Racial justice dialogues in many U.S. higher education spaces have primarily stemmed from a desire to educate the uninformed. Many institutions have failed to attend to their students, faculty, and staff of color while focusing on providing “safe” places for the uninformed. Such efforts seem to have led to an extreme complacency of those who need to change the most to become disillusioned that they have done more than enough to contribute to race dialogues on campus. In the current sociopolitical climate in the United States, the U.S. higher education is facing unprecedented pressure to attend to the fundamental tension between those two worlds. In the Japanese language, ichigo-ichie (一期一会) is a famous saying that embodies the spirit of 'here and now'. Translated as “one time, one meeting,” it symbolizes the critical importance of how one encounter could lead to transformational changes. Contrary to the noble concept of 'trying again' many times before succeeding, ichigo-ichie poses this question: What if all we have is one time, one encounter, and one chance to get it right?
“However self sufficient we may fancy ourselves, we exist only in relation – to our friend, family, and life partners; to those we teach and mentor; to our co-workers, neighbors, strangers; and even to forces we cannot fully conceive of, let alone define. In many ways, we are our relationships.” -Derrick Bell, Ethical Ambition (2003)
TopIntroduction
Talking about race is extremely difficult in the United States (U.S.). Educational institutions in the U.S. mirror a history of the country where, from its inception, racialized injustices, systemic racism, and racialized violence have been deeply woven into the fabric of the system. Many scholars have indicated the importance of understanding such critical concepts as microaggression (Sue, 2010), stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1998), and White fragility (DiAngelo, 2018) and their connections to the perpetuation of ongoing institutionalized racial injustices. As crucial as those concepts are to provide insights into how individual reactions and the psyche of a person might contribute to broader and systemic oppression, they do not address how the system continues to fail to address complex race issues in realms such as higher education. In contrast, Bell (1993) noted that dialogues about systemic racism must begin with a difficult but necessary acknowledgment of the permanence of racism in the U.S. He argued that without such explicit acknowledgment, meaningful race dialogues are not possible. His approach was to truly see racism's permanence in every sector of the U.S., especially in the educational system, before arriving at a space where an engagement to dismantling it can occur. Often the core of race dialogues focuses on how much progress has been made on campus. What can be absent is an honest conversation that begins with an understanding that the educational system was built on and continues to benefit from systemic racism.
We are a female administrator/educator of color and a White male administrator/educator with five years of a collaborative working relationship. Hideko, originally from Japan, is a clinical psychologist with over twenty years of administrative and scholarly expertise in diversity, especially in ethnoracial and gender matters. From the Midwest of the U. S., Andrew is a higher education scholar whose work is eclectic and woven together by his evaluation methods background. Over the last twenty years while working at academic institutions, we, the authors, have observed continued racialized violence and systemic injustice seen with killings of Michael Brown, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Bryonna Taylor, Ahmed Avery, Keith Scott, Botham Jean, Sean Monterrosa, Eric Salgado, Andrés Guardado, Jason Pero, Benjamin Whiteshield, Zachary Bear Heels, Xiajoie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Ashley Yaun, and countless others. Each life taken is understood in relation to the U.S. sociopolitical policies, a long history of educational and health disparities, and historical trauma. We, the authors, have also repeatedly witnessed how these losses impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in higher education. There is also a pattern of actions and inactions by those around them both on and off-campus.