The White Man’s Guide to Equity
On a typical college campus, the term equity is rarely used outside the business classroom. When I asked what equity was in a recent class, one student responded, “doesn’t that have something to do with your house?” His answer was followed by numerous head nods (and a couple of looks of confusion). Unfortunately, this unfamiliarity tends to extend to colleges’ faculty, staff, and administrators – most of whom are white males, like me, like the majority of the professoriate. But with higher education’s so-called “achievement” gaps, this lack of knowledge can be devastating for many of our students.
In California, particularly in the community college system, the term equity is gaining traction, but it has become more of an academic buzzword than a term that informs our policies or pedagogy, primarily because not enough of us actually understand it. In a recent Academic Senate meeting at my college, for example, more than one senator had to ask what “equity” meant during a discussion about race and micro-aggressions on campus. But it isn’t that our colleagues cannot define the word; we are academics, after all. It’s just that the word “equity” becomes nebulous when we preface it with the word “educational.”
This confusion also highlights an interesting paradox. Collectively, we can usually hang on when discussing racism, misogyny, and homophobia. We are able to at least accurately define these terms since they have existed in our mainstream parlance for decades. But we do not have the language to define an environment wherein minorities, women, and members of the LGBTQ community may have the same opportunities but lack the unique resources necessary to realize their goals. Even more paradoxical is that the students who actually experience these -isms are unable to define the word that aspires to a culture free of these obstacles – equity.
In a similar vein, many faculty, staff, and administrators ascribe to a “colorblind” approach to student success, which is the practice of treating all students the same regardless of need. A colorblind approach, though in direct conflict with an equity-based approach, comes from an inherently good place, however: the desire to see our students succeed. In fact, I am hard pressed to find a colleague on my campus that does not want our students to flourish and achieve their goals. When discussing equity, including in this article, I operate under this basic premise about my colleagues and audience. My aim, then, is to help others understand what educational equity is and how it is a more compassionate approach to higher education than the more popular colorblind approach.
So what is equity and, more importantly, how does it differ from equality, which is the foundation for colorblindness?
Let us start with a brief definition of “equality.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “equality” is simply defined as “the condition of being equal in quantity, amount, value, intensity, etc.” But this definition does little to help us understand equality from an educational standpoint. However, the OED also includes under “equality” a definition for “equality of opportunity,” which is defined as “equal chance and right to seek success in one’s chosen sphere regardless of social factors such as class, race, religion, and sex.” Though “equal opportunity” is often associated with business and employment, this definition most closely resembles what we, as educators, mean by the term. In other words, when we interact with students from a place of equality, we tend to treat all students the same regardless of their identity, background, or history. And while at the surface, this may seem just, it is inherently problematic because it assumes that our students have had the same educational experiences, resources, and quality of instruction. This approach is also akin to the colorblind approach – the belief that the best way to end racism is to treat everyone equally.
Equity, particularly educational equity, on the other hand, is a situational method of teaching and learning where educators acknowledge and give reverence to students’ lived experiences and cultural capital. In fact, the definitions for equity tend to include the words “fair” or “fairness,” which themselves can be quite subjective. One person’s definition of “fair” is another’s definition of “unfair.” However, the bottom line is that an equitable approach to education necessitates that practitioners not only recognize that students have had varying levels of quality education in their lifetimes and have vastly different access to housing, employment, and transportation, but also that they adapt their pedagogies and policies to account for these differences.
This final point is the one that most of us have difficulty with. Adopting an equitable teaching philosophy requires us to, first and foremost, recognize that our students are affected by hate and unintentional bias, sometimes on a daily basis. It requires that we recognize that racism, misogyny, homophobia, ethnocentrism, and a host of other forms of hate and prejudice still exist and are actually quite prevalent. This is where so many of us differ. The purpose of this article is not in proving that these -isms exist – there is a wealth of research and literature documenting that they indeed do – but, instead, my purpose is to clarify what educational equity is and why an equity framework is necessary for our students and our success as educators.
A basic understanding of the difference between equality and equity is a great start for white men, but it is not enough. Unfortunately, we cannot even start to promote equity until we recognize the great deal of privilege that we have inherited from our gender and skin color. And even before this step, we must be prepared to confront the discomfort that comes with this acknowledgment. To most, recognizing one’s privilege can feel like an affront. For example, if a white male (or even a white female) is told that his privilege results from centuries of slavery, oppression, and colonialism, we automatically respond with hostility and anger. We feel that this revelation is a judgment of our values or that it undermines our hard work. We feel like we are being called racist.
But this reaction is unproductive and harmful. We must reject this initial reaction and realize that this assertion is not an indictment and that we are not being accused of racism. In fact, very few white men come from lineages that include slavery or other forms of oppression. Yet this hostility exists as a product of white guilt; in other words, the truth that African Americans, Native Americans, and members of the Latinx community have been oppressed for centuries threatens our sense of personal morality, and to a certain extent, our sense of personal accomplishment. We do not want to believe that our hard work was assisted by the privilege that is the result of our skin color and gender. However, it is possible to take pride in our achievements while still acknowledging that we had a head start.
Furthermore, we cannot understand equity and how we can achieve it until we also recognize and believe that our students are discriminated against and are micro-aggressed because their identities aren’t normalized in our culture. We have to recognize that our black and brown students, particularly the men, experience overt racism and micro-aggressions associated with their intelligence and academic abilities every day. We must also recognize that our female students, particularly in STEM, have their abilities doubted on a regular basis.
In the senate meeting mentioned above, one white, male senator questioned if the racism and discrimination we were discussing actually happened. He didn’t necessarily deny our students’ lived experiences, but that’s the benefit of our privilege – we don’t have to. We can choose not to see their struggles and experiences. We can even take a colorblind approach and deny that the -isms even exist.
In fact, many of us need to learn of some egregious act of hate before we choose to take off our blinders, and more often than not, we need to hear these stories from other white males. After this senator asked if racism and micro-aggressions actually occurred on our campus, another senator, a white male, went on to describe a recently retired professor who frequently wore a Confederate flag tiepin. After he described this incident, it was silent enough to hear a (tie)pin hit the floor. In a way, we just need to trust our students when they tell us they are experiencing identity-based discrimination in the same way that we trust each other when we share our experiences witnessing it.
These types of stories have immense power to sway our perceptions, but we also cannot ignore the data that our institutions are becoming more diverse, which makes this issue even more pressing. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report, “Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups 2016,” Asian American and multi-ethnic enrollment has outpaced whites, and the gap between African American, Latinx, and Native American enrollment and that of whites has closed significantly (88). At my institution, for example, the White and Latinx populations are identical, and the Asian student population is just 10% smaller.
However, even as colleges and universities become more diverse, gaps persist in student success and completion. According to the same NCES report, African American and Latinx students are, respectively, 22% and 10% less likely to graduate from college within 6 years than their white peers (108). So rather than taking the position that these students are not capable of succeeding (read: racism), we must explore the ways in which our colleges and universities are creating or perpetuating obstacles to these students’ success.
So why should we care? First of all, the number of white, male professors continues to decline, and the number of white, male students in most urban and suburban colleges has also declined. It is imperative that we evolve as our colleagues’ and students’ demographics do. According to the TIAA Institute’s 2016 report, “Taking the Measure of Faculty Diversity,” male professors only made up 50.8% of the professoriate in 2013, down from 61.4% in 1993. The same report also notes in 1993, 84.1% of all faculty were White, which has decreased to 73.2% in 2013 (of particular note, only 66.2% of professors on the tenure-track were White, which indicates even more diversity in the professoriate).
Contrary to the decline in white, male professors, most administrators and deans continue to be white males. According to the 2015 Department of Education “Digest of Education Statistics,” 80% of all postsecondary managers are White, which is down only 6% from 1993. Because these managers are working with an increasingly diverse professoriate and student body, it is even more imperative that everyone in our institutions understands equity.
But as mentioned above, this is an uncomfortable process. It forces us to confront disturbing truths about our schools and perhaps even our classrooms, which means that it is crucial that we support each other in this journey. Tearing down racist and misogynist systems is our responsibility as White men. We can and should position ourselves as allies to our colleagues and students of color; however, our discomfort is ours alone. But that isn’t to suggest that this is an individual, isolated journey. Many of our White colleagues have already started, so it is a matter of identifying these individuals and working with them to create a more equitable institution of higher learning.
And as a reminder: confronting our privilege is not a judgment of our individual values or accomplishments. Most of us are in this because we want to educate all our students. But after recognizing that some of our students struggle academically in the face of institutional barriers, we have two choices. We can choose to do nothing or tell ourselves that our students’ struggles are a result of non-academic, personal factors, or we can start tearing down these barriers, whether at the institutional or classroom level. Each course of action then becomes a reflection of our values.
Finally, very few of us got into teaching to harm students. In fact, as flawed as the colorblind approach is, it does come from a good place. We all want our students to grow and prosper. Their success is a reflection of ours. An equity-centered pedagogy, then, is simply an evolution in our approach to that success. Instead of treating our students equally, it requires us to recognize the obstacles that our institutions have placed, often unintentionally, in front of many of our students and to acknowledge that some of our students need more support than others. Not every professor wants to be a crusader for institutional equity, but every one of us wants higher success rates in our classrooms and programs. Every one of us can, at the very least, promote equity in these spaces.