Photo

First Name
MJ

Last Name
Creutz

Pronouns
she/her

Tags
Anti-Racism, DEI Foundations, Implicit Bias, Microaggressions, Title IX, White Consciousness/Anti-White Supremacy, Women & Gender Equality

Title
Assistant Director and Deputy Title IX Coordinator

Department
Office of Civil Rights and Title IX

Biography
What gifts do you bring to this work? I bring a willingness to turn towards and work through conflict instead of avoiding or passively acknowledging the difficulty of experiencing it. I invest deeply in joy and I hold space for hurt and hopelessness. I try to honor the complexity of being human by practicing what it feels like to be a whole person. Which of your professional, personal and/or community roles inform the I&E work that you do? How? My family has described me as "the glue that holds us together," for better or worse. My colleagues have named that I raise concerns or offer pushback with grace and authenticity. My friends say that I'm sunshine personified (how dramatic). My personal opinion is that those of us who experience the world with majority privileged social identities should be invested in developing trusting relationships with one another as to at any point, risk comfort within those relationships by directly challenging systemic oppression when it shows up in the ways we treat one another. Oppression which serves to routinely silence, harm, and dispose of those who are identified as less human by colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, etc. is manifested in our behavior as individuals and as Grace Lee Boggs says, you have to transform yourself to transform the world. I am imperfectly committed to risking my comfort as to challenge the systems- I try doing this in relationship with others and in any context, personal, professional and otherwise.