Community and campus partners can benefit from place-based community engagement to enact a commitment to racial equity and community-driven decision-making. Racial equity is paramount in place-based community engagement. However, very little attention has been given to how whiteness in the ideological foundations of higher education shapes the work lives of professionals, faculty, and the collaborations they form to address community issues. Thus, the purpose of this case study is to foreground some paradoxes of whiteness-at-work (Yoon, 2012) in an informal place-based community engagement collaboration between the Center for Public Life at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa and members of the historic Greenwood community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We take a reflexive stance (Ozias & Pasque, 2019), examining our own experience to explore how Yoon's (2012) concept of whiteness-at-work serves as a tool for advancing the racial equity agenda of place-based community engagement. We conclude that whiteness-at-work provides a useful lens through which to begin explicitly surfacing ways in which place-based community engagement can reify and perpetuate white hegemony. This approach also provides a starting point for racial "justice-in-the-doing," the internal, interpersonal, and institutional work to disrupt hegemonic whiteness" (Yoon, 2022), in place-based community engagement that may move us further toward garnering the racial equity to which we aspire.