One way to improve diversity work
Over the last few years, I have studied diversity work with a focus on higher education. I decided to study diversity work for my dissertation because it is supposed to prevent and address racial discrimination and other civil rights violations in organizations. In many ways, they are supposed to be “change agents” or civil rights advocates who work inside organizations. Furthermore, I have witnessed and dealt with racism in higher ed. Therefore, I began my project with the following question: What can diversity work accomplish?
Now that I’ve completed my interviews with 30 diversity workers who are paid to be professional antiracists in higher ed, I want to share one idea for how to improve diversity work: Diversity workers need protection.
Diversity workers tend to be at-will employees—they can be "dismiss[ed] for any reason, and without warning, as long as the reason is not illegal.” As a consequence, it is imperative for diversity workers to promote descriptions and remedies for organizational problems that do not upset the president.
Diversity workers’ silence about problems caused or enabled by president cannot be reduced to ignorance; my interviews with diversity workers and the previous research on diversity work (i.e. On Being Included by Sarah Ahmed and The Enigma of Diversity by Ellen Berrey) suggests that diversity workers can be aware and silent about organizational problems because they do not want to be labeled “a problem” or “a troublemaker” by their employer. In other words, diversity workers have the seemingly impossible role of being a precarious change agent. Therefore, I believe that diversity workers need to have protections so they can freely discuss students’ and employees’ grievances about organizational policies and practices. Something like the “tenure” afforded to educators or the protections provided by a union could help them get the job done, and it could differentiate them from human resource managers.
Of course, this change would not eradicate inequalities in organizations. There are definitely tenured educators who still self-censor, unions have been decimated, and having protections will not change the anti-democratic structure of the workplace. Still, this simple reform to diversity work could be useful for the individuals who are expected to be precarious change agents, and it could enable diversity workers to talk about the similarities that exist for the majority of workers in organizations—most of us need to work for a living, are precarious, need better wages, struggle with a fear retaliation that causes us to silence our criticisms of bosses and managers, and we would benefit from a lot more democracy in the workplace. At the very least, I can’t think of a good reason why diversity workers should be at-will employees.
Note: Sorry if you received this two times. Something weird was going on with Substack or my internet when I originally posted it. Sorry!