"Those like me who pay attention to diversity in higher education call this work “invisible labor”—not because no one sees it but because institutions don’t value it with the currency they typically use to reward faculty work: reappointment, tenure, and promotion. Chances are a faculty member of color is not going to get a sabbatical or a grant from her institution because she contributes to the diversity mission her university probably has posted somewhere on its website. She certainly isn’t going to get tenure for it...
This imbalance—this extra burden on minority faculty—has ever been thus. Women of color, for example, tend to take on more service than their male counterparts. Similarly, for me and other nonwhite faculty members I know, much, if not most, of this service revolves around supporting students of color—sponsoring campus groups, providing additional guidance (especially for first-generation college students), and intervening on their behalf with administrative officers. On top of that, we’re also called on to “diversify” campus committees and to represent the views of a variety of ethnic groups in even the most informal conversations. And while advice about how to manage the pressure is readily available, it’s hard to take the long view and think about tenure and promotion when college students need, and are seeking, guidance as they challenge their institutions to make diversity a priority in word and in deed...
In my diversity research, I am particularly interested in how the academy is structurally hostile to meaningful diversity. Specifically, I look at the ways colleges bring faculty of color to campus with no clear plan about how to support them once they arrive. I wonder, for example, in the consumer-based model of higher education, what happens to the Latina assistant professor of history in a room full of white students who are hearing for the first time that the history they have learned is complex in ways that implicate them? Or the black sociologist charged with teaching urban studies to kids who grew up with the invisible safety nets of the suburbs? In political-science courses across the country, faculty of color are, in all likelihood, discussing the election of Donald Trump in classrooms with students who might think all his rhetoric is just talk. If, generally speaking, classes that ask students to reexamine their assumptions about race and racism are challenging, what is in place to protect faculty who lead difficult class conversations in this particularly volatile moment?"
!!! It's those poorly requested diversity statements in applications and vague, over-general diversity policies written by and for white men that make it clear that a certain kind of labor is always going to be expected of me as a female scientist of color.
There is a certain smile and body position and welcoming delight and performative ease that I have been asked to turn on - for the cameras, for the potential recruit, for the white boss who just read an article about Black Lives Matter and is feeling momentarily conscious of not having any black friends. It's my job to fulfill the colorblind dream of stock-photo *diversity and inclusion* that all the administrators want to point to whenever they don't want to actually address racism at their university.
FB: "Black faculty report feeling more vulnerable, and the invisible labor is hyper visible in this post-Ferguson, post-Obama moment. All too often, when deans, provosts, and presidents call for panels, workshops, and university discussions, there’s a faculty member of color who has to wrestle with how to contribute (or with whether or not they want to) while still doing the work their colleagues get to do without the same burden."
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