Have you noticed that damn near every major corporation has suddenly discovered Black pain, abuse, and distress? All the major firms have come out with statements feigning shock and sympathy on huge banners but have demonstrated limited support beyond verbal. Everyone is getting on the bandwagon, many of whom rolled that same wagon over us in the past. “See we care that you are broken and bruised. Let us help. We see your pain. Let us tell your story through our lens. You have suffered enough. Let us sell our jeans, our shoes, our history, so that all can benefit from your pain. Let this death matter. It is important that everyone sees we are allies with you on your knees. We can benefit now. We can win the struggle your blood has cost us.” Please … if you want to help—send some support. We could use scholarships, small-business loans, police and prison reform, access to full medical and related health care. I am glad you see our pain, but it has been there for a while. Now let us see your support. Unfortunately, such pandering ignores the social reality of not only this moment, but the movement that has brought it into being.
How we interpret social reality reflects our biases. If we look across time, over the past few centuries we see these same racist structures being reified throughout academia. Hence:
- Theorists housed in Western universities, from John Locke to Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mills, glorified, embraced, and celebrated colonization, genocide, slavery, rape, pillage, and theft of Indigenous Peoples’ lands (Buccus 2020).
- Academia was silent as racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism were enshrined into both law and public policy. In fact, several Ivy League institutions (such as Georgetown, Rutgers, Columbia, Harvard, and Brown) have been deeply involved in slavery (Reilly 2017) (login may be required to access the article) or complicit after the so-called end of slavery (Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor 2015).
- With the end of slavery, the Western academy was silent or turned a deaf ear to the cries of the newly enslaved under European colonialism that spread across India, the Middle East, and Africa (Hargreaves 1973 and Weiner 2016).
- Universities across the Western world, during the first 40 years of the twentieth century, were either silent or complicit as thousands of African Americans were lynched, millions of Indians were slaughtered under British rule, and Jews were systematically exterminated (Dar, Desai, and Nwonka 2020 and Rothman 2018) (login may be required to access the article).
- Academia was virtually silent as eugenics and the “Mississippi Appendectomy” targeted Blacks, Indigenous Peoples, and the urban poor.
- Academia discovered the civil rights movement late in the game. And academia did not really embrace the social movement until long after the riots, long hot summers, and assassinations of King, Malcolm X, and Kennedy.
- Thirty-five years after affirmative action, Blacks and Hispanics are even more underrepresented at our top universities (Ashkenas, Park, and Pearce 2017) (login may be required to access the article).
- Academia was silent or blind to the killing of Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Peoples youth until three brave Black mothers began the Black Lives Matter movement.
- Academia continues to discover Blacks, Hispanics, and Indigenous Peoples as problems, as victims, but rarely as conquerors and overcomers. In ways that W.E.B. Du Bois queried, “What is it like to be a problem?” Hence academia continues to problematize these lives and rarely can one find any significant attempt to empower, address concerns, or repair the damage caused by White racial systems.
Maximizing the University’s Core Mission
In some nostalgic, mythical place—“the university” existed on a hill, the Ivory Tower, where all not only saw but were attracted to its light. Academe prided itself on its exclusivity, its difficulty, and its failure rates. However nostalgic one may be, such an institution could never exist save for among the very elite. The very meaning of the word “university” is derived from Latin and refers to a community of scholars and learners. The reality is that functional universities are tied to their capacity to serve the community. That core mission remains; if anything, it is even more important.
But the mission is expanding. The future of the university lies is in its capacity to develop community partnerships. Partnerships between universities and local communities can be a positive way to establish pathways that focus on increasing the access and success of underrepresented students. If the university cannot accomplish this, in today’s competitive environment it will cease to exist.
On the front end, this means working with local schools to help articulate and model what precollege skills and experiences are most appropriate for college success. On the back end, we need to ensure that we maximize the number of diverse students who graduate with the skills and experiences to enter society ready to be fully engaged. The pathways that lead through the university must be available to demographically diverse students in order to reflect the composition of the wider community, state, and/or nation. The pathways that lead from our universities must be equally diverse across the full spectrum of opportunities afforded by the university.
Chief among the skills needed of our graduates are the abilities to interact positively with an increasingly diverse world and think critically, logically, and analytically to solve complex problems. Barriers to access and success must be identified and eliminated to maximize the core mission of the university.
Equitable Opportunities
Universities have become the site of contested spaces not only in this country but worldwide as symbols of our colonial, confederate, and imperial past have been challenged and, in many cases, removed. While it is great that the symbols of our racist past such as Confederate flags, statues of Edward Colston (director of the Royal African Company, which dominated the African slave trade) or Leopold II (the king of Belgium who was responsible for widespread atrocities in the Congo), and other monuments are being retired, we must do more. We must dismantle the colonial, imperialist, and racist structures that continue to deny identity and agency, history, and cultural realities of those who were subjugated, whose liberties were denied, and who even now call for justice. If indeed we are to move forward, we must commit to more than symbolic gestures and dedicate our efforts to making substantive changes. And this means being willing to have some difficult conversations and put our resources where our values are.
Difficult conversations about privilege and racial discrimination require that first we be honest. We must provide the spaces where all, particularly the marginalized, can be heard. So often we want to bring in outsiders to tell us what is wrong. I find this strange when the real experts are there in the room. Bringing in an outsider who controls the discussion, essentially tells the insider person of color that their experiences are not valuable. Outsiders can indeed facilitate, but should not dictate, the conversation.
Legitimating the voices of people of color, who are the insiders, sends a clear message that ownership of both the conversation and the solutions are internally driven. When privilege dictates not only whose voices will be heard, but how these voices will be evaluated, this only reaffirms privilege. In this strange game, conflict arises between the various peoples of color as each strives to be validated. Transforming the institution and antiracism movements are not exclusive zero-sum operations, but inclusive, additive processes. I am not talking about affirmative action, but rather equitable action. It is not equal opportunity but equitable opportunity.
Briefly, affirmative action set aside a proscribed number of slots for those deemed harmed by racist and sexist policies and practices. Within academia, the chief beneficiaries were White women (Goodwin 2012 and Angyal 2016), while only token positions, scholarships, and opportunities were granted to Blacks, Hispanics, Indigenous Peoples, and others. Recently published data (login may be required to access the article) reveal that at our elite public institutions in higher education, the number of Blacks and Hispanics has not changed in in the 35 years since Affirmative Action has been in force. The reality is that these institutions, like many of our school systems, remain as segregated as they were at the height of the civil rights movement.
Equitable action would acknowledge these historical processes that have denied access to far too many of our citizens. It would at the very least insist that public institutions reflect the demographic realities of their respective states. Equitable opportunities within higher education means recognizing that historical racism has resulted in significant racial wealth and education gaps. It would respond by establishing scholarships and pathways to progress.
Communicating the Counternarrative
We have all read or heard of the children’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Hans Christian Andersen. Dealing with #whiteprivilege is treacherous, particularly for persons of color. In real life, not in children’s stories, what happens when one challenges power and privilege? According to Allison Prince in her book Hans Christian Andersen: The Fan Dancer (Allison and Busby 1999), shortly after writing this story, which is decidedly a political satire, Andersen received a diamond ring from the king of Denmark, Frederick VII—and that was the last political satire critical of royalty that he would write.
In academia and corporations, as those of lower status challenge #whiteprivilege they are similarly bought off or punished. Often rather than face scorn, lowered evaluations—and subsequently fewer promotions and raises—many become less critical. Such things as student evaluations and performance reviews are frequently used to punish those who would dare reveal and challenge White privilege. Strange, the ire is most severely reserved for those people of color that provide such critiques. Consequently, when we notice lower class sizes and student evaluations, we point to the professor of color as being the problem, not the #privileged.
The past—with regard to Native American/Indigenous Peoples, Black, Hispanic, Asian, women, and other gendered groups—has been reduced, redacted, and remains obscure. Much of the problem has to do with the stock narratives that continually fuel our scholarship. Thus, we continue to discover racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, and homophobia. We have discovered both the truly advantaged and the truly disadvantaged in every field of human endeavor. While these narratives are important— they sell books and are the central driving forces for all our professional conferences—they do not tell the counternarratives. They fail to capture the work of women during the past 40–50 years—especially by women of color, such as ASA’s one hundredth President Patricia Hill Collins, who ushered in lots of exciting sociological work that centers the voices of people of color.
These counternarratives—stories of resistance, rebellion, and transformation—tend to be conflated with social movements, civil rights, and the like. Again, while these movements are important, they fail to capture the moments that make up the lived experiences of most people. These moments and their stories fill in the gaps and demonstrate “how we got over.” These tales of the truly determined help us to understand how agency is realized, experienced, and articulated in the everyday lives of those we so conveniently socially construct. We are left with the objectification of others rather than the subjective understanding of us.
Meaningful Change
Universities and corporations across America are frantically trying to wordsmith their way out of the crisis #BLM presents. Slogans, pithy statements, and crocodile tears aside, this is not a PR moment. This is a time for deliberate, strategic, and protracted change. This is not a moment but a movement. The usual band-aid approaches will not work. Bringing out your beleaguered Black and other people of color to stand alongside you on the front lines will not deflect the coming storm. Carefully phrased strategic plans without strategic investment in change will not halt the hemorrhaging wounds systematic racism continues to inflict. Naming, blaming, and shaming selected targets, while providing some immediate gratification, only makes the next crisis certain.
We are in this crisis today because we have done all these things in the past. We have whole shelves, thousands of pages of records that document our willingness to say anything to get past this moment. Promises made in the heat of the moment often shrink when the moment is past. We do not need another revival where some anointed “diversity leader” tells us how bad we were/are. We need not rehearse all our many failures, as we have repeatedly promised, yet avoid any real change. Being sorry when there is no reparation, redemption, or restoration is the epitome of hypocrisy. This is not a virus where a vaccination will cure our indifference, this is not a rash where a bit of salve will relieve the discomfort, and this is not an infection where a bit of quarantine will make it all go away. No, this is systematic and only solvable through structural changes at our cores.
The solutions, therefore, are radical processes that redefine who we are, transform our cultures, and redirect our resources in meaningful, tangible, and measurable ways. It should ultimately be realized that unless there is a significant investment in recruitment, retention, and promotion of people of color at all entry points and levels of our universities and corporations then we are essentially “tilting at windmills.” This is our chance to transform and reform the university and corporation.
We have not had the kind of institutional will to make real changes happen. Oftentimes, the very persons charged with doing this—outside consultants creating reports, e.g.—do no more than a cursory or cosmetic evaluation. Putting a fresh coat of paint over rotten wood does not make the wood any less rotten. We need to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion into our core, not the peripherals. We need to change the structure. And the only way to do this is to make our institutions look like the rest of our nation, or at least the states we live in. No matter what we do, absent demographically changing the institutions from the board room to the back door, we will not see the kind of meaningful change I am talking about, #diversityequityinclusion #socialjustice.
If we fail, no worries—we will be right back here in the next cycle. The only thing is that the longer it takes, the more severe the strain and the costlier (both in human and other resources) the fix. We need strategic processes, not slogans.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
