Pathways to working toward equity and inclusion

How does each of us come to work towards building equity, inclusion, and belonging? Members of Project Ilumina share their stories here. Subscribe to share yours...

Roland Sintos Coloma: My activism really began when I was an undergraduate at the University of California, Riverside. My good friends and other student activists and I fought for curriculum and resources that could address some of the key issues, services, and needs of students of color, of first generation college students, of LGBTQ students, because they were just not in existence. This was institutional work involving gaps, things that are missing, things that are needed by marginalized students, and it ranged from protests on campus around the necessity of having ethnic studies as a field of research and learning for students at the university, to advocating for an LGBTQ resource center to make sure that the needs, priorities, and well-being of LGBTQ and questionning and allies could be addressed.

My journey is particularly interesting because I came to my undergraduate program as a pre-med, in many ways to fulfill the dreams and hopes of my immigrant family. And I was pretty good at it. At the same time, I was taking courses for my Gen Ed around literature and history, and there was a side of me that felt like I really came alive in terms of my consciousness, around injustices, and the different peoples around me. So somewhere around my second year as an undergraduate was this pivotal moment in which I needed to make a choice between continuing this path to be a medical doctor or this very unknown path around the humanities. I think the pivotal point really came around student activism and dealing with my friends and colleagues in our fight for more inclusive curriculum and inclusive resources on campus. I thought this was an important direction for me to go. 

Fortunately enough, once I finished my coursework and graduated, I ended up getting my very first job working in minority student affairs at my alma mater, working with Asian Pacific American students on recruitment, retention, cultural programming, and alongside other communities of color – African American, Latinx, Chicanx, and Native students, in terms of a consortium of services dealing with race, racism, indigeneity, decolonization, as part of a holistic approach to working with students of color at the university.

Jeong-eun Rhee: I definitely have to say for me coming to the United States from Korea was a new phase of my life where I started to really reinvestigate my own sense of self and relationship with my surroundings and history, and all those kind of identities. I can definitely see me belonging to this dominant ethnic group in the Korean context as a young person, although during that period I definitely wrestled with the issues of gender as a young woman. But after I came to the US everything kind of threw me off because in a sense suddenly everything became so strange and so unfamiliar and then all my different senses of self had to change because my environment and my surrounding asked me to negotiate with my new location. So through that experience, I don't even know if it was my choice. It was just a way of surviving, because without that sense of understanding and knowledge, I just couldn't go on with my everyday life.

Binaya Subedi: A really transformative moment for me was during the LA uprising, Rodney King, you may remember that moment. That helped me question my identity in a lot of different ways. Cynthia Dillard talks about this idea of becoming, in terms of there's a being but there also is becoming. In that moment I looked at my role: Where did I fit in in the larger context of binary of white and black? Where did people of Asian descent, Asian being very heterogeneous, where do we fit in? That was a very important moment for me. I was an undergraduate at that time, and I was trying to figure out where did I fit in and what my role was in a contemporary or historical racial formation. I always identify myself as an immigrant. And there's a particular role, responsibility, and claiming you have to do in the United States of where you are, knowing that you live in a settler colonial state. So in terms of thinking about indigenous history and experiences, over the years I have become more cognizant of who I am and what I can do, individually and collectively. So it's always a learning process.

Mary Pigliacelli: It’s really difficult for me to pinpoint a moment, but I think being in a teacher education program and being introduced to ideas about diversity, equity, and inclusion in really actionable ways encouraged me to acknowledge social forces like racism that I had mostly understood in more abstract ways. So for me it’s an ongoing series of moments of becoming more and more aware of different realities and ways I can and must intervene in them. I’ll describe one of those moments here: I’m part of reading group that is primarily made up of women of color. One of the books we read early on was Citizen by Claudia Rankine. If I had read it on my own, I would have been horrified by what Rankine experienced, and then I’d probably have tucked that feeling away and moved on because I wouldn’t have known what else to do with it. Reading Rankine with all these women who had intimately experienced exactly what she was writing about forced to me stay with the violence of racism, to reckon with it, and to keep moving forward with them to create change. I’m almost embarrased to say that I was an adult woman before I had this experience, but I can also see all the ways our society works to make sure that white people are shielded from such experiences. It had the dual effect of helping me to gain a much deeper awareness of Black women’s experience, and to make it quite clear to me that I could never fully know that experience because I haven’t lived it. It made me want to listen more, listen harder, and work harder.