The ties between feminism and civil rights activism run deep, even at Wesleyan where social unrest and the campaign for racial justice in the 1960s created a climate of change and a politics of affirmative action that helped bring women to campus in the 1970s. I mention this connection because nothing about the composition or the content of the recent, much-discussed panel, “Feminism at Wesleyan: 1970 to the Present,” reflected the extent to which the fight for gender equity has been part of a larger, shared struggle for civil rights, equal opportunity, and social justice—a struggle to which men, women, and children of different races, classes, ages, and sexual orientations gave their lives. I reference this more complex, multiracial, multidimensional history because, in the fallout from the panel’s hunky-dory tunnel vision, I hear young women of color once again saying feminism isn’t for them.
This, I think, is precisely the wrong response. The mainstream women’s movement (or the woman’s movement, as it was called in the 19th century) has a long history of marginalizing or outright excluding the same racially marked bodies from whose “plight” it has taken inspiration: the appropriation of slave women’s inhuman condition as a metaphor for white women’s “domestic slavery,” for example. But from Lucy Terry and Sojourner Truth to Gloria Anzaldua, Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink (Hawaii), and Lani Guinier (whose presence on campus last week was largely ignored by the senior staff), women of color have an even longer history of resisting multiple oppressions. Our reluctance to assert and insist on this history—to claim a feminist past, present, and future—lets the dominant culture off the hook and contributes to our own erasure.
But blaming Joyce Jacobsen, the panel organizer, as Aparna Iyer did in her eloquent April 19th Wespeak, also lets the power brokers off the hook. It makes a single individual the scapegoat for the larger structural exclusions and hierarchical imbalances we need to confront as a community, rather than simply disavow as individuals. That is to say, the white panel on feminism at Wesleyan looked a lot like the white panel of senior administrators, faculty, and students who lined the platform at the community meeting on diversity and other matters, which was held in the Chapel at the beginning of the semester. Indeed, it was at this January 25th community meeting that Prof. Jacobsen made the “heartfelt statement” about her own diversity that Aparna Iyer cited in her critique of the whiteness of the feminism panel.
Contrary to the impressions left by both panels mentioned above, there were women—and men—of color at Wesleyan in the 1970s; there are considerably more of us at Wesleyan today, or so we are repeatedly told in statements about Wesleyan’s diverse student body and its increasingly diverse faculty. Those of us on whose bodies such claims are made—and those of us who care about how power works—need to continue to interrogate what diversity actually means at Wesleyan, particularly given the ongoing erosion of faculty governance and the sense of being in jeopardy that many students continue to voice.
The body count may have changed since the ’70s, but the relations of power have not. The Dean of the College position, for example—a thankless job, if ever there was one—remains the only senior staff position traditionally occupied by and seemingly earmarked for a person of color. Why not the presidency or some of the many vice presidencies? Why is the Dean of the College the only senior staff position for which the institution actively and aggressively recruits a person of color and, coincidently, always manages to find one? This racially-coded tracking is what makes me nervous about student demands for a Dean of Multicultural Affairs. I fear that it will become another plantation position—more baby sitting than policymaking—because, well-intentioned as it often is, Wesleyan operates under what I call the Mattel Barbie Doll model of diversity: an additive rather than truly transformative pluralism that appends the “othered” but doesn’t change the mold.
Three years ago, in the midst of trying to hire a distinguished, senior African American scholar—a woman of color with a national profile, who actually wanted to come to Wesleyan—I was told by a senior administrator that the University had made a number of minority hires the year before and stood to make even more in the current year; therefore, there was no “crisis” and “no reason to do anything extraordinary.” I live for the day when hiring and otherwise including people of color is ordinary—Wesleyan’s first nature, instead of an afterthought or crisis control.
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