Michael Benitez, vice president for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Metropolitan State University of Denver, presented as the speaker for the second-to-last keynote of the 2021 Iowa State Conference on Race and Ethnicity (ISCORE).

Benitez’s keynote “The Conviction Behind Race Work in Higher Education,” took place virtually over Zoom, just like the rest of the conference.

Benitez opened by discussing his experiences living in different places across the country.

“I recall back when Dr. Hill was trying to recruit me to come to Iowa State, I looked at Dr. Hill like ‘I don’t know, that’s Iowa man, Iowa is an incredibly white place,’” Benitez said.

He said he is used to navigating white spaces and recalled his movements from Puerto Rico to New York and then from New York to Pennsylvania.

“In New York I did not have to worry very much,” Benitez said. “I was in Washington Heights, which in the ’80s […] I didn’t have to pick up English very quickly, everybody already spoke Spanish. It was full of Black and Brown people, I felt pretty much at home.”

He said when he moved to Pennsylvania he said he had a Bruce Willis moment from “The Sixth Sense,” stating “oh my god they do exist, white people.”

“That is not a knock on whiteness, it was just a different sort of space that I was stepping into for the first time,” Benitez said. “It was the first time where I truly began to understand what it means to be a second-class citizen, where everyone is looking at you like ‘why are you not doing this this way’ or ‘why are you showing up this way.’”

Benitez said he saw Iowa as an opportunity to engage with the doctoral program at Iowa State University and work with the ISCORE program.

“Being able to add my own touch, my own sort of theoretical understanding and foundations,” Benitez said. “But also make it mine and create a space for students that is engaging, that is authentic, that was about their experiences but also allowed the students to show up as scholars.”

Benitez said the students truly are scholars, as learners, but also as contributors and critical thinkers. He said it was important to see them take shape, struggle and engage with the hard work.

“These are spaces that true carve out space, time, conviction to address this moral imperative that is race and race relations in the United States,” Benitez said. “But to do it in a variety of ways, to do it in holistic ways where students are not just writing and thinking but they are reflecting and get to actually interact with each other with understandings about what it means to do so respectfully.”

Benitez said allowing students to engage contributes to their own learning.

“Offer a space where respectful erroring can occur, because if we don’t allow people who don’t know to show up and error and maybe say some real ignorant things, borderline some pretty racist things, then how do we learn to take care of that wound?” Benitez said. “How do we think about what mitigating and curing that wound and bringing some healing and hope to the trauma looks like?”

Benitez said ISCORE takes moments of time and sits them alongside students in a curricular, critical way that provides students with agency. He said he loves that idea because it allows students to start to feel comfortable, not only respectfully erroring but also moving through and engaging with the work.

“At the end the product was students who were able to advocate for themselves, students who were data driven, students who understood the history, knew how to locate it, identify it, put it together and make arguments as to why addressing race and racialization was so important to the contemporary era,” Benitez said. “When you open that door to students then anything is just possible.”

Benitez then showed a slide on the screen of a bunch of faces, Black men and women who had lost their lives to police violence.

“Right, so here we are with the why, right, even though it’s not intended, there’s real consequences, more recently with Floyd and Taylor and Arbery,” Benitez said. “So we begin, and we still continue to see this pattern, but thank goodness for technology, right. And thank goodness for the camera as a tool. And what we’ve been able to do is really kind of highlight and make clear the injustices and how they’re going down, because before this technology, Black folks, Black bodies weren’t being believed. To have people believe you, you had to truly go out the way to somehow prove that somebody else acted under white supremacist conditions.”

Benitez said when we look at the data all around, whether it’s poverty, unemployment, segregated schools, the prison industrial complex, voting rights or immigration, people can begin to see a “pattern of the structural racism we so often talk about, but that at times is so hard to see when it happens from the smaller scale as a trickle down of structural racism.”

Benitez then shared a story from his own youth that played into this concept.

“It was the first time that I got straight A’s,” Benitez said. “I was happy. Now I didn’t even know what straight A’s can look like. But I was happy. I worked hard to do my best to clear up my homework. And then I went home.”

He said he showed his report card to his mother and she was proud of him and told him he did a good job, but then he took his report card to show his friends.

“I take my report card down to my homies, who will just chill on the corner,” Benitez said. “And I did the same thing. ‘Hey, yo, check this out, bro. Look at this man, straight A’s.’ But instead of my boys giving me the same props that my mom gave me, my boys went on to sit there looking like he’s trying to be…”

Then Benitez let the audience of the keynote finish the sentence. “White” was the answer he was looking for and the audience answered correctly.

“Just because I showed brilliance, because I showed intelligence, because I show that I can handle my best,” Benitez said. “All of a sudden folks are looking at me like Mike’s trying to be white. I’m looking at them like, ‘Nah, I’m trying to be me.’ Because intelligence does not belong to whiteness. Intelligence is a human thing that we cultivate, that we try for, that we show up with. And there’s no reason why when we do well in spaces, all of a sudden, that’s Americanized, in a way, where folks are trying to be white. No, I’m trying to be Black. I’m trying to be Black and Brown. That’s what I’m trying to be when I show my brilliance and intelligence, I am owning my Blackness, I am owning my Brownness.”

Benitez said he often jokes with his students saying “yo, why are you trying to be Black, why are you trying to be Brown.”

“I take that as an educational opportunity,” Benitez said. “I take that as an educational opportunity to engage folks in the discourse and the way that we transform, the way we have conversations for people. It’s not to say that it’s Black or Brown or white or Asian or Native, it is simply to say that we gotta get away from the way we centralize conversations around this epistemic norm of whiteness and show up for ourselves.”

Benitez moved on to discuss the importance of diversity, especially looking at ISCORE.

“When I think about ISCORE, ISCORE does such a phenomenal job really diversifying the educators so that we had, you know, Black faculty and scholars, we had Latinx faculty and scholars and we had Asian faculty and scholars and Native faculty and scholars, and you see where I’m going with that, right?” Benitez said. “And we even had intersectionality in the representation with gender and race, and sexual orientation and in religion and all these different things that offer that sort of rich complexity and criticality.”

To go with this discussion, Benitez offered a photo of a variety of Barbie Dolls on the screen.

“It’s important to address that then when you think about the broader Iowa or ISCORE, within the context of the broader Iowa, that Barbie does a better job diversifying their Barbie Dolls than most institutions in higher education do in diversifying the faculty.”

Benitez joked that higher education institutions may need to reach out to Mattel for “a little consulting on how to diversify their faculty.”

Another viewpoint Benitez added to the conversation was how places like Iowa State has students from a variety of backgrounds, including both urban and rural, and when these two groups meet it can be interesting.

“The reality is that an institution like Iowa State University, they have students who come from urban communities, and they show up to Iowa, and they say, ‘Oh my God, this place is white. This is wow, I don’t know, I’m not used to this, I’m gonna have to adjust,’” Benitez said. “And at the same time, you have people who come from rural communities with maybe three Black people, and they show up to this same space, saying, ‘Wow, this is so diverse, this is great, I’m gonna learn so much.’”

Benitez said people of color cannot solely exist in higher education as a spectacle and consumption for white people to learn. He said whiteness has to become the other side of the coin and be the spectacle for which people of color also understand whiteness and whiteness as a cultural norm.

Benitez said he was in a presentation with another person and that person took the phrase “put your money where your mouth is” and changed it to “put your power where your mouth is.”

“Put your power where your mouth is, share the power,” Benitez said. “Because right now more than the colonization of resources and land and many other things, it’s about the coloniality of power. And powers are what we have to share in order to begin to acclimatize spaces. And that’s what ISCORE did. When I think about Dr. Hill, he wasn’t there sitting back saying ‘I’m in this position. It’s a great position to be in. But what does it mean for me and my own experiences as a Black man to take some of this power and share it so that those who work with me, who work alongside me, are able to also feel like they have agency to make their own decisions, or better yet, when they need to, at times, maybe even challenge me.’ And that was a big part of why ISCORE mattered and still matters.”

Benitez then discussed how the hardest thing about addressing whiteness is that it presents a real deep identity crisis for people.

“I mean, imagine that you get to college and all of a sudden you learn that half of everything you learned or maybe even most of what you learn is actually half true or not accurate at all, or is something that was just made up,” Benitez said. “When you have white folks, and that’s what they’re relying on to create their identities for 18 years, then they get to college, and somebody tells them ‘Oh, that’s not true.’ ‘Oh, yeah, that’s only half right.’ ‘You don’t have the whole story.’ But that creates a real deep sense of, you know, ‘what do I do with this?’ This is not a bad thing. But I think what we need to be more mindful about is where do we cultivate those spaces?”

Benitez said ISCORE is important in this way because it allows for that type of conversation to take place and allows for people to advocate and take action on issues they find important.

Benitez ended his 50-minute long keynote by asking people to do two things: “Never ask a student to do something that you would not do yourself” and “model what you preach.”