Response: Courageous Actions: A Response to Ripple Effects and Shock Waves

As a Chicana clinical psychology professor for 19 years in the academy and now an associate dean in the school of education at a private university, I am honored to share my comments on JeffriAnne Wilder’s courageous action. I share with her the experience of being “the only” or “one of a handful” of people of color in my doctoral program, in my predoctoral and postdoctoral clinical internships, in my research group, in my academic department, and now in higher education administration. It has been a very familiar and not always comfortable place for me, even though I have learned to navigate my way through the academic context and have been successful. I believe and feel deeply that this success has been at a psychological cost because I have always had to exert additional energy and attention to the cultural and racial climate of the department, the school, and the institution as a whole. As a woman of color, I bring my racial, cultural, class, gender identity experiences and perspective to everything I do; it is fundamentally who I am as an integrated whole person. It has been difficult to be who I am in an academic context that privileges a Eurocentric worldview, where predominantly White faculty and administrators are unaware of their prejudices and racism, and where there exists a lack of recognition and support for my cultural and racial reality. Similar to JeffriAnnes’ experience at her institution, while I found and learned strategies for making it through the academic process in my institution, some of my fellow colleagues of color in the department and school did not survive and were not tenured. Given my experience, I believe it does take courageous action on the part of faulty of color to speak out and voice the realities of racial discrimination in university institutional practices and cultural climate. Like others, I commend her for stepping forward and sounding the alarm, it seems to have made a major contribution in raising awareness, opening up difficult conversations, and movement toward change.