Calls for greater equity are ubiquitous in higher education policy, both at the state and institutional level. The California College Promise and the local programs through which its benefit of tuition-free community college is accessed, are part of this trend, making it critically important to understand how equity is framed, understood, and enacted by community college professionals. The questions that guided this study are: How do discourses about equity evolve through the California College Promise from policy adoption to implementation? In what ways do community college professionals, leverage, enact and negotiate racial literacies in their work to advance the goals of the California College Promise? To conduct this study, I applied Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Critical Race Theory (CRT), to critically analyze the underlying ideological underpinnings of select policy documents associated with the California College Promise. The findings demonstrate the need for higher education professionals to have both the training and tools that enable a critical examination of policy to disrupt the recreation of practices that sustain social and racialized stratification in education. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]