Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), is under attack!

By: Lennox Reeder

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), is under attack. In order to save it, Reed is going to have to remove dysfunctional ‘Anti-Racism’ initiatives. As the New York Times recently reported in their article “‘America is Under Attack,’” efforts to remove DEI from colleges and universities began long before recent student action around geopolitical events. Obviously, Reed College is insulated from the majority of those sorts of attacks due to its funding structure, but if the college intends to defend its recent and hard-earned gains in diversity, it is going to have to focus on the distinctive and compelling nature of DEI, not the loyalty statements and honeyed words of so-called anti-racism.

Let me back up a bit before we dive in. I am aware and critical of systemic racism. I do not think it is something unique to my sociopolitical positioning, a modern Black individual, that lets me understand systemic racism. I don’t believe that our particular privileges function as a sort of ‘Original Sin,’ something that Columbia linguist John McWhorter established as principally constitutive of the new religion of ‘anti-racism’ heralded by authors like Ibram X. Kendi. Put another way, I think the best way to combat systemic racism is not through conveying to everyone around me that white privilege has marred them irreversibly and that the only way to overcome it is through obsequiousness towards people of color and, in the case of what McWhorter colorfully dubbed “Third Wave Antiracism” towards black people. I actually think that the narrative of antiracism practiced through things like our “Anti-Racism” statement, in a notable moment of the monumental and beautiful demographic shift this college has undertaken over recent decades, is objectively harmful and demeaning towards Black Reedies, faculty, and staff. It’s harmful in the first instance because it is a litmus test for hiring, and those sorts of things naturally remove the nobility of being a good person for the performance thereof in exchange for a material benefit, in this case receiving a position. In the second example of harm, the existence of an antiracism statement victimizes people of color. It fundamentally alters our presence in the social group while shielding the institution itself from real questions.

To that last point, I know people are going to say, “Lennox, the statement literally ‘affirm[s] our responsibility to continuously learn about and disrupt systems of privilege, inequality, and oppression, and to reform our[selves].” (Reed College Anti-Racism Statement, 2017) And yes, it does, but in doing so it essentially throws a tarp over the rock of structural inequity and says that because we can no longer see it, it’s not there. It’s performative precisely because it sets racism apart as a purely intellectual exercise, something that people are choosing because they do not understand, as we erudite people of Reed do, that racism is bad. I don’t have that position on racism, and in fact, I think that’s the wrong approach to it. Of course, racism is bad, but it’s generally speaking inspired by something, whether that’s scientific racism that argues one group has certain biological advantages or deficiencies, or structural racism in what we seek in students and who might not have access to those opportunities on their way through life. I especially want to hone in on how it victimizes people of color because I fear that may not be obvious yet.

When we treat “white privilege” as an ineffable stain upon the shroud of humanity, we have a fatalist attitude. This fatalism constrains all white activity to that of the oppressor unless it happens to be couched in so-called antiracism. On the flip side, it reinscribes all activity by folks of color as being the work of victims. I don’t think that’s fair to us, or at all accurate even of narratives of resistance to oppression. Beautiful Black art is made every day irrelevant to the white gaze. Martin Luther King Jr. was not just a victim when he proclaimed a dream that “little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.” He was actively imagining a positive future of not just coexistence but cooperation–meaning he obviously refuted the narrative that merely for the crime of being born white white people were irreparably cruel, bigoted, racist, and unworkable in visions of a future. It’s probably fine to imagine a future free of them, I might not myself, but this is an academic institution where the biggest goal or challenge in our days is to think freely. I fear, however, and quite naturally given the fall of Harvard’s Claudine Gay (Whether or not she committed the complete dishonor of plagiarism on her dissertation decades ago was obviously beside the point of her firing, but the leveling of that claim and the reassessment of her entire body of work was clearly done through structural racism to ascertain a means of firing her). By purely casting people of color as victims in narratives of cruel Whitey’s making, we are castrated of our own role in history-making and storytelling. Whether that be the novel tales we tell one another in the human quest for meaning, or in, as Ibram X. Kendi insists upon, reforming the past to fit clever and concise narratives that trap the one in being inescapably wicked unless they wave the flag of anti-racism as they act.

DEI is probably the most important thing for institutions in the American 21st century to grok. Notably because of the colossal demographic shift our country is undergoing, as nations of beautiful immigrants often do, which no longer allows for a predominantly white male good-old-boys club to establish hiring and promotion internally as there’s a dearth of those guys to go around. I hope that Reed can protect its massive gains in diversity, equity, and inclusion, by castigating (from the Latin castigare–reprove, censure) and cutting away foul anti-racism, to focus on structural matters and improvements that can really improve our diversity. I see DEI as a critical part of the ivory tower, and antiracism as a dragon coiled around it. The white knights of the far right, twisted individuals like Chris Rufo or shorty king Bill Ackman (whose wife was found guilty of much worse plagiarism than that of Claudine Gay) will come to slay the dragon, and if we do not carefully separate the two will get away with burning the tower down as well.

I will leave you with an image from the lovely anti-racism training I received towards the tail end of my HA training at the beginning of this year. A speaker read us Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” as an example of how it feels to be an employee of color at an institution that often asks them to undertake structurally bigoted positions. The poem concludes with the stanza “We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries/ To thee from tortured souls arise./ We sing, but oh the clay is vile/ Beneath our feet, and long the mile;/ But let the world dream otherwise,/We wear the mask!//” (Poetry Foundation, accessed J.23, 2024) Ask yourself, is the anti-racism statement doing anything for these people? Or is it merely gilding the long mile towards progress, without doing anything to shorten it?