Beyond ‘Diversity’
By: Tom Cornford
Tags: Diversity, Anti Racism, University, Racism, Theatre

It was my privilege, today, to join Roaa Ali and Royona Mitra as a respondent to Professor Kehinde Andrews (he of Back to Black/remaining-patient-and-cogent-under-assault-by-gammon fame) on a panel at the annual conference of the association of UK theatre studies departments titled ‘Equality and Diversity: What’s Next?’

Royona, Roaa and I decided to focus our contributions on asking questions of our subject association in order to generate a debate around the future of anti-racism in our discipline(s) (a term I will consider further below). I decided, in the spirit of making my ‘provocation’ actually provocative, to develop a critique of the conceptual limits of ‘diversity’, using as evidence a 2017 report from SCUDD’s ‘Diversity on the Discipline Working Group’.

Here’s what I said…

Our discussion today calls to mind the Black, Puerto-Rican sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s 2003 book Racism Without Racists (now in its 5th edition — he keeps having to update it). Bonilla-Silva argues that, rather than considering racism as the psychological prejudice of individuals who persist in believing that there are correlations between particular characteristics of people and their phenotypic variation, we need to consider racism as a structure; in his words, as ‘the totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege’. Bonilla-Silva draws on Peggy McIntosh’s term ‘white privilege’ here, which describes numerous ways in which identifying as or being able to pass for white confers social advantage, but rather than focussing on the symptoms of structural racism, Bonilla-Silva also offers a means of analysing its function. Bonilla-Silva’s account of racism focuses, in particular, on ways in which racialized interests are promoted or reinforced without the appearance of racism, a phenomenon he names ‘new’ or ‘color-blind’ racism, and which he characterizes as ‘subtle, institutionalized and apparently non-racial’. I have argued that, in the contemporary theatre, one such subtle and institutionalized and apparently non-racial mechanism for the reinforcing of white privilege is the promotion of the diversity agenda. I want here, to make the same argument about higher education broadly, and theatre & performance studies in particular, by offering three very brief critiques of the concept of diversity, and relating them to SCUDD’s 2017 report on its project titled ‘Diversity in the Discipline’.

I want to say up front that I appreciate the report’s intention and many of its recommendations (though I do not think they go far enough), as well as its acknowledgement that ‘[t]he language of diversity and inclusion should not obfuscate […] realities of prejudice and discrimination’ and its attempts to shift the conversation from, for example, ‘unconscious bias’ to ‘actual power and power structures’. I’m afraid, however, that, since my broader argument is that we must work for equality in specific, concrete and unavoidably antagonistic ways, I cannot help but risk making specific, concrete people feel antagonised by what I am going to say. This debate, however, is precisely not about the individual, but about structures of power from which individuals, such as me, personally benefit. I can therefore assure you that no-one in this room is more susceptible to my critique than I am.

Three critiques of the concept of diversity

1. ‘Diversity’ often serves to dilute and obscure critiques of injustice. The breadth of categories captured under the heading ‘diversity’ commonly leads to mis-uses of intersectional theory, in which the variety of identity positions discussed has two effects: it dilutes their significance and it situates them horizontally in relation to each other on a scale of difference, rather than vertically as relations of power, as in — for example — the SCUDD report’s phrase ‘national, ethnic and religious identity’. This purports to represent more accurately the numerous ways in which people may self-identify than would the word ‘race’, and yet the breadth of the range of identity’s potential terms also serves to obscure the vectors of power that shape environments where whiteness, a middle class background, masculinity, and non-disabledness are not only assumed but actively promoted and reinforced as normative standards. SCUDD’s diversity report notes that ‘the lack of diversity in our curricula should be cause for concern’. Diversity, however, as a conceptual framework, struggles to articulate why this should be a cause for concern, and why — as the evidence strongly suggests — it is not yet causing very much actual concern. By contrast, Bonilla-Silva’s focus on the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege exposes injustices for which ‘diversity’ frequently provides cover. Kalwant Bhopal notes, for example, that research has demonstrated that the principal beneficiaries of the Athena Swan Charter (developed to address gender inequality) have been white, middle-class women. Meanwhile, academics of colour looking to the Race Equality Charter to advance their cause will find that, unlike Athena Swan, it is decoupled from the availability of grant income, inevitably diminishing its priority. Race Equality Charter returns also regularly include international students under the category ‘BME’, which, while accurate in terms of what SCUDD’s report calls the ‘markers of self-identity’, almost certainly misrepresents the position of ‘home’ students of colour in those institutions, who are more likely than their white peers to have encountered social and educational disadvantage and discrimination. Thus, ‘diversity’ obscures injustice.

2. Diversity erases history. The Diversity in the Discipline report describes ‘an evolutionary imperative towards diversity’, and the term diversity does indeed have its roots in biology and in the observation of the naturally-occurring variety and variability of life-forms. In relation to the politics of identity and the oppression and marginalisation of people, however, this idea obscures a great deal more than it reveals. It need hardly be said that it is much less significant for our purposes that human beings exhibit phenotypic variation than that certain groups have been not only been enslaved and oppressed by the interlocking processes of patriarchy, coloniality and capitalism, but have been both explicitly and implicitly identified as the justifiable subjects of oppression by the forms of knowledge that were constructed by the institutions of white, male, capitalist power produced by those systems, and, moreover, that they continue to be identified as such by the inheritors of those forms of knowledge, namely the institutions in which we all work. Therefore, our analysis of the function of human variance within our societies and institutions can only succeed if it is based upon a geopolitics of knowledge, grounded in historical processes, and not a pseudo-biological concept that erases history in its focus on a vaguely imagined future.

3. Diversity has no politics. If politics concerns relations of power, which are inevitably constructed gradually across time, and diversity has a conceptual blind-spot regarding both power relations and their histories, then diversity as a concept can offer sociological but not political analysis. As such, it may easily find itself co-opted for positions whose interests are served by the maintenance of the political status quo in spite of its purported desire for change. For example, SCUDD’s report proposes three concrete actions, in relation to gender, mental health and the potential consequences of Brexit. It asks ‘what are the factors impeding [women’s] progression towards lectureships and professorships?’ It proposes that ‘action must be taken to identify causes and support mechanisms to help those affected’ by mental ill-health. It recommends that SCUDD ‘[c]ampaign and lobby on the importance of international (and especially EU) students to the survival of our discipline’. I agree that all of these actions are important, but likewise note that parallel concrete actions are not proposed in relation to race, disability, or the hostile environment, and that faculty and students of SCUDD departments (as the report demonstrates) are proportionally much more likely to be women than to be people of colour, more likely to suffer problems with mental health than live with other disabilities, and much more likely to be affected by Brexit than by the hostile environment. In other words, this report tacitly reveals the racialized interests of its corporate authors, the representatives of Theatre and Performance Studies in UK higher education.

This flaw is common to all initiatives framed by ‘diversity’ and a direct consequence of the application of a conceptual framework to addressing inequalities which is so easily co-opted to reinforce the privileges it ostensibly seeks to dismantle. ‘Diversity’, in Bonilla-Silva’s terms, is non-racist when we need anti-racism, just as it is non-ableist when we need anti-ableism, and so on. Therefore, we have to think beyond diversity and engage, perhaps, the other term in the SCUDD report, which we commonly use in forums such as this as though it were neutral: ‘the discipline’. Discipline has been and continues to be a violent, painful and life-threatening reality for oppressed and marginalised people as it was for the thinkers and activists whose ideas we are able to borrow for our purposes in the (relative and unequally distributed) safety of academic freedom today. Comfortably within our living memories, leftist and Black liberation movements were violently suppressed as part of the project of establishing neoliberal hegemony. Our current government’s pursuit of austerity, the hostile environment, and the Prevent strategy has gone further, by requiring public servants, both directly and indirectly, to discipline the publics we serve. In this context, it is encumbent upon us to ask how we are being co-opted to discipline. How, for example, is the knowledge we produce or disseminate disciplined so as to promote or support racialized interests? How can we resist and overturn this disciplining function of our teaching and research? How can we go further and make knowledge ill-disciplined by using it to expose racism as a structure and to work against its interests — and therefore, for those of us who are white, against our own interests? Until we engage deeply with these questions, we will find, almost inevitably, that diversity becomes another tool of white supremacy. And so my questions to SCUDD are these:

How do we propose to expose and critique histories of domination within our fields? How can we work to challenge tacit and explicit hierarchies that continue to discipline our knowledges? In short: how can we better represent the ill-discipline?

That’s where I stopped. The discussion that followed our contributions was encouragingly concrete and specific, and focused, in part, on an important shortcoming aspect of my argument here. On the one hand, as Royona said, critiques of whiteness (and of concepts such as ‘diversity’ that commonly work tacitly to re-centre it) help us to develop what she called ‘critical hoping’ and an awareness of the need not so much to diversify as to repair our curricula and institutions. On the other hand, Roaa’s critique of my position (as I understood it) was a) that it risks erasing the work of activists who struggled to secure a place for, for example, ‘diversity’ on the agendas of institutions and governments, and b) that it leads all too often to a form of quietism. This is symptomatic of a great deal of leftist analysis. Often it feels as though the more forceful the critique, the less action results from it. We therefore have to be both thorough in our critiques and prepared strategically to build contingent coalitions in order to achieve change using the tools at our disposal. So let’s set our sights on horizons beyond ‘diversity’, but let’s not forget that ‘diversity’ may be a staging post to help us reach them.