institution to show up to validate that? And how do we honor that space? (1:01:14) Dania Matos

• Following the lead of my students and realizing that I think what we are all saying is more is needed. It is never enough to rest on terms that we need. We need to treat these terms as the beginning of conversation or as part of the beginning of a conversation rather than the end. (1:03:16) Mel Chen

Can you talk about the ins and outs of language with teaching first years, particularly around issues of justice? (1:07:01)

Question 5 Time Stamp (1:07:01)

• Want to bring them into feeling like they can use this language and take the time to unpack it. But also I think I shifted from, I'm going to help you enter into this world and understand what these words mean to really teaching from a responsibility that I've shifted very intentionally into what is my risk. What is my responsibility to this community to help them be able to be at the tables and have the tools that they need. My first question is what does this word mean? And breaking it down ... If you want to be an academic, that is fine. Just understand the system you are buying into. If you want to be counter, what does that look like and be thoughtful about it. (1:08:12) Phenocia Bauerle

Additional Thoughts (1:11:15)

Additional Thoughts Time Stamp (1:11:15)

• How do students with marginalized social identities experience when they come to the berkeley campus? What do they experience in recognizing that when students come to us, they're coming from a lifetime of experiences, a lifetime of experience marginalization and some things that come to mind for me, our stereotype threat most immediately … What are our students bring with them into the classroom and how do we as educators create a level playing ground or position ourselves in a way for our students to learn and get around some of these experiences. Some of those buzzwords can exacerbate these feelings of marginalization because we use them in a very empty way (1:11:51) Amani Allen