Academic: I received my PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004. Dr. James Banks was my dissertation Chair. I earned tenure at Westfield State University in 2014. I have taught 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 narratives. I am a two-time winner of the Student’s Choice Award for Educator of the Year. I resigned my position at Westfield State and am currently serving as Lecturer at the University of Washington. My work on White Fragility has been featured in Salon, NPR, Slate, Alternet and The Seattle Times.
Professional: I am Director of Equity for Sound Generations, Seattle/King County. I have been a consultant and trainer for over 20 years on issues of racial and social justice. I was appointed to co-design, develop and deliver the City of Seattle’s Race and Social Justice Initiative Anti-Racism training. I have worked with a wide-range of organizations including private, non-profit, and governmental.
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. 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).