The White Educators’ Guide to Equity

During our engagement of our community college colleagues over the past decade, we have had the honor and privilege to encounter thousands of disruptors at districts and campuses across that nation. One of the themes we have observed from our encounters is that these communities of disruptors are not only seeking out kindred spirits but also tools to deploy at their various sites to bring about equitable outcomes for our most marginalized students. Dr. Sims and I instinctively knew that it would be virtually impossible to provide all of the necessary tools in one singular tome, therefore we joined forces and partnered with Peter Lang Publishing to establish a series.

The Educational Equity in Community Colleges (EECC) series is a contribution to not only the disruption but also the reimagining of post-secondary education broadly and community college specifically. Our series defines and redefines, criticizes, and critiques, packs and unpacks, most importantly, imagines and reimagines. Our contributors take the time to lay the foundation by examining the historical origins of inequality and inequity, not because we are “stuck in the past” but because we understand that what we are looking at in terms of outcomes data, campus climate, and culture is the effect and not the cause. We take time in each volume to define terms, not because we believe that our work in an exercise in semantics but precisely because we understand how terms have been coopted and weaponized against equity-advancing practitioners. Lastly, our writers do not pull recommendations and solutions out of thin air but are rooted in years of practice, critical self-reflection, research, and application.

One of the most disappointing developments in this work has been the co-optation of the equity work by colleagues centering themselves as faculty, administrators, or classified professionals as the primary focus of the educational equity agenda. There has been a consistent trend of conflating labor issues with student equity issues by creating false equivalencies and strawman arguments. Yes, there are labor issues that need to be addressed by all constituent groups, but to stymie the efforts of our most vulnerable student populations to make your point is problematic. Our student equity agenda can no longer afford to be held hostage by our colleagues who are not able to address any institutional challenge beyond employee grievances, petty personality conflicts, and personal financial gain.

When I deliver public addresses, rather in person or virtually, one of the most consistent questions I get is about how to “get the people who really need to be here…” or some variation of solidifying “buy-in.” Buy-in is a worthwhile endeavor if we are engaging colleagues dealing in good faith; however, it is a stall tactic at best and a disingenuous strategy to maintain the status quo at worst when dealing with bad actors. Far too many institution’s equity efforts have plunged into an abyss of centering the comfort of our colleagues over the suffering of our students. Our series aims to remedy that tendency.

Therefore, the Educational Equity in Community College series is about pivoting from the performative to the transformative. We whole-heartedly believe in radical love and its power to transform the lives of individuals and communities; however, it must be paired with an equity-minded consciousness and transformative policies, practices, and procedures to truly disrupt and reimagine our community colleges and our college community.

Lasana O. Hotep
November 2021
Dallas, Texas

This was a family pool; it did not have depth markings. Nevertheless, I did not really know anyone at this pool party except my cousins that I arrived with. I was interested in avoiding any and all conversations that held the potential to turn me back into a pumpkin. I was from the “hood”; this was not the hood. I felt out of place. For me, the pool was not only an escape from Sacramento’s insidious heat, but it also seemed to be a safe haven from the conversations that would reveal that I was far more urban than I was urbane. Up until this point in my life, I’d never seen so many blonde people congregating in one place. I am from Richmond, California; suffice it to say, this was not my normal crowd. My cousins grew up in spaces like this. I did not. As the hum of the conversations – which seemingly enveloped the pool – grew louder, I decided to recommit to my watery refuge. Party goers were discussing things that were altogether foreign to me, like ski trips and planned European vacations. I went back and forth between pretending that I could swim and flopping around like a fish. All I knew was that as long as I was in the pool, I was relatively safe from questions about where I was from. What I did not know upon entering the pool, however, is that the pool floor was a gradual decline. I did not swim much. I had no access to backyard pools in my social circle, and despite the best efforts of the City of Richmond’s Parks and Recreation folks, our city pool was notoriously filthy. So, in retrospect, it should come as no surprise that I found myself, rather abruptly, in over my head.

In community college, just like in the pool, I was surrounded by friendly faces. Many community colleges are surrounded by friendly faces. But again, I will say this for the people in the back: this is not enough! It’s never been enough! Good intentions are not enough. Committed educators must be willing to jump in. Without real justice-centered work, we will never advance equity. In order to serve students who are the first in their family to go to college, we have to be hypervigilant so that they understand the terrain that they are being forced to navigate. If we leave students in situations where they are forced to navigate unfamiliar terrain without properly informing them of the traps that lie ahead, we have failed to adequately prepare them to reach their fullest potential. Had I known that the pool floor’s decline, that it went from 4 feet to 9 feet, I would have stayed in a place where I felt safe. And it may be that everyone in this crowd had a pool of their own, I cannot be sure. They may have understood how backyard family pools work. But this was the first time I had ever been in a backyard family pool. From my view, prior to jumping into the pool, I had no way of recognizing the declination of the pool’s floor. You see, the people that filled this backyard barbecue assumed that, because I was in the pool, I must have known how to swim.

First-in-family, poor ethnoracially minoritized students of color (PERMSC) do struggle in community colleges, not because they are innately unable to be successful, not because they are not filled with promise and potential, but precisely because we have not done the work of clearly delineating the necessary markings on the “pool.” Here it makes sense to operationalize these two concepts. Both racialized capitalism and white supremacy exist conceptually and analytically, and both also exist materially. In order to understand the relationship, which I have described elsewhere as an unholy, incestuous union (Sims et al., 2020), between these two conceptual-material realities, I will endeavor to define them here.

White Supremacy and Racialized Capitalism

White supremacy is impelled by a belief that peoples racialized as white are more valuable than non-white people. The concept of white supremacy was created for two primary purposes. The first purpose was to justify the dehumanization of Indigenous and African peoples so that they could be marked as physical “sites” of surplus value extraction. This means that their minds, bodies, and souls were used to create wealth for their oppressors, which is the function of racialized capitalism. Capitalism is inherently exploitative. White supremacy, simultaneously, determines and provides justification for who can be systemically and systematically exploited. The second reason is to drive a wedge between people who have the same/similar socioeconomic realities but different ethnoracial identities. That is to say, the concept of race is used to keep poor BIPOC people and poor white people (more accurately, people racialized as white) from working together, in solidarity, to overthrow capitalism.