The Role of Combahee in Anti-Diversity Work

Abstract

This article is focused on a critical and oppositional approach to diversity work on college campuses--what we call “anti-diversity” work—that builds on and operationalizes various principles of black feminist thought articulated by the Combahee River Collective and other black feminist thinkers. At our small, Midwestern, residential, liberal arts college, we are “doing” anti-diversity work through a new faculty/staff development initiative, a project we developed and are currently implementing, called the Decolonizing Pedagogies Project (DPP). This project draws on concepts like intersectionality and coalition building, along with centering our inquiry on the experiences and theorizing of marginalized bodies and thought, to create decolonial locations that make space for “alternative ways of producing and validating knowledge itself.” The DPP demands that those who engage with the project do deep self reflection on the ways whiteness shapes and holds them to rigid understandings of diversity and inclusion that, as a result, preclude sustained institutional change. Using an intersectional lens, the foundational assumption of this approach is that “black women are inherently valuable” and that the liberation of black women would mean the liberation of everyone, because all systems of oppression would be toppled in the process.

Keywords:

• anti-racism
• black feminism
• diversity
• higher education
• intersectionality
• pedagogy

Acknowledgment

We specially recognize and thank Dr. Lisa Anderson-Levy, who was unable to participate in the drafting of this article but has been crucial to the success of this initiative as a co-PI and member of our facilitation team.

Notes

Yareliz Elena Mendez-Zamora, “Surviving Institutions that Weren’t Created for You,” The Huffington Post, August 1, 2016.

Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 212.

Ibid.

We applied for and received an external grant from the Mellon Foundation that gave us the freedom and autonomy to pursue this project.

Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

Patricia Hill-Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,” Signs 14, no. 1 (Summer, 1989): 746.

Ibid.

Jeremy Ashkenas et al., “Even With Affirmative Action, Blacks and Hispanics are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than They Were 35 Years Ago,” The New York Times, August 24, 2017.

Sara Ahmed, “Embodying Diversity: Problems and Paradoxes for Black Feminists,” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 12, no. 1 (2009): 44.

Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Leigh Patel, Decolonizing Educational Research: From Ownership to Answerability (New York: Routledge, 2015).

Charles Teddlie and John Freeman, “Twentieth-Century Desegregation in U.S. Higher Education: A Review of Five Distinct Historical Eras,” in The Racial Crisis in American Higher Education, edited by William A. Smith, Philip G. Altbach, and Kofi Lomotey (New York: SUNY Press, 2002), 77–101.

Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, “The Neo-Liberal University,” New Labor Forum 6 (Spring–Summer, 2000), 73–79. Slaughter and Rhoades define neoliberal universities as institutions that “assign markets central social value,” 73.

Michelle Cooper, “The Economic Imperative of Achieving Diversity,” Forbes, April 27, 2010, offers an example of this approach to treating diversity primarily as a marketable asset by which “current students” can become the kind of “future workers” desired by global manufacturing and technology companies.

See, for example, Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). In this landmark affirmative action case involving the University of Michigan law school, the majority ruling in favor of affirmative action invoked business interests as a primary consideration, explaining that, “Major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints,” 308.

Henry Giroux, “Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University,” Truthout, October 29, 2013.

These posters included one titled “race is real” and promoting debunked “scholarship” by racist and eugenicist “scientists”; another decried “anti-white propaganda at college” and directed viewers to an Alt-Right website that explicitly promotes antisemitism, racial violence, and fascism; a third poster admonished viewers to “Love Who You Are: Be White.” Our institution was one of dozens of campuses targeted in what appears to have been an organized campaign by white nationalist networks. Alex Arriaga, “White Supremacists Target College Campuses with Unprecedented Effort,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 6, 2017.

S. V. Iverson, “Camouflaging Power and Privilege: A Critical Race Analysis of University Diversity Policies,” Educational Administration Quarterly 43, no. 5 (2007): 586–611.

Ahmed, On Being Included.

Dafina-Lazarus Stewart, “Language of Appeasement,” Inside Higher Ed, March 30, 2017.

Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (Xenia, OH: The Aldine Printing House, 1892).

This number includes both degree- and non-degree-seeking students.

This is as of the 2016–17 school year as provided through our Office of Institutional Research, Assessment, and Planning.

This is for the 2015–16 school year.

The statement reads: “Because equity and inclusion are central to our students’ liberal education and vital to the thriving of all members of our residential learning community, Beloit College aspires to be an actively anti-racist institution. We recognize our aspiration as ongoing and institution-wide, involving collective commitment and accountability. We welcome employees who are committed to and will actively contribute to our efforts to celebrate our cultural and intellectual richness and be resolute in advancing inclusion and equity. We encourage all interested individuals meeting the criteria of the described position to apply.”

We have also found the following texts especially influential, and we often assign excerpts in our foundation reading series: Audre Lorde, Sister/Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984); Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 1989); Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99; bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress (New York: Routledge, 1994); Gutierrez y Muhs, Presumed Incompetent (Salt Lake City: Utah State University Press, 2012).

Iverson. “Camouflaging Power and Privilege.”

Estela Mara Bensimon, Alicia C. Dowd, and Keith Witham, “Five Principles for Enacting Equity by Design,” Diversity and Democracy 19, no. 1 (2016).

Atiera Coleman, Paul Dionne, Marijuana Sawyer, and Nicole Truesdell. “An Equity Asset Based Approach to Student Learning and Faculty Development” (paper presented at American Association of Colleges and Universities Conference on Diversity, Learning, and Student Success, Jacksonville, FL, March 17–19, 2017).

Nicole Truesdell. “Black Lives, Black Women, and the Academy: ‘Doing’ Equity and Inclusion Work at PWIs,” in Difficult Subjects., edited by Badia Ahad and OiYan Apoon (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing), forthcoming.

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks. 100th Anniversary Edition (New York: Signet Press, 1995).

As of Summer 2017 we have had 43 faculty, staff who teach, and administrators go through our pedagogies series. The entire President’s cabinet, including the President, went through our series as well.

Indigenous Media Action, “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex,” May 4, 2014.

To this point, we sometimes begin by interrogating Enlightenment foundations of all disciplinary assumptions about who is human and whose knowledge matters using Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed, 2002).

Kimberle Crenshaw, “Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait,” The Washington Post, September 24, 2015.

Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 214.

Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the Black Lives Matter Movement,” #BlackLivesMatter (website), n.d., emphasis in the original.

Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, But Some of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982).

Eula Biss, “White Debt,” The New York Times Magazine December 6, 2015.

Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 356.

Audre Lorde, “Women Redefining Difference,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 114–23.

Sara Ahmed, “Evidence,” Feminist Killjoys July 12, 2016.

James Baldwin, “On Being White … and Other Lies,” in Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to Be White, edited by David Roediger (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 179.

Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011): 54–70.

Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).

Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement, “218.

Ibid., 213.

Mamta Motwani Accapadi, “When White Women Cry: How White Women’s Tears Oppress Women of Color,” The College Student Affairs Journal. 26, no. 2 (2007): 208–15.

National Public Radio, “Kerry James Marshall: A Black Presence in the Art World is ‘Not Negotiable, ’” NPR Morning Edition March 28, 2017.

For example, in the physics and biology departments and in our career services office, some white women have moved beyond superficial understandings of racism and investments in their own innocence to actions in their classrooms and offices that make their disciplines’ investments in and reproduction of whiteness part of the conversations they have with students and colleagues. Their attempts to interrogate their own positionality in their respective locations indicates to us that the work of DPP can take root and hopefully keep spreading.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicole Truesdell

Nicole Truesdell is Senior Director of Academic Diversity and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Beloit College. Dr. Truesdell is a trained sociocultural anthropologist whose general interests are in radical pedagogies, academic hustling, and social justice. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, racism, gender, citizenship and belonging, community organizing and activism, social movements, equity in higher education, mentoring, and radical black thought.

Jesse Carr

Jesse Carr is a Postdoctoral Fellow, Office of Academic Diversity at Beloit College. Dr. Carr earned his Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan (2015), where his doctoral research focused on patterns of systemic violence in the U.S. His work at Beloit focuses on building more equitable and accessible classrooms, mentoring underrepresented students, and assisting with research and assessment on faculty development.

Catherine M. Orr

Catherine M. Orr is Associate Professor of Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College. Dr. Orr’s research focuses on social movements, identities, and disciplinarity. Her work has appeared in Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Hypatia, and NWSA Journal. She is the co-author (along with Ann Braithwaite) of Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies: Introductory Concepts (Routledge 2016) as well as co-editor (with Ann Braithwaite and Diane Lichtenstein) of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies (Routledge, 2012).