Community Equity

A good friend recounted to me a story about her experience holding a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training session for a group of professionals at a private company. At the first meeting, one participant raised her hand to ask what the hiring and treatment of nonwhite people on the job had to do with her home value. Her definition of “equity” prompted her interest in attending the training, but to her dismay, the event seemingly had nothing to do with increasing her real estate portfolio. It is clear that the woman held no reciprocal understanding of “equity” in relationship to the history of structural racism and exclusion. She had no advantageous framework that could hold an accurate view of “equity” and demands for reparations and repair. For her, “equity” was necessarily detached from creating equal and mutually beneficial outcomes for her colleagues, but she was clear that the DEI workplace convening posed a distraction from and a threat to the protection of her individual economic interests. Unfortunately, she is not alone in her assessment. Her affective impulse to protect her privatized gain is part of what compels the cancellation of not only DEI programs and initiatives but the underlying, community-based knowledge about the social unity that emerges from shared histories and shared resources as well. If the “haves” among us are only able to ponder, forget champion, community with the “have nots” when there is no cost to doing so, then collectivity will be baseless and performative because our interests will necessarily be divergent and oppositional. In times like these, who cares about your interests? My friend’s anecdote got me thinking about how the over-investment in home value can obscure the appreciation of community equity. Where do we go from here

An Olive Tree in the Borderlands: Teaching Palestine in a New Mexican High School

This article is a reflection on the path of teaching about Palestine in two charter high schools in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. Teaching about Palestine became critical to me as a person with ancestral ties to genocide, as a human rights accompanier, and as a teacher seeking to guide students towards liberation. Tying together the healing medicines of the mesquite tree of the borderlands and the olive tree of Palestine, this work encapsulates the power of turning grief, disillusionment, and overwhelm into action in classrooms. As I share how my liberatory pedagogy, sprouting from Indigenous teachings, comes to life within my classroom, I describe the lessons that I learned and the changes I have had to make over the years to teach about Palestine in a way that empowers students instead of discouraging them. In learning about Palestine, students can understand their own lived experiences of colonial violence as peoples in the borderlands and use their learning to build futures as changemakers. Alongside coursework about Palestine, students created and painted a collective mural with the theme of “liberation.” The mural represents Palestine, and the process for the mural demonstrates the liberatory work we did together. Each section begins with excerpts from the poem “The Second Olive Tree” by Mahmoud Darwish to honor how olive trees accompany the Palestinian liberation movement. I will continue to teach about Palestine and grow the lessons in response to students, the land that we spring from, and the ever-changing context of all our relations seeking liberation. My teaching is dedicated to building relationships with the two-legged, four-legged, and winged ones, the ones that grow green, the earth, the water, and the celestial beings

HARM-HEAL: A Power Consciousness Model for Bodies of Privilege

Why do white, brahmin, and other dominant-raced and/or -casted bodies that have historically harmed Dalit, Muslim, Adivasi, Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (DMA-BIPOC) continue to perpetrate harm? This article advances what we call the HARM-HEAL model to elucidate how power is conditioned in individual and collective bodies of privilege, and how power can be deconditioned and reconditioned to facilitate systemic change. Even as we may resist power supremacy within our spheres of influence, reconditioning at somatic, personal, and communal levels is essential before any sustainable justice can occur at the institutional level. The HARM dimension of our model identifies the similar mind-body foundations of white and brahmin power supremacy as a moral disease. The HEAL dimension posits rehabilitation from this moral disease progression through accountability, correction, and reparation, which set the stage for justice and equity. We intend for this model to serve as a framework for critical individual and collective reflection on power within academic societies, universities, human rights organizations, and other institutional settings

What I Have on My Mind: A Transformative Reframing of the Blues Epistemology

Clyde Woods’s work is positioned at the nexus of critical, urban, and cultural studies, and his blues epistemology offers a guide to reading the cultural production of marginalized groups as maps containing alternative visions of the past, present, and future. However, research that extends the blues epistemology has been limited, and tends to approach his multifaceted blues in a piecemeal fashion. While his writing consistently sought to unite cultural studies with activist praxis, he never settled on the best terminology with which to capture his multifaceted understanding of the blues as both a body of explanation and an engine of change. Rather, he tended to reframe his blues to fit given projects. Moreover, this lack of consistency is reflected in a secondary literature on the blues epistemology that tends to center either the former or the latter. By tracing connections between literature on imaginaries, cultural studies, Black geographies, and blues epistemologies, I argue that Woods’s theoretical contributions are most accurately and productively understood as blues imaginaries. I conclude that remapping urban imaginaries through the lens of blues epistemologies reshapes our understanding of urban imaginaries by highlighting the voices of the marginalized, focuses our understanding of the blues by recentering praxis, and creates spaces for diverse groups of people with radical epistemologies to reimagine radical futures

Addressing Educational Inequities for Pacific Islander Students through Action Research and Community Partnerships

Due to the legacy of nuclear testing and colonization, Chuukese and Marshallese immigrants came to Hawaiʻi for healthcare and educational opportunities under the Compacts of Free Association, agreements between the United States government and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau. As immigrant groups new to Hawaiʻi, Chuukese and Marshallese students and families have encountered racism and educational injustice in schools, contributing to disenfranchisement and significant barriers to learning. This article addresses understudied issues for teachers. It shares experts’ cultural and linguistic perspectives on essential background information for teachers of Chuukese and Marshallese students

The Improbability of John Brown

I was a senior in high school when I saw the videorecording of Rodney King being beaten by LAPD officers Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Theodore Briseño, and Timothy Wind. I had just come home from my first year of college the day the L.A. riots broke out. I watched all of this, and more importantly I watched the reaction to it from the people closest to me. I observed these events through the lens of a young man who had always wanted to be a police officer, but was also coming to life intellectually in the world of higher education. In 2000, I passed on a seat in the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police Training Academy in order to continue working to become a scholar of occupational culture and socialization within policing. To further my academic career, I had to focus on graduate funding, data, jobs, conference presentations, publications, grants, tenure, and promotion. It was a lot of work, it did not pay well, and in the end, I didn’t see how it was really helping anybody. By 2007, the weight of all that was crushing me. That’s when I was introduced to the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, and that changed everything

Grounding at the Crossroads: A Collective Reflection on Walter Rodney’s Critical Pedagogy

Drawing on our collective experiences as community-grounded ethnic studies scholars, we reflect on our engagement with the work of Walter Rodney. In particular, we discuss a reading group we created during the COVID-19 pandemic to discuss Rodney’s 1969 text The Groundings with My Brothers. Building on a body of scholarship that uplifts Rodney’s approach to critical pedagogy, known as “grounding,” we each reflect on our experiences applying Rodney’s “grounding pedagogy” to our respective regional and institutional contexts

A Visual Culture History of Chicane/Latine Solidarity with Palestine

For several social justice circles around the world, Palestine is a relational matter and an organizing principle. This article argues that the Chicane/Latine visual culture of solidarity with the Palestinian cause has been present in the Latine community’s struggles for justice in the United States since at least the 1970s. Though Chicanes/Latines sparingly reference Palestine in contrast to countries in the Americas and occasionally Southeast Asia, the modest archive of visual culture tells an important story of transnational solidarity rooted in struggles for liberation. In this article, the dispersed archive of visual culture includes photographs in community press, activist prints, and mock wall installations on U.S. college campuses. The article studies archived Chicana/o periodicals of the 1970s and 1980s, such as La Gente de Aztlán, La Raza, and El Editor, and examines photographs that render Palestine and Palestinians visible. It then examines contemporary activist prints by the collective Dignidad Rebelde, showing how these images build on the earlier forms of affective solidarity. The collective’s critique of U.S. and Israeli settler-colonial violence incorporates Latine cultural symbols. This article concludes with an examination of mock wall installations at the University of Washington and Northwestern University, illuminating how they visualize both Palestinian and U.S.-Mexico border wall struggles

California’s AB 101: The Long, Intergenerational Struggle for Establishing and Expanding Ethnic Studies

In 2021, California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 101, which requires that all students graduating high school by 2029–2030 must take an ethnic studies course. California is the only state in the nation with this graduation requirement. This article explores the historical and contemporary factors that pushed California to legislate and implement AB 101. We utilize a historical case study approach focusing on different student-led movements that embraced ethnic studies to combat educational inequalities. To do so, we pinpoint three historical phases in which ethnic studies became implemented throughout the state. In the first phase, influential scholars in the early and mid-twentieth century produced scholarship about historically marginalized people of color, which became foundational for the study of Black, Chicana/o, Asian American, and Indigenous people. The second phase involved students of color fighting for a culturally relevant curriculum, as demonstrated by the 1968 Third World Liberation Front, the 1968 East Los Angeles Chicano walkouts, El Plan de Santa Bárbara, and Chicanx/Latinx student hunger strikes in the 1990s. Lastly, the third phase consists of contemporary students, parents, educators, and activists successfully petitioning their local school districts to mandate ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement. Despite these gains, far-right organizations in cities like Santa Barbara have mobilized to push back against both the ethnic studies requirement and progressive social justice groups like Just Communities Central Coast. This resistance initially derailed AB 331, an earlier ethnic studies bill that Governor Newsom vetoed based on accusations that it was “anti-Semitic.” A revised version, AB 101, was then introduced and passed. While momentous, we contend, AB 101 is still limited; reaching its full potential would require greater teacher credentialing and the expansion of ethnic studies to K–8 students