White Women’s Work: Decentering Whiteness, Confronting Complicity, and Taking Action to Become More Inclusive Colleagues

This chapter describes the dialogic process used to center and then decenter our “whiteness” by examining our own complicity in perpetuating racism through our scholarship, leadership, and allyship with our BIPOC colleagues. We discuss the intentional steps/actions we took (and are taking) to dismantle our limiting schemas and inequitable systems and processes. The guiding question we explore in this chapter is how, and in what ways, can a structured collaborative inquiry serve as a catalyst for anti-racist learning and action? This chapter contributes to the advancement of human resource development (HRD) practice by describing a process for White scholars and practitioners to begin, or continue, an anti-racism learning journey. Human resource development scholars and practitioners have increasingly focused on the intersection of race and other identities (Crenshaw, Stanford Law Review 43:1241–1299, 1991) across the key and contested areas of practice within the field and its processes of relating, learning, changing, and organizing (Bierema and Callahan, Advances in Developing Human Resources 16:429–444, 2014).