Whiteness Beyond (Just) White People: Exploring the Interconnections Among Dimensions of Whiteness in Higher Education

Toward (Racial) Justice-in-the-Doing of Place-Based Community Engagement

“…From an organizational development perspective, ideologies become institutionalized as culture and practice, shaping individuals' interactions within the institution's context (Tevis et al, 2023). Thus, analysis of whiteness in place-based community engagement reveals the ideological foundations of the educational culture into which university-community professionals and engaged researchers have been socialized.…”

“…These cultural norms, and thus whiteness-at-work, "are damaging," dRworks practitioners have argued, "because they are used as norms and standards without being proactively named and chosen by the group." However, because we live and work in institutions and communities historically shaped by white culture (Tevis et al, 2023), "these attitudes can show up in any group or organization, whether it is white-led or predominantly white or people of color-led or predominantly people of color" (p. 1).…”

“…In the scholarship about community-university engagement, considerable space has been dedicated to the potential of community-engaged teaching and research to address complex and pressing social issues such as these. In the same spaces, scholars also warn about the consequential material effects of whiteness embedded in higher education on People and Communities of Color (Tevis et al, 2023) such as "traditional service-learning programs [that] commodify People of Color for the benefit of white people and white-serving institutions" (Irwin & Foste, 2021, p. 419). Without "paying attention to .…”

“…However, scholars argue, whiteness permeates the "philosophical underpinnings" of US higher education (Stewart, 2020, p. 13), and very little attention has been given to the ways whiteness in the ideological foundations of higher education shapes the work lives of professionals, faculty, and the collaborations they form to address community issues (Telles, 2019). Thus, this commitment to racial equity will be no more than words on this page without the necessary work toward disrupting whiteness as embedded in the everyday messages and practices of historically whiteness institutions through curriculum, pedagogy, and professional norms (Gusa, 2010;Tevis et al, 2023), and thus as a shaping force in community-university interactions. One tool seems to hold promise for examining PBCE: whiteness-at-work (Yoon, 2012), which names paradoxical situations where self-identified proponents of racial equity -namely, higher education practitioners --employ discursive strategies and practices that ultimately perpetuate whiteness.…”