In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the University of Washington and the UW Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity are proud to recognize Ralina Joseph, associate dean of equity and justice for the UW Graduate School; founder and director of the UW Center for Communication, Difference and Equity; and professor of communication. Professor Joseph was a first-generation college student and began her career 20 years ago as an assistant professor of communication at the UW, after earning a bachelor’s in American studies from Brown University and a master’s and doctorate in ethnic studies from the University of California, San Diego. As a professor, scholar, mentor and leader, Joseph’s deep curiosity and inquiry about race and its intersections has left an indelible mark on the UW and beyond. In 2016 she created Interrupting Privilege, a program that facilitates intergenerational conversations on how privilege shows up in areas from race to gender to citizenship and beyond.
We spoke with Professor Joseph about her career at the UW as one of the first few faculty members of color, her dedication to anti-racist education, and her community-engaged work.
Tell us about your journey at the UW.
For me, the UW is a place that says yes to lots of things. If infrastructure was not in place, I could figure out a couple of partners to connect with, begin the community work and find many people who wanted to join me. So that’s been a lot of my story at the UW from the beginning. I was one of the few faculty members of color in my department, and I was hired alongside several women of color faculty across the campuses who were also the first or one of the first in their departments. We didn’t have mentorship in our faculty, so we found each other and created lifelines including an organization of women of color faculty called WIRED: Women Investigating Race, Ethnicity and Difference, which grew to 70-something members across the three campuses.
In 2015, together with a team of staff, faculty, students and community members, I founded the Center for Communication, Difference and Equity (CCDE) following the 2014 Ferguson uprising and the murder of Michael Brown. We wanted to have teach-ins to support our students. Our students were feeling shell-shocked, walking around and feeling like there weren’t spaces in the classroom where faculty could attend to all of their emotions, critique the racialized violence around them, and move forward together. The Center really grew from that. About a year in, we started bringing people together to have conversations across generations and across races. We began hosting conversations about race and its intersections in a region that is shy about talking about race.
Today, in CCDE’s eighth year, we have an exhibit at the Northwest African American Museum that’s going through the end of the calendar year. And that work has been incredibly meaningful for me and continues to be, and it continues to grow. I’ve had so many students whose dissertations, master’s theses, articles and even art projects have drawn from Interrupting Privilege. My third book, “Generation Mixed Goes to School” (with Allison Briscoe-Smith, Teachers College Press, 2021), drew from Interrupting Privilege, and my soon-to-be-released fourth book, “Moving through Racial Exhaustion” (NYU Press, 2025), will speak to the entirety of the project. The community-based nature of Interrupting Privilege has given me an opportunity to know and love Seattle in ways that I thought were unimaginable. I had no idea that I could do a project like this, and it’s been a true joy.
You’ve talked about the ways in which your work is multifaceted. You’re a teacher, you’re a writer, you’re a public speaker and a mentor. Do you have one area you’re feeling more called to?
I love all areas of my job! And who can say that? One part you didn’t name is being an administrator. The part I love there is dreaming up and implementing larger-scale solutions (and we have a huge scale at the UW, with 16,000 graduate students across the three campuses). I feel called to keep on creating change by expanding solutions.
Of the first three areas you named, my heart will always be in mentorship. I have the joy of mentoring five Ph.D. advisees right now. I have graduated another 15 advisees, and I’ve been on over 50 dissertation committees. Part of mentorship is shifting my approach as our graduate students want such different things now. They have a different level of critique of academia than the students I graduated just five years ago. One of the best ways to learn together is to co-author, even though that isn’t in my humanities tradition or training. My advisees Lando Tosaya, Laura Irwin, and I wrote a piece on fostering mentorship practices of support and accountability. In a totally different vein, another advisee, Helen Rosenboom and I co-authored a short piece on “Love is Blind” together. And right now, my student Joel Allen and I just finished a piece that’s on the museum exhibit and the possibilities of what we call Reparative Dialogue. To be able to connect with my students, learn from them and collaborate — and all of this is in community spaces — is really my heart.
One of the beautiful things about being a senior scholar is that I don’t have to hold my tongue. I speak a lot of truth to power, call things out, and do that in the service of my junior colleagues and graduate students who can’t speak as freely as I can without repercussions. My second book is on this theory of strategic ambiguity, which is about figuring out the safe places and spaces to speak, speaking through code. I don’t have to use strategic ambiguity nearly as often these days.
“I think that for women, people of color and LGBTQ folks, as we negotiate spaces where we’re minoritized, we need to be strategic, but we also need to not be so scared of speaking that we forget how to speak and how to move forward. So that’s a big part of what I feel is my responsibility in the academy and for the community.”
My fourth book is called “Moving through Racial Exhaustion: Critically Communicating Race to Interrupt Privilege.” I’m using our big database of racial dialogues. I call on those throughout the text to discuss the steps that we can all take to move through this very real thing called racial exhaustion.
I want to make sure to give a shout-out to the Northwest African American Museum, who have been our primary partner in so much of the Interrupting Privilege work. I’ve been really lucky to be involved with them from participating in community-engaged programs at NAAM from their opening to being a scholar-in-residence there in 2019–20, and now having them host this exhibit.
What is the philosophy that guides your community work?
I think that my philosophy is really one around reciprocity. Whenever I’m engaging in community work, whether at the museum or bringing in people to have conversations from outside the University — we are growing a partnership right now with GenPride, which is an organization for LGBTQIA+ seniors — we’re always thinking about how we can bring as much as we can to the organization to help them out and never be in the space of extracting from them for the purposes of our research.
I think that we have a long and troubled history of university folks really “coming down from the ivory tower” to extract from our communities in harmful ways. And so, what I try and do with my students, and try and do with my colleagues at the CCDE, is to think about how we are always entering into our work with humility. We’re always thinking about, How do we make our relationship as reciprocal and conversational as possible? How do we leave the space better than we found it?
For example, with GenPride, our graduate students and I volunteer at the community lunches and get to know folks before they start recruiting so that we can bring people in to have conversations for recorded dialogues. We provide the dialogue so nonprofits can use it for their own community celebrations, and even for grantmaking. Is there a way that my services can be helpful to the organization? Part of it is just the sense of always doing community-engaged work simply because I am a part of the community.
I don’t see myself as representing some kind of exclusive knowledge. Everything that I try to produce is based on what the community is giving me. This book that I just wrote is all about these dialogues and the gifts that people give us of sharing their knowledge. So I want to try and represent them in the ways that they want and in the ways that feel like we’re in this together, that I’m not providing a secret special knowledge, but rather I’m trying to do that work of amplifying voices.