Decentering Whiteness and Pathways Are Topic of This Years Opening Day Keynote Address

Publish Date: Feb. 15, 2022

Associate directors at the USC Race and Equity Center Debbie Hanson and Esmeralda Hernandez-Hamad presented the keynote address at CHC’s all-campus in-service meeting on January 13.

The team focused on providing CHC faculty and staff with strategies to decenter whiteness and develop racial equity, especially as we use the opportunities and momentum that’s afforded to us by the Guided Pathways process.

“It’s about understanding that our institutions are built on and embedded with whiteness. That beliefs, values and practices maintain the racial hierarchies,” shared Hernandez-Hamad during her opening comments.

“Being race conscious means learning, and knowing how to see the salience of race, and the product of racism, on a day-to-day basis, and that all of us are able to intervene and address these racialized experiences to advance racial equity.And this is an ongoing process, a continual learning process,” she continued.

The pair challenged attendees to see if racial equity exists at Crafton by first looking at the institutional data, but even more importantly by disaggregating data at the classroom and service office levels.

“Understanding racialized impact will allow us to step back and say, okay, I have equity gaps for my students, or I have equity gaps for my black students. It can feel a little overwhelming because what do I do with this data. One of the strategies is a race conscious grade and attendance map,” Hanson explained.

The presenters used examples of mapping and observations from other colleges as tools that can be implemented to address equity issues. The presenters encouraged faculty and staff to leverage disaggregated data and do a very fine-grained analyses as a first step in understanding where racial inequities might be occurring.