About Me
Academic: I received my PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004. Dr. James Banks was my dissertation Chair. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Multicultural Education at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. I teach courses in Multicultural Teaching, Inter-group Dialogue Facilitation, Cultural Diversity & Social Justice, and Anti-Racist Education. My area of research is in Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, explicating how Whiteness is reproduced in everyday discourse. I am particularly concerned with the challenges of an increasingly white teaching force and an increasingly diverse student population (my vitae is at the end of this page).
Professional: I have been a workplace diversity trainer for over 15 years and was recently appointed to co-design, develop and deliver the Mayor’s Race and Social Justice Initiative Anti-Racism training for the City of Seattle. This initiative is sponsored through the Seattle Office of Civil Rights and the training was co-designed and developed with Darlene Flynn.
Personal: “I grew up poor and white. While my class oppression has been relatively visible to me, my race privilege has not. In my efforts to uncover how race has shaped my life, I have gained deeper insight by placing race in the center of my analysis and asking how each of my other group locations have socialized me to collude with racism. In so doing, I have been able to address in greater depth my multiple locations and how they function together to hold racism in place. Thus my exploration of what it means to be white starts with what it means to be poor, for my understanding of race is inextricably entwined with my class background. I now make the distinction that I grew up poor and white, for my experience of poverty would have been different had I not been white” (DiAngelo, 2006).
I am a white woman whose academic, professional, and personal commitment is to anti-racist practice, however, I don’t call myself an “anti-racist white” because I believe that it is for people of color to decide if, in any given moment, I am behaving in anti-racist ways.
