We embody diversity by appearing in a way that is inconsistent with the norms of an institution. In formalizing an arrangement, institutions create a residence for some bodies more than others. You can become a stranger within an institution, or a “space invader,” to borrow Nirmal Puwar’s (2004) evocative term. Diversity work is then the work you do because you do not fit with a series or arrangement. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describes “a misfit” as follows: “A misfit occurs when the environment does not sustain the shape and function of the body that enters it. The dynamism between body and world that produces fits or misfits comes at the spatial and temporal points of encounter between dynamic but relatively stable bodies and environments. The built and arranged space through which we navigate our lives tends to offer fits to majority bodies and to create misfits with minority forms of embodiment, such as people with disabilities” (2014, n.p.). We have a misfit when there is an incongruous relation of body to thing, or body to world. In an earlier article, Garland-Thomson describes misfitting as “an incongruent relationship between two things: a square peg in a round hole” (2011, 592–
93). When you try to fit a norm that is not shaped to fit your body, you create an incongruity. You become an incongruity. As I noted in the conclusion of chapter 4, accessibility becomes diversity work in the second sense: some have to work harder just to be accommodated.
I think of bodies and garments. Over time, a garment clings better to the body that wears it. A garment might even become clingy. A garment and a body are more attuned the more the garment clings to a body. Maybe an institution is like an old garment. It acquires the shape of those who tend to wear it; it becomes easier to wear if you have that shape. Privilege could be rethought in these terms: easier to wear.
Privilege is an energy-saving device. Less effort is required to be or to do. If you arrive with dubious origins, you are not expected to be there, so in getting there you have already disagreed with an expectation of who you are and what you can do, then an institution is the wrong shape; the jumper does not fit. You fidget to try to make it fit, but fidgeting shows all the more that it does not fit. Annette Kuhn describes how as a working-class girl in a grammar school, she feels “conspicuously out of place”
([1995] 2002, 111). And indeed, she describes this sense of being out of place by giving us a biography of her school uniform; how by the time her ill-fitting uniform came to fit, it had become “shabby” and
“scruffy” (111). The word wear originally derives from the Germanic word for clothing. It then acquires a secondary sense of “use up, gradually damage” from the effect of continued use on clothes. Harder to wear: this is the second sense in which something can be wearing. It wears out; you are worn down.
When you try something on, you test the fit of a garment. Something is trying when it is subject to strain. No wonder: not to inherit privilege is trying.
It can be trying to embody diversity. Your body becomes a performance indicator. You become a tick in a box. You might be one of this many students from working-class backgrounds who get into the university; one of this many people of color hired by the university; one of this many women in senior positions; one of this many students or staff with disabilities. You might be familiar with being one of this
many. Perhaps you have become a professor as a member of a minority. We might call you a passing professor. Pierre W. Orelus reflects on how as a professor of color he is often met with surprise. He writes, “After I formally introduce myself in class, I have undergraduate students who ask me, in a surprised tone of voice, ‘Are you really the professor?’ I sometimes overhear them asking their peers, ‘Is he really the professor?’” (2011, 31). Really: Really? Are you sure? Orelus compares this mode of questioning, this sense of curiosity and astonishment, with the questions typically asked of immigrants.
Being asked whether you are the professor is another way of being made into a stranger, a body out of place, subject to strain.
You have to make a declarative statement: “Yes, I am a professor.” You might have to keep making that statement, because in declaring yourself a professor you might be speaking rather unlike a professor.
A passing professor is most insistent.
Some have to insist on belonging to the categories that give residence to others. Another story: we are at a departmental meeting with incoming students. We are all talking about our own courses, one after the other, each coming up to the podium. Someone is chairing, introducing each of us in turn. She says, this is Professor So-and-So. This is Professor Such-and-Such. On this particular occasion, I happen to be the only female professor, and the only professor of color in the room (the latter was not surprising as I was the only professor of color in the department). When it is my turn to come up, the chair says, “This is Sara.” I am the only professor introduced without using the title “professor.” What do you do? What to do? Diversity work is how we fill this gap or hesitation. If you point this out, or if you ask to be referred to by the proper name, you are having to insist on what is simply given to others; not only that, you are heard as insistent, or even, for that matter, as self-promoting (as insisting on your due). Maybe some have to be self-promoting because others are promoted by virtue of their membership in a social group. Not only do you have to become insistent in order to receive what was automatically given to the others, but your insistence confirms the improper nature of your residence. We do not tend to notice the assistance given to those whose residence is assumed.
Or maybe you notice that assistance when your own residence is not assumed. In chapter 1, I suggested that noticing puts you in a different world. Here I am suggesting: you notice something because your body puts you in a different world. Another time I walk into a room with a white male professor. I notice how the collective gaze falls on him. It feels like a landing. Plop, plop. You walk in together but you aren’t seen as together. Maybe they assume you are an assistant, or a student. They see him as the professor, as they expect a professor to appear this way. He might have a beard, gray hair. Of course there is more to him than that; no doubt there are things they do not see. Quite right; that’s the point. When he is seen as professor, there is a way he too is not seen. They are seeing what they expect to see; they are seeing one person and not another as professor. Here comes the professor; he is the professor; hello, professor.
Diversity work might be the work you do when you disappear from the room. You have to work to appear. Or diversity work might be the requirement to give an account of yourself: how you got somewhere. Or diversity work might be the work you do to avoid the necessity of having to explain your arrival. One way of avoiding the necessity of explaining your existence is what I call institutional passing.
Institutional passing might include the effort not to stand out or stand apart (although the effort not to stand out can be what makes you stand out). Institutional passing might be what you end up doing when or even because you cannot pass for what you are not (because of the body you have, your history, or for whatever reason). Not being able to pass is often about visibility. You might be too visibly black to pass as white;
too visibly disabled to pass as able-bodied; too visibly queer to pass as straight; too visibly trans to pass as cis. When you cannot pass for what you are not, you have to work harder to pass into or through the organization. You might pass by trying not to be that kind of minority, the one who belabors the point about being a minority. You might try not to make demands because you know they perceive you as being
demanding before you even turn up; because you turn up.
Perhaps you pass by not speaking about yourself as a minority: as if by passing over being not, you would be less intrusive to those who are; or as if by passing over not being white, able-bodied, male, straight, cis, you would not be “not” in quite the same way. You allow others to pass over what makes you a stranger when you cannot eliminate what makes you a stranger. You might do this in order to survive, to pass through safely, let alone progress. One time I tried to set up a discussion group for black and minority ethnic staff (in policy speak abbreviated BME). Only one other person turned up. When discussing this fact with my colleague, he said that many BME staff sense that they have been given the benefit of the doubt by their white colleagues; they have to prove that they arrived on their own merits (and not because they are black or minority ethnic). If you are given the benefit of the doubt, you have to ensure your conduct justifies that benefit. You might have to establish a distance from the kind of minorities who think of themselves as minorities and who make “being a minority” what they profess or part of their profession. Institutional passing: survival within an institution, let alone career progression, might depend on not challenging norms or might even depend upon the extent to which we can increase our proximity to them (by conducting ourselves in the right way, proximity to whiteness often translates as proximity to a certain style of respectable middle-class conduct). You go up by appearing (more) like those who are up.
It would be too easy to dismiss this work as assimilation. The idea that those who embody diversity should pay increasing costs for not inhabiting institutional norms would further the injustice of how those norms support and enable the progression of some more than others.2 Put simply: some do not have to struggle for proximity to norms in order to ensure their own progression. You can inherit proximity; that’s true, that too.
Sometimes passing is about trying to be less noticeable. We only have to try to be less noticeable when we are noticeable. To embody diversity is to be noticeable. As we know, diversity is often offered as an invitation. It might be a tagline: minorities welcome. Come in, come in! To be welcomed is to be positioned as not yet part, a guest or stranger, the one who is dependent on being welcomed (the word welcome, a “friendly greeting,” derives from will, “one whose coming suits another’s will”). Indeed a welcome can lead us into a precarious situation. The word precarious derives from pray and means to be held through the favor of another, or dependent on the will of another, which is how precarious acquires the sense of risky, dangerous, and uncertain. No wonder: an arrival can be precarious. If you are dependent on a door being opened, how quickly that door can be shut in your face.
We are back to that door, that mechanism that enables some to decide who is to be let in, who is not.
But just because they invite you does not mean they expect you to turn up. What happens when a person of color turns up? Oh how noticeable we are in the sea of whiteness:
When I enter the room, there is shock on people’s faces because they are expecting a white person to come in. I pretend not to recognize it. But in the interview there is unease because they were not expecting someone like me to turn up. So it is hard and uncomfortable and I can tell that they are uneasy and restless because of the way they fiddle and twitch around with their pens and their looks.
They are uncomfortable because they were not expecting me—perhaps they would not have invited me if they knew I was black and of course I am very uncomfortable. I am wondering whether they are entertaining any prejudice against me.
They are not expecting you. Discomfort involves this failure to fit. A restlessness and uneasiness, a fidgeting and twitching, is a bodily registering of an unexpected arrival.
I pretend not to recognize it: diversity work can be the effort not to notice the bother caused by your own arrival. There is pretense involved; this is not about pretending to be something you are not but pretending not to notice that you are not what they expect. If you cause discomfort (by not fulfilling an
expectation of whiteness), you have to work to make them comfortable. You have to pass by passing your way through whiteness, not by becoming white, but by minimizing the signs of difference. Another woman of color describes: “I think with a person of color there’s always a question of what’s this woman going to turn out like. . . . They’re nervous about appointing people of color into senior positions . . . because if I went in my sari and wanted prayer time off and started rocking the boat and being a bit different and asserting my kind of culture, I’m sure they’d take it differently.” Some forms of difference are heard as assertive, as “rocking the boat.” Some forms of difference become legible as willfulness and obstinacy, as if you are only different because you are insistent (on being different). The pressure not to assert your culture is lived as a demand to pass or to integrate. Note how this pressure can be affective: you experience the potential nervousness as a threat; you try to avoid the nervous glance by not fulfilling its expectation. Maybe you don’t wear a sari; you don’t want prayer time off, and so on. Or maybe if you do these things, because not doing them is not an option, then you find other ways of not rocking the boat.
Sometimes appearing as a stranger means you try to avoid appearing as a stranger. When you are caught up by an appearance, diversity work is emotional work. You have to manage your own body by not fulfilling an expectation of how you will appear. This quote is from a black male diversity trainer:
The other point as well about being a black trainer is that I’ve got to rapport build. Do I do that by being a member of the black-and-white minstrel show, or do I do that by trying to earn respect with my knowledge? Do I do it by being friendly, or do I do it by being cold, aloof, and detached? And what does all this mean to the people now? From my point of view, it probably has nothing to do with the set of people that are in that room because actually the stereotype they’ve got in their heads is well and truly fixed.
Building rapport becomes a requirement because of a stereotype, as that which is fixed, no matter who you encounter. The demand to build rapport takes the form of a perpetual self-questioning; the emotional labor of asking yourself what to do when there is an idea of you that persists, no matter how you exist.
Indeed, the consequences of racism are in part managed as a question of self-presentation: of trying not to fulfill a stereotype, which lodges in the minds of others as an idea of who you are, an expectation of how you will be. As he further describes:
Don’t give white people nasty looks straight in their eyes; don’t show them aggressive body positions. I mean, for example, I am going to go and buy a pair of glasses because I know the glasses soften my face and I keep my hair short because I’m going bald, so I need something to soften my face. But actually what I am doing—I am countering a stereotype; I’m countering the black male sexual stereotype and yes, I spend all my time, I counter that stereotype, I couch my language, behavior, and tone in as English a tone as I can. I am very careful, just very careful.
In chapter 2 I suggested that smiling becomes necessary to soften an appearance when you are perceived as too hard. Passing here is about softening your appearance. You have to work not to appear as aggressive because you are assumed to be aggressive before you appear. The demand not to be aggressive might be lived as a form of body politics, or as a speech politics: you have to be careful what you say, how you appear, in order to maximize the distance between yourself and their idea of you. The experience of being a stranger in the institutions of whiteness is an experience of being on perpetual guard: of having to defend yourself against those who perceive you as somebody to be defended against. Defenses do not always work; I think we know this.
Diversity work: when you have to try to make others comfortable with the fact of your own existence. Institutional passing can also require working on one’s own body in an effort to be
accommodating. The effort to rearrange your own body becomes an effort to rearrange the past. This past is not only difficult to budge; it is often what those to whom you appear do not recognize as present.
Institutional passing can involving minimizing signs of difference from institutional norms. Or institutional passing can involve maximizing signs of difference from a set of expectations about what those who are different from norms are like. Institutional passing would then include the work you do to pass through by passing out of an expectation: you try not to be the angry person of color, the troublemaker, that difficult person. You have to demonstrate that you are willing to ease the burden of your own difference. The killjoy too appears here as the one that we must give up; institutional passing as appearing to fulfill the happiness duty, softening our appearance, smiling because or when we are perceived as too harsh. We smile as compensation, almost as if we are apologizing for existing at all. Of course if we pass as happy, we are not happy. And sometimes we refuse to give up the killjoy; we claim
Institutional passing can involving minimizing signs of difference from institutional norms. Or institutional passing can involve maximizing signs of difference from a set of expectations about what those who are different from norms are like. Institutional passing would then include the work you do to pass through by passing out of an expectation: you try not to be the angry person of color, the troublemaker, that difficult person. You have to demonstrate that you are willing to ease the burden of your own difference. The killjoy too appears here as the one that we must give up; institutional passing as appearing to fulfill the happiness duty, softening our appearance, smiling because or when we are perceived as too harsh. We smile as compensation, almost as if we are apologizing for existing at all. Of course if we pass as happy, we are not happy. And sometimes we refuse to give up the killjoy; we claim