Me, Myself, and DEI

Following the George Floyd uprisings this summer, a(nother) frank discussion about anti-Blackness and racism unfolded in American society, and, per usual, it was especially robust among those of us on the left. For perhaps obvious reasons, I was particularly attuned to how these conversations unfolded in the liberal and predominantly white world of secondary and higher education. June 2020 witnessed the appearance of numerous “Black @” Instagram accounts. In post after post, Black students and alumni voiced their tales of slights and microaggressions suffered while attending historically white schools and universities; indeed, many are still collecting responses. Around that time, we also saw the widespread circulation of the hashtag #BlackIntheIvoryTower on Twitter. Started by two Black female faculty,  #BlackIntheIvoryTower posts are, by any measure, a savage indictment of the toll that higher ed takes on Black graduate students and faculty in the academy. 

Unsurprisingly, this collective venting of frustration was frequently accompanied by frank skepticism among people of color – students, staff, faculty – about institutional statements of solidarity with us, as well as bone-deep exhaustion with endless initiatives focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). One devastating thread critiqued the actual impact and usefulness of DEI trainings. For instance, some pointed out that Amy Cooper – a white woman who called the police on a Black man birdwatching in Central Park earlier this year – undoubtedly sat through several of those unconscious bias trainings that have become so trendy in today’s corporate environments and look where that got us. According to one NYT writer, “The moment provided a bracing tutorial in what bigotry among the urbane looks like — the raw, virulent prejudice that can exist beneath the varnish of the right credentials, pets, accessories, social affiliations, the coinage absorbed from HBO documentaries and corporate sensitivity seminars.” In other words, the episode was a reminder of the ugly underbelly of genteel white racism that continues to flourish even in progressive circles, of the variety that Robin DiAngelo – one of this summer’s top-selling authors – dissected in White Fragility two years ago.

Another major critique had to do with whether so-called DEI initiatives are even going about all this moral uplift work within our institutions in the “right way.” In vigorous online debates, folks in higher education generally dismissed any model of DEI work that is not explicitly about structural change. As many rightly pointed out, we’re unlikely to get durable transformation from DEI efforts that take issues of structural oppression and reduce them to matters of interpersonal relations. In other words, voluntary anti-bias and inclusive teaching trainings for administrators and faculty will not fundamentally change the racist, classist, and elitist world of private K-12 schools or higher education. Perhaps most damningly, many also pointed out that student-facing DEI efforts aimed at promoting college access and success are, at heart assimilationist – that is, focused on helping “them” become more like “us.” In addition to being condescending, a viewpoint like this assumes that what “we” are and what “we” have created is both above reproach and worthy of emulation.

As a diversity practitioner, these critiques hit me like a punch to the gut for a whole host of reasons. Given my own life experiences, I have long been a believer in the power and potential of DEI to vastly improve the life chances and prospects of people like me – that is, outsiders who seek to succeed in a world that was clearly not made for us. But as I reflect now on the kinds of student programming I’ve provided for my first-generation, low-income, students of color, I see that, at least half the time, I was trying to give them the tools I thought were necessary to “play the game” just as well as the wealthy white students that most of our institutions churn out. Another way of saying this is I wanted to help facilitate their so-called inclusion into these institutions, but I never really stopped to ask myself: what are they about to be “included” in? Indeed, “inclusion” into what? More importantly, inclusion at what cost?

A little over a year ago, I began a new job as Director of Equity and Inclusion at a small independent school in Los Angeles with the hope that it would be the kind of position that would allow me to make the structural change that I so believed was necessary. And, at the time, I spent considerable time thinking about the type of leader I wanted to be. Given what I had, up to that point, witnessed in elite higher education settings, the central issue for me was how I, as a woman of color, was going to manage the politics of working in a predominantly white institution (PWI) without losing my moral clarity in the process. More than a year later, and in the wake of a still ongoing national reckoning with the sins of our national past, I want to reflect on where I started and how far I’ve come in my thinking when it comes to DEI. In the process, I’ll discuss the origins of DEI, what it looks like in schools, and will gesture at some of the practical challenges of working within PWIs while trying to do diversity work, something to which I briefly alluded towards the end of my last blog post, as well. 

**

In what will surely come as a surprise to no one, modern-day DEI offices on college campuses resulted from the student protest activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Black students, in particular, led protests demanding changes to racist campus cultures and university hiring practices, leading to the establishment of Offices of Minority Affairs and Third World Centers, as many were originally called. Today, we know them better as Offices of Diversity, Offices of Equity and Inclusion, or, most recently, Offices of Inclusive Excellence. But the events of this summer force us to ask: what are these offices really looking to accomplish? 

At a recent professional development workshop, I was reminded that the language of “diversity-equity-inclusion” actually originated among Fortune 500 companies. That is, DEI was a corporate concept developed with the express intent of building out the bottom line. In corporate settings, the rhetorical emphasis is often on how a diverse workforce brings valuable perspectives to the organization, improves decision-making and outcomes, and thus positively contributes to the company’s overall efficiency and productivity. In his book, Multicultural Odysseys, Will Kymlicka documents how and why the concepts of diversity and multiculturalism went mainstream in the West in the 1990s. He writes that the inherent danger of reducing diversity to simply an attractive and marketable form of colorful difference – which many of today’s companies do –  is that it “repackages cultural differences as an economic asset in a global economy and/or as a commodity or lifestyle good that can be marketed and consumed" all of which leads to the displacement of "the original emancipatory aims of multiculturalism" (130-131).

In On Being Included, scholar Sara Ahmed writes damningly about the ways that this notion of diversity-as-marketing is reproduced in colleges and universities in the UK and Australia. Overwhelmingly, she argues that diversity work – from institutional commitments to task forces and committees, from mission statements to best practices – all serve as a smokescreen that largely leaves institutional whiteness in place. While diversity practitioners might adopt any number of strategies to get around, or more properly "through" the institution, they encounter insurmountable hurdles and obstacles along the way. Gone are the good old days when folks could speak candidly in the grammar of equity, antiracism, and social justice. Instead, today we speak a language of identity and difference that makes little room for meditations on power or privilege. According to Ahmed, today's DEI can thus be boiled down to a multicolored aesthetics provided by different bodies on flashy websites and glossy brochures.

From my own experience, I can’t say she’s entirely wrong. Even beyond aesthetics, I have begun to see the way that DEI functions in the service of whiteness and it’s inspired this very reckoning you’re reading now. I was astonished to learn, for example, that in the K-12 world, studies abound demonstrating the many ways that “diverse students” – which has really just become a colorblind shorthand for students of color – improve the educational experience of their white peers. Higher ed isn’t exempt, either. In The Diversity Bargain, Natasha Warikoo shows how many white college students in the US and the UK more or less reluctantly agree about the importance of affirmative action to add diversity to their respective colleges, but only insofar as it enriches them and their personal experience (18, 186). As much as it sickens me to admit, as DEI practitioners, we are well aware of this data. We frequently share it amongst ourselves at our various practitioner retreats because we very correctly recognize it as one among an arsenal of weapons that may help us fight for our cause among wealthy and/or white stakeholders of PWIs. The tacit underlying assumption is that unless they see how it benefits them and their children, they are unlikely to act on behalf of marginalized students.

To be fair, the situation is less bleak at those schools and universities who have for some time now reached consensus that a diverse student body is a worthy goal. In this case, the next stage of the fight has to do with what we in the world of education call belonging. And this is how DEI as a corporate concept translates into school settings – consider it equity and inclusion by way of belonging. What does belonging mean? Well, for DEI practitioners, “belonging” is a shorthand for identifying and thwarting all the ways that students from marginalized backgrounds – whether because they are first-gen, low-income, nonwhite, international, undocumented or DACAmented, trans or gender nonbinary, etc. – receive subtle and not-so-subtle messages from peers, staff, and faculty that they were not ever meant to be in this space to begin with.

How do we create cultures of belonging? That depends first and foremost on where we, as DEI practitioners are located within the institution. Do we have autonomy, vision, and the resources available to us to implement it? Above all else, can the staff and faculty and the culture they’ve created cope with the mission they’ve charged us with? Will they support it or undermine it and how effective are we likely to be at convincing them to get with the program? In the best possible scenario, DEI practitioners might be capable of generating more inclusive school policies, or at least dispensing with the most exclusive excesses of the old.  Often, we are fortunate enough to extend existing student programming to better support vulnerable students. Always, we build solid relationships with our most marginalized students, staff, and faculty who recognize in us a kindred spirit and, if we’re lucky, entrust us with their stories.

In less favorable scenarios, though, DEI leaders can spend their whole tenure just trying to build up enough good will to get players to agree to the agenda, hence the well-documented phenomenon of DEI practitioner “burnout.” And while one could argue that any incoming administrator who wishes to get something done will always need to engage in politicking to execute their vision, what makes DEI work particularly frustrating is that many institutions boldly – and often publicly – assert a values proposition about their moral worth as organizations based on the mere fact that your position and office exist while simultaneously refusing to provide you with the requisite leadership and support to help you actually do your job. Instead, you are told – implicitly and explicitly – that it’s up to you alone to figure out how to bring people along because, after all, isn’t that why we hired you? This is all part of the smokescreen to which Ahmed alludes – the one that places diversity in the service of whiteness in order not to undermine but maintain institutional racism and oppression.

If you have the stomach for it (and here I would remind you how politically advantageous it is to adopt what the Harvard Business Review calls a “chameleon-like” leadership style), there is still, of course, quite a lot that you can accomplish on behalf of students, staff, and faculty. For DEI practitioners who operate in K-12 PWIs, for example, we place major emphasis on affinity groups where students can gather regularly throughout the year to support one another and develop community around a particular identity (ie: race, sexuality, gender, etc.). That’s the positive framing of what affinity spaces accomplish. What we leave out when we’re talking to people is that these spaces are also explicitly meant to help students develop strategies for coping with often hostile institutional cultures, especially microaggressions they undoubtedly suffer from peers and faculty alike. It’s among the most rewarding work, rooted as it is in relationship- and community-building. But it’s also heartbreaking when you consider its goals in their entirety.

Scholar Micere Keels has recently made a forceful argument for how and why we should foster these affinity spaces, or what she calls “campus counterspaces,” in higher education settings as undergraduates of color – especially Black and Latinx students – continue to face down discrimination on a day-to-day basis on college campuses. To a far lesser extent, higher ed institutions have begun to furnish similar programming, resources, and spaces to graduate students and perhaps even faculty of color. They may, for example, host mixers for them, or provide funding for ethnic graduate associations, etc.  Taken together, all of these efforts seek to help BIPOC build themselves up before they go out into the predominantly white world where they will get knocked down again. That may sound harsh, but this is the explicit aim of these spaces: to furnish a space for joy, yes, absolutely, but primarily because joy is one powerful way to ward off the worst abuses to which some among us will inevitably be subjected. In education-speak, you’ll hear us talk about this as the project of “building a positive racial identity” and “increasing our sense of self-efficacy.”  But I would like you to know that this is also a way we seek to inure ourselves to the harm that our environment will continue to do to us.

And this is precisely what’s begun to give me pause. I think back to the fact that, among the last workshops I led for my first-generation, low-income students at Princeton was one focused on fighting back against institutional oppression. The impetus? A Black female student found herself at the talk of a prominent white male artist and, after he showed a film clip of the shooting of Philando Castile, the mostly white audience of graduate students and faculty discussed at length the “sensuality of Black death.” She was understandably devastated and, together, we designed a workshop called “Practicing Self-Advocacy.” This was the workshop description:

Black Lives Matter. #metoo. Title IX. Recent events on college campuses and throughout our country force us to reflect on the nature of power and hierarchy. What do you do when a system, an institution, or an individual robs you of your power? How can you, how should you, react in those situations, especially when the power imbalance is not tipped in your favor? Workshop participants will learn how to navigate challenging situations as well as when, how, and why to use key University resources in the process.

As I look back on it now, I can say my heart was in the right place. But I was doing exactly what, at base, is so fundamentally wrong with all these kinds of DEI efforts: I endorsed a view that places the responsibility for addressing institutional excesses and abuses on the shoulders of the most marginalized as opposed to placing the burden of responsibility on the institution and its most powerful representatives. To be fair, this was entirely in keeping with how I thought the world worked and, back then, I, much like my students, didn’t really think I was allowed to question it. In other words, I wasn’t holding my students to a different standard than that to which I held myself. Indeed, I was giving them the same advice that some of my own mentors gave me: no one can help you, figure it out yourself, and by the way, here are a few tips since the institution is not interested in reforming itself. (I have since discredited this variety of mentorship)

I think a niggling sense that there was something wrong with such a worldview actually propelled me into a more senior leadership role in a PWI. I thought that, with patience, hard work, honesty, and compassion, I could help the institution arrive at a better version of itself, one that offered not just the classic feel-goodery of “diversity and inclusion” but real transformation and justice. I thought that, if I was kind and persistent, I might be able to engage the staff and faculty – the ones who put the “W” in PWI – in thinking about their teaching practice. I thought that, if I was tender and thoughtful enough, I might even help white, white-passing, and white-adjacent minorities who served as staff and faculty begin to think about what it means to be white. Of course, I knew even then it is a risky business to remind white people that they are white, but I thought that, if I were just pleasant, smiling, and likeable enough, maybe they’d be open to considering. 

And then Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. Tony McDade. George Floyd. 

Suddenly, against the background of the events of spring and summer 2020,  many liberal and progressive white Americans were suddenly willing to recall their whiteness, some even able to entertain a discussion of said whiteness. Among educators of PWIs, it opened a rare moment for self-reflection on how our racial identity/ies affect the ways we move through the world and with what consequence to our students. In the early days, of course, these conversations looked a little different. They were community roundtables and town halls when we gathered to hear an outpouring of pain and grief, primarily from our Black and brown students who have been trying to get our attention for years. Indeed, many of these roundtables only took place becausestudents and alumni of color took to social media to publicly call out their schools and alma maters, hence the birth of the Black@ accounts. I myself helped lead many of these roundtables over the summer, and, though I didn’t know it at the time, it would turn out to be a values-clarifying moment for me, not only as a professional but also as a human being. Indeed, it led directly to this post that you are reading now. 

In early June, just after George Floyd’s murder, many school communities wished to come together, to heal, and I realized, slowly, that my role was to nurse along this healing process. But what did ministering to the needs of my “community” look like? Well, it often consisted of cultivating a space where Black students and, to some extent Black staff (there were no Black faculty), could pour out their pain in order to activate white sympathy. In these sessions, they disclosed personal stories of interpersonal harm and abuse they suffered, often at our school. In the process, they inspired empathy by reminding their peers and teachers of their basic humanity. I think they also suggested to them that white folks might have a responsibility to make a better world, or at least a more inclusive school where Black students like them might belong. And many teachers and administrators responded to these pleas.  

To be clear, my students of color wanted these spaces, and, to an extent, benefitted from the sorts of communal sharing that they engaged in. In other words, multi-racial community dialogues do have a place in schools and universities, though I believe they need to be structured in very particular ways (I will write about this another time). For now, I wish only to point out how and why these community healing dialogues were a jarring experience for me. In those sessions, I watched as so many white, white-passing, and white-adjacent staff and faculty suddenly realized that they should do this work after I had spent months trying to convince them to do just that. I’m so very glad that they came to this conclusion, but I worried about how we finally got there. It was as though only the extreme pain that this world has to inflict on Black Americans – death, murder – could move them to action. And it troubled me – how long would such varieties of empathy last, the kind of empathy that can only be roused from its innocent stupor when extreme violence is on public display? Like my former Princeton student, I wondered about this white appetite for Black suffering, and despaired about the role I played in helping them consume it.

It all came as a painful reminder that I was miles away from the initial hopes and dreams that first drove me into DEI work. Certainly, I was always committed to bringing about change, but at what cost? From the moment I started, I knew I would be unwilling to make certain kinds of moral concessions, especially those that came at a real psychosocial and material cost for my students. But I had yet to decide what costs to myself I was willing to put up with. True, I had long ago made my peace with that basic expectation incumbent upon all DEI leaders (most of us who are, by the way, women of color) – namely, that you should tread softly around white folks because they can turn on you at any moment. Don’t be too insistent, too inspired, and, if we’re being honest, too excellent. Still, I thought I might be able to work within whiteness on behalf of my students. As I wrote last time, I have, after all, done a decent job of succeeding within PWIs, to date.

But the summer showed me there was yet another line I could not cross. Well, three lines to be precise:

First, I was not content to simply exist in a role, to “check a box,” as we say in the DEI practitioner world. If I wasn’t empowered to make substantive changes to the white supremacist culture and structure of the institution, then what’s the point? This is DEI as a smokescreen and it leaves institutional oppression intact.

Second, I refuse to be the type of DEI Director responsible only for putting on feel-good multicultural programming. For example, I am opposed to a view of DEI that revolves primarily around ethnic heritage month activities. Often, these events simply remind white families and administrators about the diverse and enriching multicultural environment they get to live and work in. And I can draw a direct line from those sorts of events to the multi-racial “healing” community roundtables and town halls that similarly served white interests. This is DEI in the service of whiteness and it has little positive impact on marginalized students.

Third, I am not willing to be tokenized if there’s no payoff for my students. Let me explain. Whenever identity-related crises erupted (and really, this is just a way of saying that whenever bias-related abuses came to light), I was repeatedly called upon to contribute my “cultural competency” to help the institution and its majority white leadership manage what threatened to metastasize into an all-out public relations crisis for them. Initially, I will admit that I was not opposed to this set up. Indeed, I was happy to midwife us through one racial incident after another as long as I received assurances that it would eventually lead to change that would benefit my students. And I created very detailed plans for what that change should look like – cultural competency training, anti-bias hiring modules, performance evaluations, etc. But after months of constantly giving and supporting and mediating and mending all while receiving little in return, I began to have second thoughts. This is DEI as minority crisis management, wherein I am most valuable during moments of racial catastrophe when I can lend the institution credibility with communities of color that, in fact, it has not earned and continues to fail to deserve.

In all of these situations, my students continue to suffer and, thus, so do I.

**

So many school and university leaders felt so put upon by student demands this summer. We’re already dealing with a global pandemic, they whispered amongst themselves, Why can’t we catch a break. But last June, a conversation at a fantastic DEI practitioners institute opened my eyes to how very disingenuous complaints like this were. If anything, the pandemic showed us how quickly institutions are willing to pivot when they perceive a clear financial incentive to do so. All around the country, we saw how rapidly they marshalled their resources, shifting to online learning environments, training their teachers as necessary, and assuring families that there was no reason to take their sons and daughters to any other schools. Give us your tuition,they beseeched, We’ll do everything necessary to keep you here. And yet, racism and structural oppression have remained eternal features of our education systems and real change remains elusive. Why? Because we lack the will, the incentive, and the resolve to do better. Rather than transformation, we are committed to maintaining the status quo. Rather than mustering courage, we show cowardice. Rather than pursuing justice, we settle for DEI. 

And so after a decade of “doing diversity,” where do all these reflections leave me and DEI? When it comes to being a DEI practitioner, I am terribly cognizant of the institutional obstacles we face, and understand that, for various reasons, many of us will strive quietly to help our students without rocking the boat, even though the evidence suggesting our vessel bears the mark of shoddy craftsmanship is mounting. I know all too well that many of us will do so at great personal cost. It hurts the soul to make the kinds of concessions I’ve outlined above. It breaks your spirit, it robs you of dignity. Depending on your moral commitments, it may cause you to question your own integrity.  For all these reasons and more, I find that, for me, working within PWIs in this season of my life has made my heart sick and it’s time to heal. 

As I work towards a more dignity-affirming world for all of us, I’ve often wondered what dignity I deserve as I engage in this beautiful struggle. After many years of reflection, I’ve decided I deserve it all. All of it. And I’ll work tirelessly until I get it. Until we get it. All of us.