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SubscribeWe were lucky to catch up with Zack Ritter recently and have shared our conversation below.
Zack, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Looking back on your career, have you ever worked with a great leader or boss? We’d love to hear about the experience and what you think made them such a great leader.
He was so caring and kind and curious! We need leaders who believe in our employees and go beyond the capitalist relationship of produce or perish. We need to see each other as whole humans we care about cultivating and inspiring! His father was not in his life, therefore he took it upon himself to be the father figure for everyone…I am so indebted to Dr. Barbee for showing me what true leadership and care looks like!
Zack, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I will put down my bio, and all the professionally proper things people say about themselves and their workplaces (which is good, I’m not knocking that :), but if you boil it down, I try to inspire people to change how they think about themselves and the world, in order to create a more loving, caring, curious, and kind society that works for everyone, but most importantly minoritized groups and folks that have been historically oppressed. I teach social justice history, I try to bring joy to other by making them laugh, I share random history facts that I hope are seeds to liberation, I care deeply for my students, family, friends, and loved one, and I try to give of my time, energy, and money to causes I think will help reduce suffering and heal society from generations of hurt.
Dr. Zack Ritter has spent more than 16 years in higher education across Southern California with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusivity. He is currently the Senior Diversity Officer at CSU-Dominguez Hills. He was Associate Dean of Students at CSU-Dominguez Hills, helping run the Office of Community Standards restorative justice department and Basic Needs housing and food insecurity program. He was also the Associate Dean of the Office of Institutional Diversity at Harvey Mudd College and University of Redlands. He is an Adjunct Professor teaching social justice history and research methods at UCLA and CSU-Dominguez Hills. He has co-edited three books with titles such as Whiteness, Power, and Resistance to Change in Higher Education and Emancipatory Change in Higher Education. He also spent several years in the nonprofit sector, building bridges between Muslim and Jewish communities. Dr. Ritter received his PhD from UCLA, focusing on East Asian international students, racial stereotypes, and American media promulgation of globalized race/class/gender hierarchies.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
That I can be a consultant and be the visionary for my own financial destiny and actually survive while being my own boss. And doing DEIJ work means questioning power and privilege in society and in all the spaces we find ourselves…and how we create a society that is more collaborative, liberatory, and justice focused. It also means thinking about changing structures that are currently harming folks. I’ve been part of many institutions that cause harm, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes on purpose, and I’m tired. I think many of us are tired of being complicit with and tethered to institutions that use DEI language, but don’t really mean it, cause a great deal of harm and are not interested in changing.
If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?
I just think I would have recalibrated my expectations of what was possible to change in the world and how slow that change would take. I think I would have liked to have been on TV teaching history and inspiring people on a larger scale to dream and create the society that they would like to see. I think the classroom is one of the most liberatory spaces we have in society, but taking that dynamic energy and putting it on the screen would be amazing! I think hope is hard to come by today, for obvious reasons, just look at the news. But I want to inspire folks, and I want to remind them of how much power they have to shake up society . And to build a society that they want to build, rather than accept the one that has been flung onto them. Like Arundhati Roy says: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
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Zack Ritter
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