Why Diversity for Diversity's Sake Won't Work

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By JENNIFER DELTON

Buried deep in the transcript of Congressional hearings for a 1944 fair-employment bill is a telling exchange between a Texas congressman who opposed the bill and a lawyer who supported it. In tones of theatrical disbelief, the congressman demanded, "In other words, you call it discrimination to designate the color of the people you want to work for you?"

With equal incredulity, the lawyer responded, "Well, wouldn't you?"

Indeed the congressman would not. Some jobs, he opined, demanded talents only a white man could provide. Why waste time interviewing applicants you have no intention of hiring? When he had made that same argument a few weeks earlier, another lawyer had demanded to know how a man's color alone could possibly predict his potential performance on the job.

Like today's diversity experts, the congressman held fast to his belief that for some jobs, race matters.

Proponents of "diversity hiring" insist that faculty members of color have a different perspective on issues of race and ethnicity that will increase students' understanding of the multiracial, multicultural world they will inhabit in the 21st century. The mere presence of "diverse" faculty members will prepare students for workplace realities, proponents argue. Moreover, minority faculty members are needed to serve as mentors to a growing number of students of color. Whatever costs are incurred by such policies are outweighed by the obvious pedagogical benefits they secure.

The goal of diversifying college faculties may be a worthy one, but academic circles have largely ignored problems inherent in the practice of "diversity hiring." Such hiring practices are not only legally questionable, but they also go against everything a half-century of antiracist educational activism has taught us about the meaninglessness of visible racial characteristics. Despite diversity advocates' insistence that color matters, the meaninglessness of physical racial characteristics continues to be a key theme of antiracist education. Moreover, that presumption — the meaninglessness of racial characteristics — underlies current antidiscrimination laws as well as the rules of social etiquette. To infer anything about a person's interests, character, or sensibility on the basis of physical racial characteristics is legally suspect and socially déclassé. Yet that is what "diversity hiring" practices require us to do.

The continuing relevance of the phrase "regardless of race," especially as manifested in antidiscrimination laws and social etiquette, forces diversity-hiring advocates into ineffective guesswork and subterfuge to attain their goals. The law prohibits search committees from advertising on the basis of race or ethnicity, inquiring about a person's race or ethnicity, or hiring a person on the basis of race or ethnicity. Thus search committees draw on their own assumptions — what we used to call prejudices — to focus on those areas where they think people of color might congregate. They read between the lines of letters, seeking hints about racial identity. An interest in transnational migration, a reference to Spelman College, struggling grandparents — could it be? And then when the candidate finally appears before them, visible to the eye, they can see what they are looking for: race, ethnicity, diversity. (Although I recently heard a colleague boast of how his department visited graduate-program Web sites that post pictures of their job seekers, which suggests that the guesswork is becoming less inefficacious and more legally questionable.)

Antidiscrimination laws have had the unintended effect of making the physical appearance of race all-important to committees seeking to hire diversity. You can't advertise; you can't ask; all you can do to confirm race is see it. So even though most search-committee members know that what is important about race is unseen, manifested in experience, identity, and a complex web of social negotiations, they tend to revert to a simpler physical conception of race when chasing diversity. Although forced in part by antidiscrimination laws, the emphasis on appearance is nonetheless matched by diversity rhetoric promising "to change the complexion" of the student and faculty bodies, especially at small liberal-arts colleges that are still largely white.

This reversion to color is especially misguided at the present historical moment. Never has color been so complicated, tenuous, and dependent on regional context and personal choice. Tiger Woods looks black but refuses to identify as such. Dominicans who are white in New York City are identified as black in upstate New York. Hip-hoppers who look white or Asian call themselves black. Current scholarship emphasizes the fluidity of racial and ethnic identity, scolding those who still believe in discrete racial categories. It seems that everyone has complicated notions of race and ethnicity except the various committees charged with increasing minority hires. They seem perfectly satisfied with traditional, physical definitions of black, white, and Hispanic. As is the case with art and obscenity, they know race when they see it.

Despite a search committee's thrilling confirmation that the candidate is indeed "diverse," the rules of social etiquette prevent any spoken recognition of this fact. One is supposed to carry on as if race did not matter. And yet how does one ascertain if the candidate in question would be willing to bear the pedagogical responsibilities of a diversity hire? Can one just assume the candidate will want to be a mentor for minority students? Speak on issues of multiculturalism? Perform diversity? To ask may give offense. To assume the person will want to contribute on the basis of color seems imprecise. In a social minefield like this, one waits patiently for cues from the candidate.

To get around laws prohibiting hiring on the basis of race, proponents of diversity hires have revised the categories by which we evaluate job candidates. In addition to traditional criteria such as a candidate's graduate program, letters of recommendation, teaching evaluations, and scholarship, search committees are urged to consider what that person might contribute to a college's diversity initiatives, just as they would consider what a candidate might contribute to other academic or co-curricular programs. Following the lead of admissions officers, diversity advocates have identified color as one of several factors — like previous teaching experience, a secondary field in musicology, or a prestigious graduate program — that may be considered in assessing a candidate. But skin color and the experience it is supposed to represent are not comparable to those other factors. One may ask candidates about teaching experience and secondary fields. Legal and social restrictions prevent inquiry about color, making it both more and less than a line on a vita: hardly impressive as a real achievement, yet somehow more significant than a three-year stint at San Diego State.

The larger problem is legal. While the Supreme Court has declared that race may be considered as one factor among many in admissions policies, it has not yet ruled on this practice in the area of employment. In order for employers to consider color in hiring decisions, they have to be declared affirmative-action institutions, meaning that they have sought and obtained the government's permission to consider color to make up for past discrimination in hiring. Few universities or colleges have sought such a classification.

Despite the difficulties posed by antidiscrimination laws, diversity advocates have not called for their termination or revision. They seem to support the laws; they just want to find ways around them. The disingenuous, wink-wink evasion of antidiscrimination laws weakens those laws and, indeed, all laws. In evading those laws, diversity experts do not act in the tradition of civil disobedience, since they actually support the laws. It's as if, by virtue of their good intentions and expertise, they are above the law. Similarly, they seem supportive of social rules that discourage people from assuming a person's interests or qualifications on the basis of appearance, even as they assume that people of color — by virtue of their color — are better equipped for a particular job.

Diversity experts ask us to hold all of these competing views in our heads at once: Race matters. Race doesn't matter. It's fluid and invisible, but can also be classified and seen. This is an interesting lesson in ambiguity, but it is a precarious foundation for fair, effective hiring policies.

By insisting that "race" is a legitimate factor in hiring and salary decisions, diversity-hiring policies not only undermine hard-won antidiscrimination laws, they also reinscribe racial categories with social meaning. In the past, race-conscious hiring policies such as affirmative action posed a similar threat, but they were necessary in order to achieve integration, make up for past injustices, combat discrimination, and empty racial categories of meaning.

It was one of the more flummoxing paradoxes of the civil-rights movement that race-conscious strategies were necessary for color-blind ends. But the goal of affirmative action was integration and justice. The goal of diversity hiring is something called "diversity," and it is unclear what its relationship is to either integration or justice. It is touted as pedagogically beneficial. It is supposed to prepare students for the 21st-century workplace. But those benefits hardly justify undermining antidiscrimination laws and reinvesting race with legal meaning. Proponents see diversity hiring as a continuation of the civil-rights movement, and hence it seems to have a veneer of justice, but it is difficult to discern the specific civil-rights infractions diversity hiring would resolve. Despite their overt whiteness, liberal-arts colleges are not the construction trades.

In the decades since the Supreme Court's 1978 Bakke decision, "diversity" has lost its original context (a "doorway" for racial integration) and been expanded to include gender, sexuality, ethnicity, income, socioeconomic class, and even body type. It now performs a variety of competing functions. It is a call for cosmopolitanism, a way out of whiteness, a pedagogical asset. It is a comfortable, catch-all slogan; a marketing tool; an assessment criterion. Despite the shifting meanings and conflicting purposes of diversity, we are asked to subvert the law to pursue it. We are asked to put aside what we know about race and pretend that color can be just another hiring criterion, open to the whims of the market, unmoored from the past, neutered of controversy.

When I raise these concerns to colleagues, their response is always, "What do you propose we do instead?" As understandable as this question is, its underlying insistence on practical solutions has helped to create the conundrum in which we find ourselves. Discussions about diversity are always emphatically focused on solutions and results. Tell us what we can do, people say. Tell us what works. The emphasis on solutions allows us — indeed, demands us — to evade the more difficult, divisive discussions about how we define diversity, which categories will receive scarce resources, which categories are more desirable. Otherwise intellectually curious people, we dismiss concerns about the commodification of color as irrelevant or obstructionist. And even as we instruct our students to interrogate everything, we are loath to interrogate the concept of diversity, whose interests it serves, why it is so desired at this historical moment, or how its competing meanings become vehicles for particular political agendas.

To offer an alternative at this point merely contributes to the problem. What I would urge instead is an honest reappraisal and discussion of the contradictions and costs of the current assumptions and practices.

Jennifer Delton is an associate professor of history at Skidmore College. She is writing a book on corporate efforts to integrate the American workplace.