Balances and IMBALANCES in Community Engagement

Welcome to Voices in Between, the podcast with international voices on education and diversity. This is Christoph Knoublow meeting educational experts and discussing perspectives in between ideas of true and false. Hello everybody, I'm here today with Dr. Janine Hillfletcher from Portland University in New York City and she's discussing balances and imbalances in community engagement. Hello and thank you for having me. I will start by just letting our audience know that I am a faculty member at a Jesuit and Catholic private institution in the city of New York, in the Bronx, in New York City. And the institution itself has been historically a white serving institution, that is, most of its students or most of its history, were white Catholic students. But the community surrounding the university has over a period of time become predominantly a community of color, a very large population of people who are first generation in the United States and a shifting population, but also a population that is economically poor on the scale that the U.S. statistics, I think still places the Bronx as the poorest urban congressional district. So economically, the community is at a disadvantage relative to the university and the university itself as a private university has traditionally been students who come from families in which they could afford the tuition payments at the institution. So you're just kind of picturing that the institution that I'm at is a private institution, predominantly white serving historically. It is in a sense a location of privilege and the surrounding community has been a poor community, largely residents racialized as Latino or Black and a large population, an immigrant population. So you can picture the setting. And we can envision the imbalance of power between members of the university, attempting to engage in mutually beneficial partnerships with various locations throughout the community, various nonprofits, various organizations that are serving the community. And I have been involved in a variety of projects for a number of years I served as our faculty director of service learning. And we would invite faculty members and students to be part of projects that were going on in the community as a way of expanding what they were learning in the classroom. But after a number of years working under a mentor in that program, we really recognize that this predominantly white classroom of students who were heading out into and privileged students, heading out into communities that were lacking resources and were racialized in ways that were not predominantly white, that that was not addressing the imbalance that was a structural imbalance within our nation. And so we began to ask the questions, not just the fact that there is a location, the location of the institution, right within the location of the wider community that had an imbalance of access to resources and were racialized differently. But how did that come to be? What's the history of our community that we would need to know in order to support students not just to go in and perform acts of charity, but to really enter into mutually beneficial partnerships. And what we had to come to an understanding was that we needed to empower students with the better sense of how race and legislation has played a part in creating this disparity, right? So that when we were asking students to engage across this wealth gap between their experience as university students and the experience of people in our local community, when we were asking them to engage across that wealth gap, we wanted to ask them to see that this wealth gap has been racialized in the United States and that this wealth gap and the racialization within the United States has a history and that our local community is part of that history. And what we needed to do was we needed to really undertake both the historical situatedness or a situation, sorry, situating our moment in a broader history, right? But then also having a better analysis of how does race function within the United States and how has race functioned within the United States. And what is our moment, right, in light of that longer history? And so rather than just being an institution that engages a local community, we wanted to think about how has our institution been a location of wealth building and the accumulation of privileges and how has our local community been a location that has been denied access to wealth building and has been denied access to those same privileges that our students that we're serving have benefited from. We had to go all the way back to the foundation of the United States and think with our students about the concept of a racial project. And so in thinking about the imbalance of community engagement and the imbalance of institution in relation to local community, in the United States you have to ask the question of the racial project that has structured our nation, that then creates the wealth gap that members of the institution of the university might be encountering relative to members of the local community. We had to go all the way back to the foundation of the nation, right, in which white Europeans and Christian, my background of training is as a as a theologian. So in the area of religious identities, right, so we had to go all the way back to the founding of the nation and the recognition that within the nation's racial project, we were borrowing white Christian Europeans who were creating the colonial setting, were borrowing ideas from Europe about the indigenous people that they might encounter, right, and that foundational moment of our US history, white Europeans brought with them ideas about diversity, right, that were framed as a hierarchy of humanity, that the white European Christian rational male, right, exhibited what God designed for humanity and that if you read the racialization as it comes out of Europe in that time of US colonialism, the other races of the world were variously characterized, but they were always characterized in a hierarchy under white and Christian at the top. So you can think about the long history of enlightenment thought with a thinker like Emmanuel Kant and the way in which Kant was working with other racial categorizations to say well the ideal human, right, is in the form of the white European way of thinking and being and that when European Christians arrived to the nation that will that to land the the new geography of what will become the Americas, they encountered indigenous people and they racialized them, they said well they don't live in the quite the same way we do, they don't look quite the same way we do, and they also are undertaking practices of being human, right, that are different from what we expect, right, one of the key features of racialization of indigenous peoples on the part of the white Christians who arrived was that they are not relating to the earth in quite the right way, right, they're not building cities in the way that we are, and so they were racialized as not as intellectual and also not as industrious, right. This long project of racialization in the United States that I started all the way back at the beginning of the founding of our of our country in order to bring you to the place of our present moment, all the way back at the founding of the -- the country, this idea that the indigenous populations were not quite capable of directing themselves, right, then legislation was put in place by which the white colonists took the land, right, by purchase or by conquest, and indigenous peoples were kept from both their relationship to the land and to wealth building. Now, you know that I'm trying to get you to the 20th and 21st century when we're working with students and inviting them to engage a local community, but we needed to do this long history of recognizing that white populations created the conditions for wealth building for what will become white Americans to their benefit and denied those same opportunities to those that they had racialized as indigenous or racialized as Indian. Then you have several hundred years of white Americans creating institutions through an economy of enslavement, by which peoples of Africa and then peoples of African descent after them were racialized as black. They were categorized as not a part of God's design until they were made Christian. They were racialized as not as industrious and not as intellectual and not as rational as white Christians of European descent, and through that racial project were denied access to wealth building under a system of enslavement that said black Americans don't have the right to the fruits of their labor, right, they were racialized as black and they were held in servitude over several hundred years. Those foundations of our nation, our nation's racial project by which indigenous peoples and peoples of African descent were denied wealth building were the same racial project that provided the resources by which white Americans would gain access to wealth building. So even in the 21st century we have to ask the question, why is it that our institution has been a predominantly white serving institution? We've got those foundational racial projects in the founding of the country by which indigenous people were racialized, by which those who would build the nation as enslaved laborers were racialized. After enslavement was outlawed in the middle of the 19th century, new systems were put in place within the United States by which white Americans gained access to education for wealth building, gained access to sources of wealth building through legislation that gave them ownership of land. And in the Jim Crow era in the United States, the late 19th and early 20th century, after emancipation, black Americans were kept from the wealth building that would allow them the privileges of accessing sources of education like the institutions that we're found in today. That brings us up to the middle of the 20th century, Jim Crow and the kinds of legislation that kept wealth building from black Americans come all the way up through the middle of the 20th century. The dismantling of Jim Crow legislation was also, there were other than new legislation like legislation that came with the wealth building that comes from home ownership in this country that continued to be racialized, right? So when we're thinking about institutions of higher education here in the United States and the kinds of privileges that those within those institutions bring with them, we have to think about a racialized project, a racial project of wealth building by which people of color in this country were denied access to land ownership. They were denied access to education as a form of wealth building in the generations leading up to ours. They were denied access of wealth building in home ownership that would give them the resources then to be part of some of the elite institutions of higher education, right? So in order to understand what it is to be an institution in the United States that is engaged in a wider community when that institution and the wider community both have been impacted by this national racial project by which wealth building was directed to white Americans and wealth building was kept from Americans of African descent, indigenous Americans and Americans who were later racialized within the categories of Latino, Latina Latinx that all of those historical realities go into the experience that we experience today which is racialized institutions, right? Predom historically white serving institutions engaging with communities that have been denied those opportunities for wealth building through legislation related to home ownership, through legislation related to education and through legislation related to land ownership and wealth building. So I'm not I'm not sure whether you have arrived with me at that complexity of thinking about what it means to be an an educational institution in the American context that is attempting to engage in community education. But what I'm hoping that you have followed with me thus far is this sense that members of the United States as a nation have had differential opportunities for wealth building that would give them access to institutions like institutions of higher learning and which would have impacted their opportunities for the kinds of communities in which they live. So when we're talking about community engagement we're asking questions about what has led to the racialized makeup of our institutions and what has led to the racialized makeup of our communities. And the diverse imbalances between institutions of education and their communities which is a topic in the US but certainly beyond the US as well. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening. Looking forward to meet you back on voices in between.