Recreational Antiracism in the Academy
I’ve been trying to make sense of why some incidents in academia rankled with me. These incidents can be generically described as follows. A hiring committee or department is composed almost entirely of cis white men. They all consider themselves to be progressives who are open to diversity and so on. They are proud that they have read the implicit bias literature, and openly joke about how they’ll never know if they themselves are implicitly biased because they already know the purpose of implicit bias tests before taking them. But year after year, they continue to hire only cis white men. Their acquaintances are hesitant to use this as evidence of something wrong, because these men profess to be progressives, are aware that implicit bias exists, and openly wonder why women keep dropping their classes.
This type of situation, in my experience, is much more common than the “paradigm” case of someone who explicitly professes beliefs about certain demographic groups being inferior. But I was grappling for a theoretical framework to explain what exactly is wrong with this situation — the culprits seemed to have engaged in certain performative acts that made it harder than usual to pin wrongdoing upon them. Thankfully, Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo’s paper, “We’re All for Diversity, but…” (paywalled) and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s review of a book-length critique of implicit bias discourse helped to crystallize a lot of thoughts that had been vaguely squirming in my pre-verbal consciousness.
Between the two articles, I learned two concepts that really help put my observations into context.
- The danger of focusing on private, individual intentions as a source of bias — which is accentuated by the focus on implicit bias over structural issues.
- The commodification of diversity: when a minority is hired, institutions make a big deal out of it to paint themselves as diverse, but at the same time, they do not consider a lack of competence in diversity as a significant factor against hiring certain candidates. Diversity is considered as a nice bonus to be capitalized on for image reasons, but not being competent to handle an increasingly diverse student body is not considered as even a moderate disadvantage.
When these two concepts are combined, you get an overall lack of accountability for failing to improve the situation of minorities in academia. Focusing on intentions makes it impossible to accuse any cis white man who appears sufficiently well-intentioned of wrongdoing, even if their actions perpetuate white male supremacy. Relatedly, the emphasis on private intention and the view that diversity is just a nice “bonus” leads to a lack of interest in operationalizing how we evaluate candidates for competence in diversity — and it’s hard to hold people accountable if you let them get away with saying “but we tried to hire minorities”, without requiring them to operationalize this “trying”.
“I’ll never know if I’m implicitly biased”
I’ll start with the relationship between implicit bias discourse and the focus on private intentions. For a fuller account, read Prescod-Weinstein’s post or the book she’s reviewing, but the core of it is that cognitive psychology frames implicit bias as something that is in an individual’s mind, and in doing so, takes away the focus from structural white male supremacy. Because it is hard to epistemologically access an individual’s beliefs, this makes it harder to pin wrongdoing on individuals who may be implicitly biased. Of course, all this is compounded by the recent failures to replicate certain implicit bias studies. Prescod-Weinstein quotes Charles Lawrence III, a law professor, who warned about this:
I further express my fear that cognitive psychology’s focus on the workings of the individual mind may cause us to think of racism as a private concern, as if our private implicit biases do not implicate collective responsibility for racial subordination and the continued vitality of the ideology and material structures of white supremacy. In its most extreme manifestation, this view of implicit bias, as evidence of only private, individual beliefs, is expressed as a right to be racist.
I’ve experienced this use of implicit bias to escape any kind of responsibility. The title of this section is a quote from an interaction I had with white male philosophers in a department that has serious diversity problems. They had a habit of interviewing almost exclusively white men for jobs, even when there were minorities who worked in the same areas as those white men and had a better research output (they did not care about teaching). Yet, when in the company of minorities, they would happily joke about how they had taken the implicit bias tests but would never know if they were actually implicitly biased, because they couldn’t help gaming the test if they knew what it was testing for. As a statement of fact, it’s true that the tests cannot show whether they are implicitly biased. But their declaring this, in the current climate of discourse, also made it hard for anyone to accuse them of doing wrong in their hiring practices. But they’re good men! They were so nice to you! They even know about implicit bias!
Diversity as a Mere Bonus
The Sensoy and DiAngelo paper focuses on diversity in academic hiring in particular. While their experiences come from the field of education departments in particular, they will sound familiar to many minorities. They go through an extended list of statistics showing that racial diversity has increased among students, but faculty diversity has not. All the same,
position calls that “encourage” and “invite” underrepresented groups and especially visible minority applicants are ubiquitous. (p. 558)
This sentence painfully hits the spot for many minorities. Diversity-oriented language is in so many job ads, but the actual hiring process does not reflect this supposed “encouragement” — or maybe they really want you only to apply, but not to actually get any jobs.
The quote above also reflects how institutions want to appear to be welcoming of underrepresented groups, which is why they put such language in job advertisements, but in terms of the actions that lead to people being hired, they do not demonstrate serious efforts to produce faculty diversity. For example,
When hiring committees are considering a candidate of color, the fact that the candidate would “add” diversity to the faculty is most always talked about, yet when a White candidate is at the top of the list, the fact that that candidate would not add diversity is not talked about. (p. 573)
The root cause of such behavior, I suspect, is that hiring someone who maintains the department’s status quo (demographics-wise) is not an action that raises any issues that have to be talked about. It’s considered neutral, the same way that people consider it neutral or normal for most protagonists in Hollywood movies to be white, but throw a fit when certain minorities get starring roles. Whiteness is invisible. But when you are seriously considering hiring a person of color, the fact that they add to diversity suddenly becomes a way to market that candidate to the powers that be.
Of course, since lack of diversity is not taken seriously, institutions make little effort to make themselves accountable for their lack of diversity. This lack of accountability is buttressed by my earlier point on how it is assumed that if one cannot demonstrate discrimination on an individual basis (implicit or explicit), then there isn’t a problem in the hiring process. Lack of accountability manifests as a complete absence of any way to operationalize efforts to make your faculty more diverse. Words are thrown about how nice it would be to hire someone diverse, but these are not translated into actions that increase the likelihood of diverse candidates being hired. For instance, there is typically no discussion of how to evaluate a candidate’s competence in diversity. Hiring committee members often switch off or leave the room when a diversity-related question is being asked — and often these are ‘optional’ and therefore not asked at all. There is also no operationalization of what consists of a good answer to such questions — indeed, higher education publications routinely offer sound-bite advice on how to answer such questions, suggesting that answers borne of genuine experience are not demanded. Hiring committees frequently allow for evaluative (rather than descriptive) language in discussions of candidates, without considering how certain evaluations may encode white supremacy (e.g. friendly, relaxed, great sense of humor, cool style, fits in).
(One example of an evaluation that I know for a fact actually happens in academic philosophy: “He’ll grow into it.” Think about the people of whom this phrase is uttered— they will most likely not be women of color or queer-presenting people. What is the it that this person will grow into? What image comes to your mind, when you think of the prototypical brilliant philosopher?)
There is also no operationalization of which faculty members are competent to serve in on a hiring committee if there is a strong desire to hire a member of an underrepresented group. This feeds off the fact that there is no operationalization of whether a candidate is competent on diversity issues.
Sensoy and DiAngelo offer many concrete ways to operationalize hiring diverse faculty, and I highly recommend reading the article to learn what they are. If you really do not want to put in the effort to hire diverse faculty, they suggest that you stop marketing yourselves as pro-diversity:
As a committee, you should ask whether your practices and outcomes are in line with the institution’s professed values. If not, then be honest about the department’s unwillingness to be accountable to those values and remove any misaligned statements from marketing and other materials promoting your faculty. (p. 574)
Importantly, keeping your current hiring process unchanged, if you are a disproportionately white department, is the same as maintaining white supremacy. If you have been hiring only white candidates for a long time, and you make no effort to institute concrete measures to change this, then it is reasonable to expect that you will continue to hire only white candidates (claims that there weren’t any suitable non-white candidates have been, in my experience, false — it’s usually something like the situation narrated by Alice Silverberg in her Sept 17, 2017 post, “We’d love to hire a woman”). As Sensoy and DiAngelo put it,
when a predetermined formula generated by the institution is used, the default is the reproduction of power; such formulas were not originally constructed to address diversity and thus cannot be relied on to achieve diversity. (p. 564)
Concluding Thoughts
My analysis here has been deliberately simplified in some parts to avoid writing a whole academic treatise on the subject. One thing to consider is that while implicit bias may turn our attention away from structural injustice onto inaccessible individual intentions, there’s still room for theories of moral responsibility for implicit bias.
Another aspect to consider is how implicit bias discourse interacts with white fragility [pdf]: Are the white men I discuss above, who joke in an apparently self-aware manner about implicit bias but continue to act to maintain white male supremacy, attracted to implicit bias as a doctrine because it relieves them of the need to defend themselves? While they may have never expressed explicit biases, perhaps they had always felt slightly guilty about the fact that women keep dropping out of their classes, and they secretly worry that they are doing something explicitly discriminatory… but the implicit bias framework comes along and saves them from worrying about their actions!
Finally, considering academic hiring in particular, has the terrible state of the job market become an excuse to classify any incident of obviously better-qualified minorities not being hired as just “bad luck”? (Yes, I’ve seen this happen too.) This is another way that institutions can escape responsibility — we think their work is good, but given the competitive market, there are so many other good people out there, and almost all of them happen to be cis white men. Recreational racism* — when you get to sincerely express regret that this or that minority is no longer in the profession, but you have zero accountability for contributing to that situation.
*This term was introduced by the book that Prescod-Weinstein reviews.
