Seriously… why do we have to fight for this sh*t?
By Parisa Akbarpour
This semester, I’m taking an anthropology course called Language in Culture and Society, which is taught by Professor Alexander Dent. Prior to the first day of class, our homework was to listen to Toni Morrison’s award speech in 1993 for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Morrison was an African American writer and professor who spoke on the impact of language, particularly in respect to oppression.
I had never read or heard any of Toni Morrison’s work prior to doing this homework assignment. After listening, I thought to myself: Would I ever have heard this speech if it wasn’t required for my class?
Maybe, maybe not; but it’s probably less likely I would have stumbled upon it on my own accord. And the reason for that is easy: my privilege as a white person. I learned so much after listening to Morisson’s speech: about how language is created by the oppressor, so it inherently seeks to keep the oppressed as such. It made me confront my own speech patterns as a white person, and how so much of it is inherently racist, but because of white privilege, I don’t recognize it as discriminatory.
Professor Dent is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist (among other things: a musician, a parent, a pet-owner), who has done extensive research in Brazil on country music, a project on punk rock in the 80s and 90s, intellectual property and piracy, and authoritarianism.
He makes sure to establish a consideration for diversity, equity, and inclusion in all parts of his class, with the understanding that we are now having to work backwards in examining what is being taught and how it’s being taught, asking ourselves if we are “taking seriously the perspectives of those who have not been taken seriously by power structures in the past,” as Dent stated in his first lecture.
It’s for this reason that he re-examines his curriculum each semester and makes changes to add new, different, and historically belittled perspectives.
“There’s a lot more voices I would like to add,” he said. “Malcolm X and James Baldwin have talked a lot about language.”
Dent, who is the chair of the Anthropology Department at GW, has collaborated with other professors to make a petition for a cluster hire: a mass-hiring of new faculty members.
The petition calls for three measures to be taken:
- “A cluster hire of eighteen (18) Black, Latinx, and other underrepresented faculty over a three-year period.”
- “Invest substantially in faculty development and community building efforts to support the success and retention of faculty of color.”
- “Support a fully funded Africana Studies Program that will assume department status within the next three years. Furthermore, the university should hire a new director for this department-to-be and give them the opportunity to hire some of their own faculty.”
“It’s not enough to diversify applicant pools, to say reinvigorate the Africana Studies program (which is badly needed). We need a cluster hire, and lots of other institutions are doing it.” Dent said.
The university also announced on January 29 that they would hire a third-party to complete a diversity audit.
“This audit follows a recent recommendation from the Black Student Union, and it will assess diversity in all its forms on our campuses. We will begin the search for an external firm to lead the audit in the coming weeks, with the expectation that we would complete the audit by late spring,” the Office of the Provost said in a statement.
While the diversity audit seems like a nice decision in the right direction, it brings up questions of performative diversity and inclusion efforts.
“We don’t need to bring in an external group that costs a lot of money,” Professor Dent said. “We don’t need someone to tell us we aren’t diverse to start getting to work. I thought the fact that [the university] responded to the BSU was good but we shouldn’t delay getting started.”
It does seem interesting that the sentence starting off an announcement of a diversity audit, which is conducted in cases where there is an extreme lack of diversity, is: “GW is proud to be a university with a diverse and vibrant community of scholars.”
The issue of diversity and inclusion penetrates every part of our life and all the institutions we engage with, and it should! It’s about time we start questioning ourselves as well as our institutions (i.e. speech or our university). It should make you uncomfortable and it needs to make you uncomfortable.
The only way to come out on the other side is recognizing that discomfort and realizing it’s all fake: manufactured by society and accepted by people because of their own privileges. Myself and other white people have to constantly let go of the discomfort that is a perceived threat to our privilege, and turn it into informed action.
We need to understand that this is a conversation forever in progress. It’s not just one cluster hire, not just one diversity audit, and it’d be extremely naive to think so.
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