I am a former employee of the University of Arkansas School of Art, a predominantly white institution that has been asked—through requirements of an endowment (a financial gift)—to, “…be constructed as a model of inclusion and diversity.”Inclusion and diversity in this specific context are technologies used to change the social makeup (e.g., racial, economic, sexual, gender, ethnic, national, and ability identities) of the body of people who work, learn, and teach inside of the institution. The work of inclusion and diversity manifests in different ways, but are ultimately meant to destabilize hegemonic environments by inviting people from varied backgrounds in. This describes one way I have found myself trapped inside of a racial paradox.
The remedy of creating an inclusive and more diverse space is often only considered from its face with little—if any—resource dedicated to reflection and foresight. The lack of reflection and foresight is an overlooking of the questions: “how and why is our environment racially hegemonic?” and, “how will problems stemming from that racial hegemony persist and continue to exclude non-white people unless we change them?” In the briefest terms, it plays out in this way: someone says, “This space is hella-white, so we (whites) should get non-white people and our problem of racial hegemony is solved.” In this scenario, maintaining the racial hierarchy is the intention: keep white above all and everything else underneath. Whiteness is the standard, or priceless, while all other racial identities are commodities whose value is set against the standard. Anyone non-white is perceived as a token that will bring the institution value.
Once I, the so-called token, decides to enter the so-perceived white space, I am expected to fall in line with the “grand white plan”. When these expectations are inevitably revealed to me, I have a choice to make. I can decide to disappear parts of myself to align with the standard. I can decide to be present but disengaged. Or I can decide to do me throughout and suffer the consequences. No matter my decision, my presence brings the institution value.
I have included an anecdote that inspired me to write this to clarify:
The School of Art exists under the J. William Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences. J. William Fulbright was a former Arkansas state senator and segregationist. J. William Fulbright signed the segregationist “Southern Manifesto” in 1956. A university unit is named after a segregationist and there is also a statue of him on the campus. In my university email signature, I included to a link to a Twitter post. The image (and installation) is an artwork by a University of Arkansas student named Jacob Campbell. The picture shows the Fulbright statue with a black sheet over it and a sign propped in front of the statue that reads: “In need of a new statue preferably not a segregationist.” I created the link to participate in a conversation about anti-Blackness and institutionalized racism within the university community—a community I decided to be a member of and that pretended to accept me. I was asked to remove this link by University Relations because there is a policy barring employees from publicly engaging in political speech during work hours. They asked me to erase my contribution to this conversation out of fear of someone making a complaint. I made the signature into a work of art by bringing together a small collection of publicly accessible information and giving it an expressive purpose. Fulbright signed the segregationist Southern Manifesto in 1956 (each one teach one), 2020, was accessible through my email signature, anyone who happened to correspond with me was always confronted with the information. I did this because by naming the hyperlink an art, the institution would have to question its presence as such, thereby questioning the work they hired me to do and lauded me for.
Under such conditions, many Black academics have to adopt a “fuck it” attitude in order to not lose sight of themselves. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney define this attitude well, “The only possible relationship [for the subversive intellectual] to the [American] University today is a criminal one.”