Community is the Center
Julia van der Ryn, Executive Director, Center for Community Engagement
I’m truly grateful and honored to have the job that I have and to be able to work with people I learn from every day. I often question my own relevance and how effective I can be as white woman doing this work — with students in the classroom, with my colleagues, with community members and organizations. None of these spaces need one more white person. This critical questioning of my own role and positionality is necessary and must be chronic. I should be uncomfortable, alienated at times. Maybe it isn’t always “productive” and maybe it keeps me awake too much at night, but I do think this is part of the work, especially for white people.
Questioning and self-awareness should fuel the work, the way we do the work, not inhibit it — yet, knowing when to stand back is also necessary, to catch myself when I put myself at the center. Let’s not default to ideas that it is possible to “put yourself in another person’s shoes”. You can’t. And imagining isn’t necessary when there are people right here who can tell us their lived experience. It bothers me that we even have to talk about centering people’s voices and knowledge. The reality is they ARE central to any social change work. Yet this is the power of the dominant norm. If we hold power, we have to be very intentional not to fall back into established structures, cultures, norms. We have to continuously and consciously engage in strategies to shift our paradigms to authentically value community and cultural strengths. Creating a more just and equitable society must be driven by the knowledge and skills people develop navigating the structures that were not built for their survival, the structures that must be changed.
What continues to rise to the surface, to bubble up as we dive deeper, is that the communities we engage with are the oxygen of our educational endeavor at Dominican University of California. The people and communities most impacted by injustice are the life-force that breathe the right and the ethical into social change work. The people most harmed by racist, inequitable structures know how to resist, persist, center the needs of their whole community, not just their own. Faculty and students are learning through immersion with community. Yet, so much of the time it is the contrary for people from the community who need to navigate institutions, white spaces that even when well-intentioned, expect adaptation. Instead the institutions and structures need to change. It is crucial that they to learn how to transform from the people and communities that have been excluded.
The Center’s explicit commitment to community-engaged teaching and learning that “values community voice and knowledge” (as our Service-Learning Program Learning Outcome states), compels us to keep learning to breathe with community, rather than take all the air from the room. In 2022, our professional organization, LEAD California invited us to partner to offer a faculty development series. Service-Learning Program Assistant Director, Emily Wu and I named the series, “Critical & Asset-Based Community-Engaged Learning: Pedagogy & Practices” and then challenged ourselves to develop and facilitate in the fall semester. Participants included faculty from our institution as well as University of Southern Ca, Santa Clara University, and University of La Verne. In creating this series, Emily and I continued to deepen our dialogue about how to “teach” others the importance of centering community. A lot of this work has to do with decentering our own academic knowledge, what we think we know, until we actually breathe the air that is community. It is a practice that is also about unlearning, undoing our own conditioning.
Institutional Accountability & Commitment
Over the past few years, the Center for Community Engagement has worked to expand advocacy and policy level opportunities for our students. In doing so, we have seen clearly that diversifying representation does not change racist and inequitable structures. While representation matters, white dominated groups and organizations often seek to increase diversity by adding people of color without changing the structure. Yet these opportunities are often designed for people with the privilege of time, stable finances, and who have never doubted their belonging in that space. Increasing representation without changing how the organizing body is structured, does not address the ways in which these opportunities are less accessible to people that work multiple jobs, aren’t English fluent etc. Instead, the unspoken or subconscious expectation is that BIPOC members will assimilate, adapt, adjust themselves into white spaces–that is if they can find the time and have the support systems to even be in these spaces to represent the interests of their communities.
There is no way around it, and I’ve been told that this language is alienating and not “productive” but until we address the white supremacy that underlies these spaces, the structures they uphold, and the whitewashing of language — then diversifying representation doesn’t actually represent change.
People and communities who are most harmed by oppressive structures and narratives are experts in these social forces. An asset-based approach is one that honors the knowledge and skills of people who have had to struggle to survive within these structures. If we are committed to creating a society that “treats” all people justly, then we must start with respecting this knowledge. People and communities that are historically oppressed, have a lot to teach all of us about struggle, resistance, generosity, hope, and humanity. Policies and decisions made purely from an external view will ultimately not be effective, this has been proven time and time again. We can see it most clearly, from a distance in “well-intentioned” international development efforts, yet these same mechanisms driven by external theories of what is needed, are the status-quo in U.S. approaches to “need”. Therefore, authentic and sustainable social change must be informed and driven by the knowledge of people and communities who are the most impacted, most harmed by oppressive structures.
While not all BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) are directly impacted by systems of mass incarceration and deportation, the interconnection of unjust, racist structures is rampant and extensive. A recent article in the New York Times Magazine, “The Toll of Police Violence on Black People’s Mental Health” details the impact of structural racism. Reading the daily news triggers trauma because people live the reality everyday of not being safe or protected within education, healthcare, housing and every other social system. For this reason, abolitionists believe that it is not enough to abolish police, prison, border control, stringent immigrant policies and on and on. We must address the conditions that keep people at the margins, that perpetuate generational poverty and structural violence. This includes U.S. responsibility for policies and interventions in Latin America that often drive people to migrate.
Addressing Structural Racism: Ongoing Learning & Action with Community Knowledge at the Center
“Neither success or failure is written. The story of our generation will be based on what we are willing to do. Are we willing to endure the grueling fight against racist power and policy. Are we willing to transform the antiracist power we gather within us to antiracist power in our society?” — Ibram Kendi, How to be an Antiracist
Shifting and recreating entrenched structures and paradigms is not an insurmountable challenge. With commitment and moral will, they can be changed. Maybe they won’t be perfect and we won’t live in a utopia, but we can make them better. Striving, struggling for justice is also necessary for our collective humanity.
Yet, these institutions are already slowly dying and it is exactly these traits — the clinging to power, the resistance to change that will eventually be the long, chronic disease that kills them. If we have to wait that long. Kendi fought his battle with cancer and instead of receding to protect his own well-being, doubled down on fighting racism. In the chapter titled, “Survival”, he uses the powerful metaphor of racism as a cancer that is killing the body of this nation. Kendi survived his own cancer “against all odds” and believes that our country can also overcome structural racism.
If we can truly center the knowledge, voices, expertise of people and communities who have resisted, persisted we have a much better chance of a cure. Nikole Hannah-Jones describes in her 1619 essay, describes the the long history of Black Americans fighting for freedom as foundational to this country’s ideals: “we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.” Nikole Jones evidences the many ways in which Black Americans have demonstrated their belief in this country’s stated democratic values. The people who have fought for human rights know the worth of the struggle better than anyone.
The struggle is not futile although this is what the powers-that-be would like us to believe. For those of us who teach, we need to balance the importance of knowing hard truths with tools and strategies that are working. Increasingly, with so much focus on increasing diversity we also need a reckoning with approaches that seek to insert BIPOC members into “new” spaces without altering the structure and culture of those spaces. To extend the metaphor I began with of “community as oxygen”, and as my husband who welds just explained to me, it’s the oxygen that keeps the weld “clean”. Granted, I don’t understand the chemistry or entirely what my husband is trying to explain, but my brain is attached to this idea that we need community knowledge to be valued as an essential component to keep our change work clean, real — and ultimately effective.
For example, in her New Yorker essay, Waking Up from the American Dream, Karla Conejo Villavicencio unflinchingly narrates the sacrifices her parents made that include giving up their own dreams, the burden of these sacrifices, and the tensions between dueling identities and responsibilities that children of immigrants navigate. She describes needing to interpret for her parents and how the exchange of caretaking roles: “As soon as doctors or teachers began talking, I felt my parents’ nervous energy. . . It was like my little model U.N. job. My career as a professional daughter of immigrants had begun.” If we ever asked children and parents what this experience is like, maybe we would stop putting them in this situation–where parents are disempowered and children navigating huge responsibilities. If we centered their voices, their experience, then an important structural change would be assuring there are always professional interpreters available in institutions. Even better, that people could choose doctors and teachers that speak their language.
This May, Javier Zamora was Dominican’s commencement speaker. After Zamora’s traumatizing journey from El Salvador to rejoin his parents (chronicled in his recent memoir Solito), he lived in Marin in the Canal neighborhood, an experience he writes about in “Canal Street”. In this piece and in his commencement speech, Zamora named the segregation that still exists in Marin County. This was a significant moment of truth telling in this particular space. It was especially important for our students who find themselves navigating whiteness in Marin and who find more belonging and home in the communities we partner with — that are surprised that exist as they are geographically isolated by freeways or in hidden pockets in greater Marin.
Zamora spoke about his long-held trauma and only recently starting a healing journey. What struck me is that, yes, each of us has our own path to recovery, yet, like self-care, this can and should be part of a collective endeavor. It is time. So let’s do the work of truly centering, respecting community voice and knowledge. There is no one way to do this. Those of us who teach are learning that it’s a constant balancing act of power, responsibility, stepping back and stepping up — it’s complicated, complex, ambiguous, and never static. Most basically, as I suggested in this space last May, we have to chose to just show-up, not knowing, but open to learning and committed to the hard work. It’s what we ask of our students and what we need to ask of ourselves, and of our society.
I leave you with a full newsletter of stories that illustrate the centering of community, and this includes our students’ voices — and Zamora’s words:
“Everyone seems to speak for immigrants; not many people ask us what we think about the current state of the country. We, who also pay taxes, must constantly prove that we are extraordinary, the best of the best, in order to have a chance at being considered somewhat human. I can’t participate in this “democratic” right — not yet — but I plan to. Until then, I write to have a voice.” — Javier Zamora, “Revisiting the Border During a Pandemic”
