“Why Diversity For Diversity’s Sake Won’t Work”

Jennifer Delton, an associate professor of history at Skidmore College, has written a superb critique (except for its rather wimpy conclusion) of current “diversity” practices in the Chronicle of Higher Education, here. If you have access to the Chronicle, in paper or online, drop whatever you’re doing and go read the whole thing now. If you don’t have access, go find a friend who does. If you don’t have any friends, go to a library and read it. Some excerpts will follow, but I’m not allowed to quote the whole thing.

Let me whet your appetite with the opening:

Buried deep in the transcript of Congressional hearings for a 1944 fair-employment bill is a telling exchange between a Texas congressman who opposed the bill and a lawyer who supported it. In tones of theatrical disbelief, the congressman demanded, “In other words, you call it discrimination to designate the color of the people you want to work for you?”

With equal incredulity, the lawyer responded, “Well, wouldn’t you?”

Indeed the congressman would not….

Like today’s diversity experts, the congressman held fast to his belief that for some jobs, race matters.

Delton’s concern is with “diversity” as it practiced (perhaps a better term would be malpracticed) in higher education, where she finds massive wink-and-nod hypocrisy occasioned by the conflict between a continuing commitment to the principle of non-discrimination and the even stronger determination to discriminate.

The goal of diversifying college faculties may be a worthy one, but academic circles have largely ignored problems inherent in the practice of “diversity hiring.” Such hiring practices are not only legally questionable, but they also go against everything a half-century of antiracist educational activism has taught us about the meaninglessness of visible racial characteristics. Despite diversity advocates’ insistence that color matters, the meaninglessness of physical racial characteristics continues to be a key theme of antiracist education. Moreover, that presumption — the meaninglessness of racial characteristics — underlies current antidiscrimination laws as well as the rules of social etiquette. To infer anything about a person’s interests, character, or sensibility on the basis of physical racial characteristics is legally suspect and socially déclassé. Yet that is what “diversity hiring” practices require us to do.

The continuing relevance of the phrase “regardless of race,” especially as manifested in antidiscrimination laws and social etiquette, forces diversity-hiring advocates into ineffective guesswork and subterfuge to attain their goals. The law prohibits search committees from advertising on the basis of race or ethnicity, inquiring about a person’s race or ethnicity, or hiring a person on the basis of race or ethnicity. Thus search committees draw on their own assumptions — what we used to call prejudices — to focus on those areas where they think people of color might congregate. They read between the lines of letters, seeking hints about racial identity. An interest in transnational migration, a reference to Spelman College, struggling grandparents — could it be? And then when the candidate finally appears before them, visible to the eye, they can see what they are looking for: race, ethnicity, diversity. (Although I recently heard a colleague boast of how his department visited graduate-program Web sites that post pictures of their job seekers, which suggests that the guesswork is becoming less inefficacious and more legally questionable.)

….

Despite the difficulties posed by antidiscrimination laws, diversity advocates have not called for their termination or revision. They seem to support the laws; they just want to find ways around them. The disingenuous, wink-wink evasion of antidiscrimination laws weakens those laws and, indeed, all laws. In evading those laws, diversity experts do not act in the tradition of civil disobedience, since they actually support the laws. It’s as if, by virtue of their good intentions and expertise, they are above the law. Similarly, they seem supportive of social rules that discourage people from assuming a person’s interests or qualifications on the basis of appearance, even as they assume that people of color — by virtue of their color — are better equipped for a particular job.

And let’s not forget the irony:

Antidiscrimination laws have had the unintended effect of making the physical appearance of race all-important to committees seeking to hire diversity. You can’t advertise; you can’t ask; all you can do to confirm race is see it. So even though most search-committee members know that what is important about race is unseen, manifested in experience, identity, and a complex web of social negotiations, they tend to revert to a simpler physical conception of race when chasing diversity. Although forced in part by antidiscrimination laws, the emphasis on appearance is nonetheless matched by diversity rhetoric promising “to change the complexion” of the student and faculty bodies, especially at small liberal-arts colleges that are still largely white.

As I said, read the whole thing if you can. As I also said, the only part of this piece with which I have any complaint is the rather weak, wimpy conclusion:

When I raise these concerns to colleagues, their response is always, “What do you propose we do instead?” As understandable as this question is, its underlying insistence on practical solutions has helped to create the conundrum in which we find ourselves. Discussions about diversity are always emphatically focused on solutions and results. Tell us what we can do, people say. Tell us what works. The emphasis on solutions allows us — indeed, demands us — to evade the more difficult, divisive discussions about how we define diversity, which categories will receive scarce resources, which categories are more desirable. Otherwise intellectually curious people, we dismiss concerns about the commodification of color as irrelevant or obstructionist. And even as we instruct our students to interrogate everything, we are loath to interrogate the concept of diversity, whose interests it serves, why it is so desired at this historical moment, or how its competing meanings become vehicles for particular political agendas.

To offer an alternative at this point merely contributes to the problem. What I would urge instead is an honest reappraisal and discussion of the contradictions and costs of the current assumptions and practices.

She needn’t be so reticent, or confused. What “works,” and what we should do for that pragmatic reason alone if acting on principle is not enough, is to admit, hire, promote, and fire people without regard to their race, creed, or color.