So the webinar is now live. And folks will be able to see the Join button on the vFairs platform. And I see Adriana has joined us. Welcome, Adriana. We will get started here in just a moment. Give an opportunity for folks to come in. And thank you for coming. There's Anthony Burik. Hello, Anthony, my colleague at OTAN. Dana, Todd. So folks are rolling in, Kita.

Great. And as people are coming in, if I could just ask you to write your name and your work. And what organization you're with, or where you're coming from into the chat. Just so I can see who's in the room. Thank you.

Perfect. And you still have folks coming in, Kita. So maybe another minute or so. Give folks a chance to come in, and write their name and their affiliation in the chat pod. And then we can get started. We'll give a couple, 30 seconds or so. And just as a reminder to those that have entered the room, the session is being recorded. And so the recording will be posted on the CAEP Summit vFairs website for the next 90 days. And then after that, it's my understanding that the sessions will be archived over on the CAEP tab website. So you will have access to them in the future as well.

Great. So should we give it another moment? Or you think I should go ahead and get started, Penny?

I think you can go ahead and get started, Kita. The folks rolling in have slowed a bit. But you'll get more folks coming in I'm sure in the next few minutes. But I'll try to give the information in the chat. So they can add the information as they come in. OK?

Yeah.

Well, good afternoon.

Thank you. I appreciate people showing up. I believe this is the last session of the CAEP Summit for this year. And so thank you for making time in the middle of your day to come sit with me. And be in learning together. I decided to do this because last year, I really enjoyed presenting in-person. And decided to share where I was at in my learning. And I have to say this format is definitely more difficult for me. I like being in person. But again, thank you for being here.

So I titled this presentation Decolonizing Education-- Exploring Whiteness, Healing, and the Recovery of Belonging. And there's a lot in that title that we will definitely unpack together. And you probably already do, but if you want to have paper and pen by you, that would probably be good. There'll be a few moments where I give you a chance to do some reflection.

So in all of my work with students and colleagues, I always like to start with just a moment of grounding to open the space together. And although we're not actually in a circle, wherever you each are, just taking a minute to feel yourself sitting in your seat, bringing a little bit of awareness into your body.

You may have been running around all day. You may have been sitting, staring at the computer a lot. So even giving yourself a chance to close your eyes, if you want. And taking a deep breath in through your nose, and letting it slowly out.

As I'll talk about throughout this session today, but bringing our bodies into our thinking and learning process is actually, I've found, a really important part of bringing ourselves to our work and showing it more fully. So just inviting you to come into that space. And if you need to take a minute and roll your shoulders-- you might have been hunched over the computer-- and just breathing while you do so. And then, when you're ready, opening your eyes just to arrive.

And at this point, we would all go around and share. I was disappointed when I found out that, in the webinar format, we can't actually see each other. And it definitely doesn't feel like a circle when we're not able to see each other.

But I would just invite people, if you haven't already, to put your name, your work into the chat. And actually, if people could take a moment now and just write what brought you to the session today, what's important to you about this work? So just anything in the title that made you think, oh, I want to connect with this for this reason.

Or how does it apply to you? And you could just take a moment and type a few things so I can see and we can all see what brings people here today. I'm just going to give a minute for that.

And I just encourage participation. I know it's easy to step back in this environment. So focusing on equity and healing, connecting and better serving diverse students, whiteness as equity, equitable access and opportunity-- passionate about decolonizing everything anywhere, it needs to be done. Great, thank you. Doing the work for myself to better inform my work and practice.

Wonderful. Thank you. And hopefully you can all-- I think reading the chat will be part of what we do here together. So just encouraging you to engage with each other that way through the text on the screen. OK. Great. Thank you all.

And also just, as we're opening, I want to take a minute acknowledging all of you for showing up today. And I also want to acknowledge the land that I'm on, which is Pomo land. I'm up in Ukiah in Mendocino County. And the Pomo people, past and present, this is their ancestral land that I have the privilege of being on.

And in decolonizing work, there's many facets of it. And one, of course, has to do with land. And I personally think it's important to just recognize the history and where we are. And I've included a link here. And these slides are all in the folder that's linked to this presentation.

If you know whose land you are on, you could type that into the chat right now. And if not, maybe afterwards you want to go to the link and look up. It's a really neat interactive map that shows all the different tribes in the United States. And it really breaks it down in a cool way.

And just also, along with acknowledging whose land we're on, there are some organizations. Like in the Bay Area, there's a group of Indigenous women who have an organization called the Sogoreate Landtrust. And they collect the Shuumi tax, so for people with colonial settler backgrounds heritage who are living on that land, they invite us to pay a tax to help them with their rematriation movement of taking back the land and building community and connection with the land.

Cool. So a few people are writing in. Great. So yeah, hopefully you will be inspired to just learn a little bit more about where you are, if you haven't already.

And I also just want to be really transparent. In my own work of understanding my whiteness, and my conditioning, and what I've been taught, and how I operate in the world, and learning to unpack some of the more harmful conditionings that live within me, I have a few principles that I'm really working with in my work of decolonizing myself, my own mind, and the way that I show up. And I just want to be explicit with you.

So one of them is slowing down, so not rushing. And we'll get more into this later about how some of this can counter some of the aspects of white-dominant culture that can be so harmful. So slowing down, having awareness of emotions and body, not just thoughts, thoughts, thoughts all in the head rationality.

Recognizing that everyone holds valuable knowledge, and speaking from my own experience-- so not universalising. I can only speak for myself. I can't speak for any group of people to which I belong or to any group of people to which I don't belong.

And I also want to be really clear that I am not claiming to be an expert. And I think the way our education is set up historically, the teacher is the expert or the facilitator, the presenter is the expert. And so even here, me talking to the screen not being able to interact with you, for me this is part of the problem with colonial-style education which is like, here, I'm just supposed to dispense something.

I would so much rather be in dialogue in a circle having us all be able to share our knowledge. And I admit I'm not technologically oriented enough that I've figured out how to really make that work. And also the limits of the platform, the Zoom webinar, I find it's pretty limiting. So there's an irony in doing this.

But I just really want to own that I'm speaking for myself. And I am just sharing my learning with you in hopes that perhaps it will be of service. But also I chose to do this for myself as a way of pushing myself to speak what I'm learning and to be able to articulate the arc of my understanding, which goes to the next point of just ongoing learning and reflection is part of this week, part of this work.

There's no arrival. There's no, OK, I've figured it out, here I am. And I think, in my own work of my race consciousness-- I'd say, when I was a child, I didn't think about race at all, as whiteness has a tendency to do, to deny its own existence and just normalize whiteness.

But in my later teenage years when I started getting more of a critical lens and learning, I would go through growth spurts of, oh, wow, things are this way, and feeling like I'd done some work and unpacked some things. And then there can be a plateau. I think I figured something out. And more and more I'm learning it's a constant cycle, and the work really never ends.

And the last point of just authenticity and courage, it can be-- oops, sorry about that. It can be scary to talk about things, especially because white conditioning teaches us as white people-- so me, as a white person-- not to talk about race. And I think we're in a moment in history where that is definitely being taken apart and coming undone.

And another characteristic, of whiteness being perfectionism, which we want to say the right-- I want to say the right thing. I don't want to say the wrong thing, when really, we have to talk about these things. So that's just my transparency about where I am and what I'm working with and trying to bring forward.

I even thought about using the term decolonisation or not. I think-- I feel and think-- that we're in a moment of there's more opportunity and more opening because so much change is happening with the pandemic and then the curtain being drawn back on the racial violence and some of the uprisings. And more white people in my life in the last eight months have reached out wanting, what should I read, and let's talk about whiteness in a way that I hadn't seen before. So it really is an opening.

So with colonization, we often think about one country taking over another country, stealing the land, exploiting resources, exploiting labor. And that is absolutely part of it in that material sense. Michael Yellowbird, who I really recommend looking up-- he's at North Dakota State University-- says, "Colonization refers to both the formal and informal methods, behavioral, ideological, institutional, political, and economical that maintain the subjugation and/or exploitation of Indigenous peoples' lands and resources," which I think is a thorough and historically specific definition.

I recently read another idea about colonialism, which is broader and has helped me in my thinking, from Rene Henery. But it says, colonialism is "the imposition of a value on some facet of creation-- a person, a landscape, a tree, an animal, water, et cetera-- that is other than or separate from its intrinsic value." So that really, imposing a value system on anything that is separate than the inherent value of that something, is a colonial move. And I feel like that's helped me think about the way our education system is colonial.

So for instance, the way we assess students and what we're measuring success by. And I think we're making progress. Or who do I mean by we? But I feel there's a lot of progress being made on that.

OK, I'm going to move forward here. I'm just checking out the chat, too. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome to put whatever is coming up for you in the chat.

So I want to just back up and say a little bit about whiteness, even though I've already started talking about it a good amount. An important reminder, that there's no biological foundation for race. It is a social construction. And I get surprised sometimes at how that idea is not alive among everybody.

And I just wanted to read this Toni Morrison quote. "There is no such thing as race, none scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct. And it has benefits. Money can be made off of it. And people who don't like themselves can feel better because of it."

And a definition of whiteness-- whiteness is a hegemonic system that perpetuates certain dominant ideologies about who receives power and privilege. Whiteness maintains itself in cultures through power dynamics within language, religion, class relations, sexual-- race relations, sexual orientation, et cetera. Excuse me.

So whiteness-- my understanding, from what I've learned, is that whiteness was created with a purpose to give a certain group of people power. And in that sense, whiteness and white supremacy can't really be separated. And I know some people aren't necessarily comfortable with hearing that.

When they hear white supremacy, they might think of the KKK, or far-right groups, or white nationalism. But where I'm at in my understanding of it is that whiteness itself is predicated on the idea of white supremacy, because that's why the very idea was created. So because of that then, as someone who benefits from whiteness, it's my responsibility to start to take that apart and look at how it's really operating.

So Hillary had put a question in the chat. How do we balance teaching students the language and civics skills they need to assimilate into our culture while also valuing the knowledge, experiences, education, and culture our immigrant students bring with them? Yeah, I think that is a great question. And I think I'm going to go through my presentation. And then we'll see if what I offer answers anything to that. And if not, we'll have time to talk, because I'm not planning on talking for the full 90 minutes. OK, let me move forward.

So when we're thinking about whiteness and colonialism, I think that another idea that I have been introduced to and is making more and more sense to me but also isn't necessarily widespread is that we are all wounded. And we've all been hurt by the system. As I say that, I want to be very clear that we are not hurt in the same ways. I'm not saying everyone is a victim to the same extent, or everybody's a perpetrator to the same extent. That just, obviously, isn't true.

But I think that, in white culture, there has been an idea that, oh, whiteness is working for us. And really, I disagree with that. From Segrest, a scholar, she said, "What we miss is insight into the profound damage racism has done to us," and she's speaking to white-identified people, "as if we as a people could participate in such an inhuman set of practices and beliefs over five centuries of European hegemony and not be, in our own ways, devastated emotionally and spiritually."

And again, Bell Hooks really talks about, be careful of saying this, because you don't want to recenter whiteness. But I feel like I am talking about whiteness explicitly, because that's what I've been trained up in. And so I have to study it in order to take it apart, especially because it wasn't until-- I think I was 21. And I was teaching.

I went to a conference. And they talked about whiteness and white consciousness. And it was the first time I had even heard those things brought up, because again whiteness normalizes itself and problematizes color. And so we could talk about other races, but not talk about whiteness as a thing.

And then two other quotes-- just, "Nobody's free until everybody's free," from Fannie Lou Hamer. And, "Turn your wound into wisdom." So just recognizing here that we're all wounded in some ways. And the healing is going to look very different depending on where we are, our position in the power dynamic, depending on our own experiences, depending on how our different identities intersect and inform our experiences.

I also appreciated this quote. "Reimagining whiteness requires seeing yourself as fully capable of responding to racial inequity and engaging other white people in this process as a non-negotiable imperative. Thus, white people addressing whiteness toward racial equity requires a collective effort." So just recognizing this as something that there is work white people need to do together.

So when I was thinking about this presentation, there's really two pieces I wanted to talk about. One is the inner work that I believe we as teachers, educators-- I, myself, am a teacher. I realized I've hardly even introduced myself. So maybe I'll just tell you a little bit more about me in this moment.

I'm born and raised in San Francisco. I taught at alternative and continuation schools in San Francisco and Oakland for 15 years-- English, social studies, and yoga. And I, three years ago, moved up to Mendocino County, where I've been teaching in the county jail for Ukiah Adult School and getting to work with adults finishing their high school diplomas. And working in the jail has really been an educative experience for me and also given me the chance to really do some healing work with folks and integrate some of the social-emotional learning and academic learning.

And what I've found is holding space to hold the circles in the jail-- I can only offer what I have. So doing the inner work of taking apart some of the stuff that I'm talking about is necessary in order for me to show up and hold the circle in a way that actually creates equity and doesn't perpetuate racism. Just reading the chat there for a moment.

So Yellowbird again talks about decolonizing our minds. So, "Undoing the effects of colonialism and working toward decolonization requires each of us to consciously consider to what degree we have been affected by not only the physical aspects of colonization, but also the psychological, mental, and spiritual aspects." So just again, here focusing on what we can do inside ourselves.

And an idea I've been introduced to is that there is really three fields of transformation. There's the personal, the interpersonal, and the systemic. So right now, I'm talking about the personal, but recognizing that interpersonal-- which also, I guess, I'm speaking of that, too-- is not more important than the systemic transformation, but that all three of those things go together. And what is inside of us, I think, gets communicated to our students.

So if we haven't unpacked some of our own what people like to call unconscious bias-- but I have a question about, is it really unconscious-- but unpack some of our own bias, then that will get communicated. And if we're not willing to look at how white-dominant culture is playing out through us, then we'll keep perpetuating that. So I feel, as a white woman working with a diverse group of people, it's my responsibility to unpack my stuff so that I can interrupt some of those cycles that I've been raised in, which takes a lot of constant reflection.

This is a piece, just a tool for self reflection, that I think is useful in many contexts. But you may have heard of the idea that we have a comfort zone, a stretch zone, and a panic zone. And a piece of white fragility can be, in talking about race, we can go into panic zone. But just generally, when we get stressed, when we're being pushed outside of what feels comfortable to us, there is that place of healthy learning, like the zone of proximal development. But then there's beyond that where we can start to freak out a little.

And this idea of the compass of shame says that we have-- there's four main tendencies. We're going to look at it. And then try and think about yourself. This applies to both professional and personal work. Where do you think you go?

So one of the tendencies-- this relates to fight, flight, and freeze. So the fight access is across. So there's the tendency to attack the other, like criticizing people, not taking responsibility, pointing fingers, lashing out, just blaming everybody else. And then, on the other side, there is attacking self, which tends to-- putting yourself down, thinking you did something wrong, never feeling good enough, which is just another form of fight, but it's directed at oneself.

And then the flight tendency is to either withdraw, so just checking out. Maybe you're there physically, but you're not really present, isolating yourself. Or avoidance, which is just pretending the situation doesn't exist. Numbing out with-- could be drugs or alcohol, but could also be online shopping, or just binge watching, whatever we do to avoid.

So as you look at this, I invite you to just think about, what is my tendency? So just which tendencies do you see most in yourself? And then you can go ahead and share this in the chat. Thank you, Daniel. And you can think about, what works about this for you, because we do it for a reason.

But then, how does it impact your work? And what might you like to do instead? And I'll just share, as an example. And then people can write in the chat.

Mine is definitely attack self. And what works about it, I think, is that I don't get into conflicts with other people. I'll just beat up on myself, think I didn't do a good enough job, or whatever it is. And then I don't actually have to deal with conflict.

But how does this impact my work? Well, if I'm modeling being mean to myself, how can I actually-- why would I afford somebody else more care or encouragement than I would give to myself? And then that encouragement I'm giving to someone else doesn't have the authenticity that it might if I could also give that same encouragement to myself.

Just reading-- so yeah, avoidance, withdraw, defensiveness, although justifying it and saying you're not being defensive. Yeah, we definitely have-- we can do all of them at certain points. But in thinking of what might you like to do instead, it's a big question, but something to think about.

But just, how can awareness of your patterns and bringing attention to them perhaps shift your habits? And the reason I included this is I think, in doing some of the decolonizing and racial awareness work, there can be a tendency to go into a panic zone, because it's not necessarily, in the white-dominant world, our mode to be talking about it. So people get out of their comfort zone pretty easily.

Yeah, a good example-- avoidance allows me to avoid conflict or saying something I don't want to say. It impacts my workers. I could avoid responsibilities that I should face head on. Yeah, thank you to everybody who's sharing-- so being curious, go towards a neutral space.

It's hard to see past color when you're a person of color, good or bad sometimes. It impacts my work, because I pay attention to the people in the room who look like me. Thank you all for sharing. So you can take that with you.

Now I want to get into some of, I guess, what I see as the meat of it. An organization called Dismantling Racism published a piece-- I don't know how many years ago, actually, maybe 15 or so-- that outlines some of the characteristics of white-dominant culture. And these things, we might see in ourselves.

And they also might live in our organizations or institutions. And I just want to go over them-- so defensiveness, individualism, perfectionism, urgency, either/or thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, paternalism, only one right way, the right to comfort, objectivity, progress is more and bigger.

So you may look at this and be like, oh, wow, I feel these in myself a lot. And also, oh, my organization really tends to have urgency. We think, we have to hire somebody now. And then you end up not doing the search to really make sure you're recruiting and bringing in a diverse group of candidates. And so then you end up hiring another white teacher at the school when really, with more time and a better search, you could be bringing in more teachers of color.

So looking at these characteristics-- get my Forward button going. This is where I wanted to do breakout rooms, if we could. Which of these characteristics do you see most strongly expressing in yourself and your work? How does it show up, and what is the cost?

And if we were doing PD at a school or something, I think this would be a great thing for a school organization to be looking at together. But for now, I'm going to be quiet for a few moments and give you a chance to write, and think, and hopefully really share in the chat. Yes, I'll go back to show you the slide. And I know I just read them. If anybody wants me to explain further about one of them, I'd be happy to do that. So just giving people a chance to think.

Yeah, objectivity-- so the idea that there is an objective perspective and that it would even be possible to look at something objectively. And I was a history major in college. And this came up a lot, because the way that history has been written, in a certain sense, seems to assume that there was one correct perspective.

And I think, at this point, we realize-- well, hopefully-- that everything is subjective. And there are as many perspectives as there are people. And so there's not going to be one correct version of history or of an event, and that really-- so subjectivity is really about, for me, honoring everybody's experience, perspective, and valuable knowledge whereas in white-dominant culture, the idea that somebody can be objective and hold the actual truth, we're throwing that out the window, because that's just based on-- it's not real. I guess that's what I would say about objectivity.

Oh, yeah, perfectionism, defensiveness, can you-- oh, versus explaining. Can you explain the difference? So perfectionism I see as the idea that we're always striving to get it right, and that we don't want to make mistakes, and that really that holds a-- I mean, us, I'm just talking about humans.

Or I can speak for myself. Perfectionism is wanting to do it right, so unwilling to try new things, thinking that it's possible to get it right. So perfectionism is very focused on the product rather than the process, that we're trying to create some ideal thing, rather than a learning process that is messy.

I see, for me, the antidote to perfectionism is accepting messiness. And that can be in processes around anything. But as I age, I'm finding life is still messy. And the more I can embrace that messiness, the better off I am. And the better off the people around me are, because things do not fit into a neat little box.

So defensiveness I see as different from perfectionism. Defensiveness is just not wanting to take responsibility. If we get criticized, we want to just lash back. No, that wasn't me. And it comes from an unwillingness to look at our part and to take accountability, so just not being open to feedback.

So again, on the other side of the spectrum from defensiveness would be open learning. If someone wants to give me feedback and tell me, hey, this didn't work for me how you shared about this, or when you did this, it felt problematic because-- that's a gift. So rather than being defensive, I would want to be open to receiving feedback from a learning stance from the hope that I will keep getting better.

Great. I'm going to read some of these. A lot of these are reflected in the focus on payment points and outcomes-based funding that drives adult ed. We're forced to push toward quantifiable individual outcomes, because that's what our society and structure has determined is most valuable. Absolutely.

And so what do we do operating within that system? And it's just been interesting, with COVID, watching there be more wiggle room around how we document things. And even, OK, we can document attendance based on if the teacher and student are having communication that day around the work. And it seems like there's an opportunity for changing some of that structure.

On my campus, I've seen defensiveness, urgency, and progress as more as ways that disrupt institutional growth-- fear of open conflict, defensiveness, right to comfort. And as a program specialist, I've learned that the fear of conflict is OK, but be open to it. Conflict is more of another way of looking at things.

Defensiveness is what I used to do when I got angry when people were trying to help me. And I realize this was a positive thing. Now I'm learning that the right to comfort is key for all coworkers, as much as I can. I think I'm-- Daniel, I'm trying to fully understand.

I think-- so my understanding of the right to comfort is the idea that, as humans, we would all like to be comfortable. And unfortunately, the way our society has been set up, white people tend to think they have a right to be comfortable when people of color have been forced in many different ways and different situations-- not universally, but been forced to be in uncomfortable situations over and over again. And white people haven't been. So part of breaking down the white-dominant culture is recognizing that, as white people, it's OK for us to be uncomfortable and not freak out about it. So that's what I want to say about the right to comfort.

Also, the constant push toward the skill we teach having the most value in the world of work, rather than valuing learning for the sake of learning, and the non-work motivations our students have for being learners in our school. Yeah. Yeah, thank you, Carmen, for pointing out that perfectionism usually has a standard and specific point of view, typically white-dominant views, of what perfection entails.

This is a great reading in the chat. I feel funny reading to you guys, because you can read to yourselves. But I think it's so hard for me-- I'm just going to name in this moment-- hearing my own voice on and on. And I really wish that I could hear all of you.

So how do you change this mindset when people don't feel it's an issue? Yeah, this is the big question-- especially in school districts when isolating the students who are served in adult ed. Our students are second-class citizens, because they were the dropouts. Yeah. Yes.

OK, so the thing about changing the mindset-- just speaking to what you wrote, Tiffany. Again, I don't have all the answers, of course. For me, I do as much work as I can.

And then my work has been about engaging people in my life in inviting ways to join me in the reflection. And that's easier with people I'm more comfortable with. But then there are times when I'm like, OK, I need to push myself to talk to this person that I don't have that much of a relationship with, or at my school or with my colleagues, starting to introduce some of these things.

For me, deciding to sit here and speak to all of you not even knowing who you are feels like a big risk. But for me, it was like, OK, it's time for me to start speaking about what I'm working with in a more public way. And I think we each have to find what our offerings are. And that will depend again on our identities, and our positions, and what we have access to, and not.

But for me, it goes back to the courage piece. It can feel really daunting when it's like, a lot of people don't even think this is an issue. And I thought, oh, I wonder if there will be people in my audience who are like, whiteness, why are we talking about that, or just could see it very differently than me, which on one hand, OK, they see it differently than me. And on the other hand, my lived experience is telling me, this is really important.

So dialogue, taking risks, and I also think building community with other people who are doing the work, and having collaboration among people who want to be having these conversations so that we can keep brainstorming together and coming up with collective ways of putting pressure where there needs to be pressure put. That's what I have to say about that right now. Thank you for that question.

Just checking. I know. Daniel, I wanted to be able to turn off mute. But they had told me that that was not possible in this webinar format, which was upsetting. And I almost felt like I didn't want to do it, if that was the case.

Kita?

Penny, do you have something to say about that?

If you like, I can go through and manually open up microphones, if you like.

Oh. I would love that. Yeah, why not? When I had asked about that last week, they had told me it was impossible. And--

Well, we have ways to do this. Let me see.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh, Penny was the holder of this important knowledge. And I didn't even know. I had asked, and they had given me a pretty clear answer. Wonderful. I see your name's popping up.

Some of you may not be able to, because you have older versions of Zoom. So those of you that do not see a microphone, you may not be able to share your mic because you have, like I said, an older version. So let's see. I'm getting through it. So Kita, you can give folks a--

Yeah, I'm going to talk a little while you're making that work. Thank you. I just want to recognize Jacqueline had said, thanks so much for sharing. People of color have spent too much time explaining, and it's resulted in nothing good. And hearing Tiffany say that she's tired and glad to hear that there has been a work group started in somebody's consortium. And yeah, I appreciate that.

And I think, again, it relates to where the burden is. And I think, for me, I've just realized that white people need to step up. And even though we will never fully-- we can never understand the experience of being a person of color in this country. And we can talk about what we do know, and how whiteness is operating to perpetuate the racism.

And realize that it's not-- historically, racism is not our issue. Racism is white people's issue. We are the ones that have been benefiting from it, so I think that shift in how we see the ownership and the importance.

Ooh, I think-- it looks like--

I think you can-- you might have to-- I can help you, Kita, with controlling the microphone. So folks, if you can--

We can talk now, right?

Yes. Be appreciative-- I don't know, on your screens, if you have the ability to raise your hand, that would help Kita be able to recognize you and allow you then to unmute your microphones.

Yeah. So I think-- let's see if I can see more of you. Cool. I'm seeing names, and nobody's video, but at least some pictures. If--

So Kita, you do have two hands up--

[audio out].

--from Daniel and from Jacqueline.

OK, thank you. Jacqueline, go ahead, and then Daniel. We'll go women first.

All right. [laughs] So yeah, I just want to thank you for talking and bringing all this stuff up, because I know it's not easy. But I also want to say one of the things I've noticed is that, even as a person of color, there's a lot of these things that I've adopted to fit in.

And so that was a part of the perfectionism-- was, if I make a mistake, they're not going to hire another Black person. Or I'd be in a place where they say, oh, we want to look for a Black person. But the last time we hired one, it didn't work out well.

And so I think that it's an issue with white people. But it's also an issue of people of color sympathizers, or people taking on those things. And it makes progress-- I don't know if anything's being addressed towards those of us who've adopted these methods, because I know one thing I'm running into is things aren't perfect. It is a little messy. And people are like, ugh.

There's this expectation that we're going to do it perfect. It's going to be-- and it's like, we're learning. And we're all growing. And everyone gets a chance. And as a person who's worked in different places, I've seen white people being given that chance to grow, and move on, and grow into a role. But people of color don't get the same thing, I guess.

That's what I'm saying. So I was just wondering-- I didn't know. And then the other question I had is I didn't know whether or not there was a work group for folks to talk about this more actively and what's happening on their campuses, but also to get together and think of some strategies around it. That's all.

Thank you so much, Jacqueline. That was really a valuable perspective to add. So thank you. And on the work group front, I don't know.

And I am not that involved with CAEP, to be honest. I just took the opportunity to get to share and maybe connect with folks. But I definitely will-- I'll put my contact information. But I don't know if we could reach out to CAEP and find out if there's a work group specifically for the whole network.

And also, I just really appreciate you saying that you, as a person of color, you see these things in yourself, too. And that makes a lot of sense to me hearing that. And I think, because white is the quote, unquote, "dominant culture," and those white-dominant characteristics have infused all of our institutions, then all of us living here get influenced.

And I see that as a form of colonialism, the fact that we've all gotten molded to think urgency and perfectionism and-- they call them characteristics of white-dominant culture. But they're impacting everyone. And we all digest them, just like-- I don't know.

Ibram X. Kendi talks about, if you're walking in the rain, of course you're going to get wet. And to think that you've been walking in the rain of racism and that you haven't gotten wet is ridiculous. So whoever we all are, we've probably ingested some of these things. I'm seeing more in the chat. Oh, and then was it Daniel who was going to speak next?

Yeah, I just--

Yeah, he had his--

I just wanted to thank you for being so open and vulnerable and telling us everything that you're talking about. I also wanted to say that I totally misunderstood the right to comfort. I didn't realize the definition that you had explained.

One of the issues that we're having at our school-- and I'm sure other schools experience this as well-- is that I would just say bias among the international students in our school and how they have a huge-- I don't want to say racist, but have biases against different cultures and wanting to work with them or talk to them. And that's a totally different subject than what we're talking about right now. But I just wanted to make sure that people bring that up that that happens as well.

Yeah. And I guess I would just say again, thank you. I love how you spoke to something that you had misunderstood and how you're understanding change. And I think that I appreciate that embodying and being willing to admit-- not getting it perfect all the time. And then, in terms of-- yeah. Just for me, there's a difference between personal prejudice and understanding systemic and structural racism and who's benefited by that.

And I think there's absolutely important work to be done in all groups about stereotypes, and how we developed as young people developing ideas about each other, and unpacking some of that. That needs to happen as well as understanding how the structures are set up to benefit certain groups of people. I think I'm going to move forward in the slides. But Penny, if you wouldn't mind, if you see a hand up, if you could tell me, because I can't really see everybody.

I will. Anna is next.

OK. Go ahead--

Thank you.

--Anna.

Thank you. And definitely thank you for presenting today about this very, very important topic that is not touched on very often. How we addressed it at the consortium level when I came on board, because we serve this community in Greenfield-- I'm Indigenous myself. But in Greenfield, there's the huge number of also Indigenous people, like myself. And so I realized that there was a maybe miscommunication between our students and our instructors, the majority of our instructors.

And I think that there's-- I'm glad that you mentioned also that sometimes there's, I guess, an imbalance between the people that we have in our institution compared to who we serve. And so therefore, what we saw here where I work is the same thing, that there was a huge, I guess, sometimes disconnect between our Indigenous community and some of our cities and our instructors and just the way that our school was designed. And so therefore, we invited a non-profit, whose focus was on how to teach us how to talk to our students.

It's called Binational Center for the Development of Indigenous Communities. So Dr. Gaspar Rivera from UCLA actually came and gave a beautiful-- a full-day presentation about just a lot of misconceptions, just ways that we can connect with our students and be able to understand them better and be able to serve them better. We invited everyone from our county, especially people that work in government institutions. And it was very well received.

I felt honestly that, after, even our instructor, the instructors that I was leading-- when the instructors saw this presentation, it seemed to me that they related better to our students, and just provided a better service, and therefore increased our reach. So just as a possible solution as to what worked for us. Unfortunately, I feel that it also has to be consistent.

So that time, it was just one presentation, and we were done. But I felt that maybe even an annual presentation would have really made a bigger impact. That's all I wanted to share as a possible solution.

Thank you so much, Anna. Would you be willing to write the name of that organization in the chat so we can each look at it?

Of course.

They actually have offices all over California. So I'm sure that you'll find--

Great.

--the nearest office to you.

Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I'm seeing that Janette-- or Janice, I'm not sure how to pronounce your name-- is next to share.

Yeah, thanks. It's Janet.

Janet.

Yeah. Thanks. I just had a question. I know that this is an ongoing topic for all of us. And I'm just really grateful that the platform has been given. Give the challenges, sometimes we-- there's always that light within the dark, or the challenges that we're facing today. And I think it's also important that we start institutionalizing-- or adopting, I would say-- processes that would help us acknowledge when we're doing microaggressions or when certain behaviors lead to some kind of discrimination.

And I know, for some, people of different race have been embedded and may not realize it. That's the point of self-actualization. But also just I really would like for us to put processes in place where, for example, someone saying a microaggression, and you point them out, and they don't take it personal. How do we determine or how do we help communicate that it's not personal to that person? It's just it may be a subtle behavior that was never really paid attention introspectively.

So within that, what has worked for you when you're in those situations and vise versa that we can start implementing at our institutions? I feel like we always talk about it. And it's great that we talk about it. But I don't see much action being involved, in my opinion.

Thank you for that. Thought provoking. From what you said, there's two strands, the first in terms of about being able to call each other on microaggressions and people not get defensive. And again, that's more in the interpersonal field of transformation. And for me, that's where I just recommend for white folks to read White Fragility, and maybe be in white affinity groups to talk about it, and start unpacking.

And then I feel that, generally, I've really shifted. I noticed that there were times where it's really easy for me to want to police, especially other white people. And that is not my job either. So shifting from a calling-out culture to a calling-in.

And what does calling in really look like? For me, the way that I love to receive feedback is someone saying, I noticed something. I wonder if you're open to receiving some feedback, coming from a place of genuine, are you open to receiving feedback? And then they can say, yes or no.