Naomi J. Miller, an associate professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Arizona, has a fascinating article on the ambiguous position of multiracial faculty members that is perceptive, well-written, and in the end profoundly confusing, at least to me. Read it if you can. (It may require a subscription.)
Prof. Miller is a one-person embodiment of “diversity.” “Technically,” she writes (very untechnically),
I am half Japanese, a quarter Czech, and a quarter English-Dutch….
My husband is half black, half German-Jewish, and so my four children are a veritable rainbow coalition among themselves.
She recognizes that she is “an ‘other’ in American society,” according to the standard race/ethnicity boxes into which everyone is placed, and yet, she notes, “every day those of us who are multiracial live ‘outside the box,’ as tired as that phrase may be.”
She writes eloquently of the tiresomeness of being asked to serve on a plethora of “diversity” committees.
Speaking as a multiracial faculty member, I know that many of the regular invitations that I receive to serve on committees or coalitions originate from an awareness of my “other” status, when it comes to gender or ethnicity. I have trained myself to turn a blind eye to the underlying offensiveness of the academic tendency to ghettoize faculty of color by placing us on “diversity committees” without fully recognizing the value of our potential contributions to majority committees as well. Yet to speak honestly, sometimes I tire of being expected to accommodate the majority of my colleagues by giving them credit for good intentions.
The good intentions notwithstanding, “the assumptions underlying some of the invitations to participate can smack of an elite and intellectualized form of racial profiling, however unintended.”
“In the end,” Prof. Miller writes with impressive force,
it’s not enough to populate the university with a smattering of “others.” As long as we’re regarded that way, then the very impact of our contributions is limited by the confines of that box, which is not where we live
But then, when she moves to conclude the piece, Prof. Miller reminds me of Wily Coyote in the old Roadrunner cartoons who zooms right off the cliff, looks confused, and then takes a nose dive to the canyon floor below.
So how do we foster the conditions for a rainbow? One initiative that is being investigated at my own institution, by none other than a “diversity committee” with a diverse membership, is the possibility of cluster hires: recruiting not just one or even two diverse faculty members as isolated “targets of opportunity,” but rather a critical mass of diverse professors who have shared intellectual interests.
In the context of such an increasingly multifaceted intellectual community, contributions from diverse faculty members can be valued not simply because they are “other,” but because they are central. Only once we change the notion of what is marginal can we change the core.
Help me out; I don’t know what this really means. “A critical mass of diverse professors”? Individually diverse, like Prof. Miller? Or does Prof. Miller actually accept the conventional notion that a black person is “diverse,” a Hispanic person is “diverse,” etc. Anyway, she appears to approve of hiring them in bunches, whoever they are.
But wait; there’s more.
There is something else, the missing piece in what I have said so far: Racial identity in balance must include the perspectives of majority as well as minority groups, even as those definitions change daily. All those individuals whom society fits into the box of being “white” are no more all alike than all the “others.” And when diversity is recognized to include multiple articulations of sexual, political, or religious identity, as well as the racial identity that is the topic of this column, then the question of balance becomes truly three-dimensional.
Unless we find a way to communicate with each other outside the old categories, we will never come to appreciate the space and freedom that only we can provide one another, person to person, eye to eye. For my children, I look forward to a future where they need be nothing “other” than themselves. With my colleagues and students, I work toward that same end.
So, the “others” are not all the same — hence the need, presumably, for a “critical mass” of them (this reminds me of the businessman who lost money on every sale but planned to make it by selling in volume) — and the “whites” are not all the same and so we must “find a way to communicate … outside the old categories.”
Call me naive (I’ve been called worse), but this doesn’t seem so complicated: drop the categories. Interestingly, this idea was suggested by Prof. Miller’s son, but rejected by her daughter, a rejection that, oddly, Prof. Miller seems share herself.
[M]y children had an interesting conversation about racial prejudice during a Fourth-of-July picnic when my eldest daughter was in high school and my eldest son was still in middle school. My daughter was explaining to her brother that it bothered her that all of her (white) friends had no concept of the reality of her multiracial identity, so that that aspect of her identity was “invisible” to them. My son asked, “But doesn’t that mean that they are color-blind, then? And so it’s a good thing that they are not racially prejudiced?”
My daughter’s response was to tell her brother that soon enough he would become aware of the relevance of his racially mixed heritage, and that although she valued the lack of racial prejudice among her friends, she was disturbed by the very “blindness” to racial identity that is so often praised as a social virtue, because it erased the reality of her own identity. In other words, ignorance is not an adequate replacement for prejudice.
In the end, as I’ve confessed, I have no idea what Prof. Miller is trying to say here. But she said it quite well.
“…but rather a critical mass of diverse professors who have shared intellectual interests.
In the context of such an increasingly multifaceted intellectual community, contributions from diverse faculty members can be valued not simply because they are “other,” but because they are central. Only once we change the notion of what is marginal can we change the core.”
—
Group think in a colored body – now THERE’s diversity for you. Such a superficial statement from an “intellectual.”
Ah, human nature. Prof Miller sounds confused, because she is trying to say what she knows she may not: That she wants to be an “other” when being an “other” provides some tangible or psychic advantage or pleasure and she wants to be not an “other” when that suits her purposes and, finally, she wants to decide when and where she will be either one. Nor matter how fine the technical aspects of her composition they cannot hide her thoroughly puerile sentiments. How insidious and how sad for her children, particularly the middle school child.
The good prof has nothing to say and means to say nothing.
The expression of fine, uplifting sentiment is the purpose here. That the sentiment cannot be understood is a triumph of sorts. Nobody can get very angry at incoherence.
So the prof gets the best of both worlds… the perfunctory and obligatory display of halo without offending anybody.
Maybe this is an advancement.
Stu & Stephen: Direct hits. Left-wing pseudo-intellectuals routinely cast the seeds of their “diversity” into the wind and then reap whatever sprouts at their leisure.
“Don’t you dare call me ‘Other!’…unless there’s something in it for me.”
Clearly what we need is a new box. For Professor Miller, for Tiger Woods, for my neighbor kids (The dad is himself the child of a black (multi-“African” and maybe some “European”)U.S. serviceman who married a (thoroughbred) Japanese woman, the mom is an U.S. naturalized immigrant Mexican (Amerind/Euro-Spanish) and the kids are, apparently, well-suntanned brunette (white) Texans.) and for my own (thoroughbred ethnic Han Chinese, adopted and being raised by WASPs)
I propose the box be called “Rainbows” and that a victimology of discriminatioins against the inhabitants of that box be published ASAP.
Or just do what a lot of us do and stop checking any box at all.
Why should all AmerIndians/Native Americans get lumped in together? I’m Osage and Cherokee, and I don’t like being lumped in with the Sioux, the Apache, and so on. We’re distinct, and distinctly different, groups with unique heritages.
I’m also Irish, English/Anglo-Saxon, Welsh (originally ‘welsh’ meant ‘foreigner’), German, Austrian, and Dutch (with a dash of Moor). Again, each culture is distinct and different. Why lump them all together?
What about those who are African-American? Does that always mean only ‘black’? Egyptians are Africans, and they’re as light-skinned as most other Mediterranean peoples like the Italians and Greeks. The Moors are from Africa; if you are from Spain and your heritage includes a Moorish ancestor, can you claim to be African-American even if you’re a blue-eyed blond?
You see how ridiculous all this skin coloration stuff is?
I vote we start a new racial category: eye color. We have green eyes and brown eyes and black eyes and hazel eyes and gray eyes. Is hazel a subset of brown? Shouldn’t someone with blue eyes be restricted from certain things for medical reasons? After all, blue eyes are a recessive trait, and if the blue color is expressed then who knows what other undesirable recessive traits might be expressed – like clumsiness, or being overweight. Yes, blue-eyed people shouldn’t be allowed to get driver’s licenses – their lightly-pigmented blue eyes are more vulnerable to damage from the sun and they might have poorer eyesight than those with darker colored eyes.
See how we can get things stirred up? It’ll be fun, and about as logical as skin pigmentation levels.
I think I kind of get what the high school girl is saying to her brother. She wants her friends to acknowledge her difference, without thinking less of her for it.
The thing is, two white people or two black people can be more different from each other than a black and a white person might be. When people get hung up on “it’s a black thing” they surrender their individual differences and freedom of thought; like my black friend who can’t bring herself to vote Republican.
I’ll be glad when people can let go of racial identity and think it’s enough to just be themselves.
I agree with the middle-school kid. I am white, and in school, I didn’t take much notice of skin color. I noticed it enough to be able to identify the person – “Bob, the short black kid”, as opposed to “Bob, the short white kid” – but I didn’t care what their skin color was – personality, capability, and character were what I noticed.
It seems what the professor wants is for others to see her skin color, praise her for it, but then not treat her differently. And that is totally impossible and illogical.
And regarding the incomprehensibility of her article: don’t you know that if one does not understand it, it must therefore be very scholarly and intellectual? If everyone could understand it, it wouldn’t be very learned, now would it? Pretentious.
This very confused lady is a professor? A joke.
I guess she resents her cultural and genetic heritage being subsumed in the great melting pot. Whites resent this too. Being realistic, entropy tends to increase. However, she done her her bit to increase entrophy in regards to the racial and cultural identity of her children.
I wonder what she has taught her children about the cultural diversity of white people? Or, are all white people considered to be the same?
Joel
I think that the high school daughter is considering what can result when those in majority status (whites) presume that those in the minority (people of color/multiracial people) are just like them. Her white friends might not be able to understand what people of color experience in a society where race consciousness is still present, notwithstanding any ostensible color blindness. Thus, if a person of color makes what might be a valid claim of discrimination, the reply might be, but “that couldn’t be racist, you’re just like us. There must be some other explanation….”