Lessons on love in collaboration: Black and Brown ruminations on global whiteness

Abstract

This article illuminates our spiritual journey, as Black and Brown scholars, to globalize and further temporalize the discussion of whiteness in the field of higher education. By employing the spiritual ontoepistemologies of communities of color, we recount our journey in developing a critical race temporal heuristic, Whiteness as Futurity (Shahjahan & Edwards, 2022). We illuminate the three lessons we learned on this path: (1) trust in multiple ways of knowing, (2) spiritual healing in collaboration, and (3) community within interdependence. Our lessons highlight the complexities and potential of collaboration on conceptual research for Black and Brown people. We argue that spiritually and communally-informed scholarly practice creates the necessary psychic space to locate nuanced analyses of whiteness not readily available with traditional analytics while also supporting humanized ways of being for scholars.