In the midst all the fuss about the Da Vinci Code movie come claims by Christians that they are the last people who can publicly be maligned and oppressed without anyone else defending them. Well, actually, at least in this claim they’ve got lots of good company. Fat people. Transgender people. Folks with disabilities. They all say the same thing: we’re the last people who get to be maligned and oppressed with no else one caring.
And, honestly, whenever I hear such a claim, I believe it. Which I like to think makes me not so much stupid as perhaps (too?) quick to offer solace to someone feeling oppressed.
Anyway, all of this has got me thinking about the politics of oppression and diversity in universities, politics that made me kind of crazy after about ten years.
A lot of the approaches to “welcoming diversity” that I’ve seen have consisted of “add black people and stir.” As if somehow simply adding people from various underrepresented minorities would (a) magically achieve a multicultural institution, and (b) fulfill our moral obligations to those who come from oppressed groups.
In fact, in my experience, a lot of the faculty and students subjected to being added and stirred seemed to be unable or unwilling to simply dissolve into the otherwise homogenous mix. As a consequence, rather than being boosted by the supposedly generous entry opportunities given them, they were sometimes left even more scarred by the experience. I remember once arguing with an administrator at Michigan State University who was trying to pull high-achieving students of color to our mostly-white university, away from institutions that were more successfully supportive of students of color. She was mostly trying to get our university’s numbers up, and chose to believe that by getting the numbers up a few notches, the students would be OK. Meanwhile we were making no real institutional changes to deal with real heterogeneity.
The irony of this was that those folks who tended to succeed tended to be the ones who were already mostly assimilated into white, able-bodied, mainstream, straight, intellectual culture. In other words, they looked “diverse” but they survived because they didn’t actually threaten the homogeneity very much. They tended to be upper-middle class, and had (sensibly) used the advantages of class to overcome the disadvantages of their other characteristics.
Yet still there was this running assumption that if we brought in people who “represented” certain minorities, they would lead others in that minority to success and well-being, and would thus make the rest of us “get it”. So the Hispanic faculty were supposed to mentor and otherwise support all the Hispanic students, and the out gay students were supposed to make the campus safe for all the in gay students, and we were supposed to see this and think, “Wow, what a great group Hispanic people are! And gee, those gay people are really cool.” Gosh, golly, a lot of times this didn’t happen—and why, I wondered, were these people supposed to do the “burden of their race” crap anyway? Like they didn’t have enough to deal with?
In practice it was often folks like me—white, able-bodied, straight—who were actually able to do the “diversity work” on campus. We had not just the privileges that came with blending in, we also had the political power to convert people like us. (You can’t just tell a straight professor that gay rights aren’t your issue when she’s making it clear as a straight person, like you, it’s hers.) So I find it really ironic that a friend of mine who is currently up for an academic job is worried that he won’t get it because he doesn’t “represent diversity,” given that he’s done major work analyzing and promoting the rights of disabled and queer people.
I have been glad to see that a lot of folks like me have ignored simplistic identity politics and done advocacy and support for groups whose defining identity we don’t personally share. I occasionally have taken flack for being a white person advising a students of color group, or for being a non-intersex person fighting for intersex rights. But in general I’ve stuck with the work anyway, choosing to listen to the majority of the group who told me my help was useful.
And I’ve seen a lot of folks like me do good work, across identities. For example, I’ve had a number of notable colleagues who were white, middle-class, able-bodied, straight men who have successfully mentored a slew of students from underrepresented and oppressed minorities, because their politics have led them to do that. That kind of mentoring clearly did a lot more for those students than all the pat “diversity training” and “multi-cultural education” promoted in residence life programs and well-intentioned but clunky classes on race, gender, class, and dis/ability.
I’m not saying you should get an honorary Diversity Identity badge for caring, or for rights-based research, or for whatever. I’m not pretending I “represent diversity.” It’s really clear to me having grown up with a black brother that there’s no way I’ve experienced anything like the pervasive racism he has, just as it’s clear to me from hanging out with my queer friends that I don’t suffer anything like what they do in terms of hatred and restriction. Affirmative action still makes sense to me as a way to try to counteract institutionalized oppression (and yes, there is a lot of it, much of it passive and therefore hard to address). But I guess what I am saying is, in my experience, the “add x and stir” formula of many universities has serious limitations—practical, moral, and political.
My thanks to April Herndon for her feedback on drafts of this.