Hammer: Diversity Plumbers Part IV
Hammer
If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning.
The request for diversity trainings is the one I worry about the most. Standing somewhere between remediation and punishment, the training is meant as cudgel, a hammer. The judging intervention is set like a walk to the principal’s office, the confessional, the preacher who offers repentance. Go fix that person, that person who needs to be made aware that their actions have created harm, that their attitudes are biased, that their presumptions are racist and sexist. The diversity hammer is meant to fix the problem, called in like the heavy. The DEI hit man.
I read a story about a diversity worker who is called in to adjudicate a free speech/ hate speech matter. Did the student mean the thing that sounded racist? People imagine that it is the DEI practitioners’ job to fix the problem, fix the bad press, fix the person, fix the anger. Can she recalibrate the pain? Move the pain from one student who suffered to the other student who caused it? An equity henchman, an inclusivity bouncer on a diversity balance sheet. They tell her it is her job to fix it. The story becomes about her work that didn’t work. It becomes another story of failed DEI work. DEI as punishment.
The requests of diversity mechanisms, the trainings, the on-line surveys, the data, the talks, are tools of failure. The answer to the question, are we there yet? The accountability odometer plots how the institution has not sufficiently changed. No, we are definitely not there yet. It shows that inequities still exist despite the values that are handed out like glossy travel-brochure trifolds. It shows the diversity office, promised to bring us home, is not any closer.
The urgent requests come in fast and my intervention has been promised by another office, as if an emergency. With my wrench in hand, I am here for triage. I address the group about equitable search procedures. It is the first line of action for those who believe there are no qualified minorities, for those who see change as a mark of lowered standards. The tools I’ve offered, the conversation to be had, is not what is wanted. I’ve been invited into a long-standing fight and my 45-minute presentation reveals only a few of the festering wounds. I am the fodder they use to punish each other.
My workshop invites the tenure-line faculty to work together. It is pencil, not ink. They can imagine expansively their community of scholars. Hushed tones and tipped heads suggest conversation. When we gather back, there are no chair scooting sounds, everyone has stayed right in their comfort zone. The invitation has been declined. As if answering another question, the first comment comes as a high-arching, lobbed intellectual smokebomb: ‘It is a proven fact that Republicans have a higher rate of scholarly output.’ In my head I’ve started to dissect this, diagramming this sentence to pinpoint all the ways it is ridiculous. It is an invitation to a battle, something akin to entertainment.
The Black women faculty in the back just watch. They’ve been at this for some time. I don’t blame them. They are probably embarrassed for me that it has gone off the rails so quickly. If it is a battle of attrition, they know how this plays out. The comment is for me, but I’m just today’s guest.
One faculty, a white woman, approaches her hands cupped. She is from the one table that had visibly sat apart from each other. She offers to me tiny bits of paper. It is their draft of their search processes. It is torn into tiny squares, smaller and smaller as if the rendering itself mimicked the department. How to put this back together? She spills the pieces into my hands, as it is my work to reconcile and tape together this department. “Here. You fix this.” The war continues and diversity was today’s theater of operation. I was the failed mission.
The work of diversity is not a war. It challenges us to be curious, self-reflective, and fully human ourselves. The work of diversity poses questions. It cannot judge, it does not want to punish. It is an invitation. In my best work with other diversity practitioners, we set our ethics of practice. It is a space that is unfettered with cynicism. We hear each other like a bell, like a song.
…
This is part of a series called the Diversity Plumbers by Mónica Russel y Rodríguez. See https://medium.com/@monica.russelyrodriguez
