The Hurt

In the comments below my last post, I acknowledged that a problematic aspect of the project of diversity is that it values ethnic diversity, gender diversity, diversity in terms of mental and physical ability: everything except political diversity. A friend of mine—actually more than a friend, in our youth we did our basic combat training together—responded: “Interesting. Is it not one's life experience that informs her or his political opinion? And are you comfortable operating in such an environment?”

I didn’t reply in the comments. His question deserved more of a response than that. Hence this post.

The question of whether I’m comfortable teaching in my environment turns on a portrayal of what goes on in academe which I fear I have inadvertently reinforced. That portrayal is one of a kind of Orwellian world in which opinions are tightly policed. That’s simply not the case, particularly in the realm of diversity.

When it comes to the community of faculty and students (and staff) who are truly committed to diversity, we are still dealing with an enclave. The dominant power structures, while not exactly arrayed against diversity, are still not nearly as invested in it as one might suppose. It is perfectly possible—and not just that, common—for faculty to pay lip service to concerns about diversity and inclusion but to have those concerns inform their teaching and research little if at all.

If I chose to do so I could teach my military history courses entirely in terms of the European and American experience, and within that frame I could focus exclusively on males operating in a world of politics and technology. No one would stop me. No one would punish me. Even among the most ardent proponents of diversity there is still a deep, almost reflexive respect for academic freedom. They might roll their eyes at me—or, more likely, lament the intellectual poverty of such an approach. But that’s pretty much all.

Comfortable in my environment? In many ways I’m not. But the reasons have nothing to do with any diversity police, because it just doesn’t exist.

I can tell you who is *not* comfortable in my environment for reasons that do relate to diversity.

It is the female instructor who is lesser, in the eyes of too many students, because she is not a man. It’s hard to believe that the stereotype persists that a “real professor” is a pipe-smoking white male in tweed—if you happen to be white and male (pipe-smoking and tweed are now optional). But persist it does.

Uncomfortable too is the faculty member of color who is even more blatantly stereotyped—and who usually has to bear the brunt of student comments and opinions that range from clueless to downright hostile. A student may say that immigrants are largely criminals (something that they will have heard not just at home but from the lips of the President of the United States). They may wonder aloud why African Americans didn’t *want* to go back to Africa after the destruction of slavery. Neither example is hypothetical. I have heard both of them in my classrooms. But they don’t hit me where I live. That, however, is exactly where they hit my colleagues of color.

The easiest thing in the world is to invalidate the feelings of others. At the moment the term of convenience is “snowflake.” People—by which one always means *other* people—should be less fragile, less sensitive, less easily offended. Yet I’m often struck by how fragile, sensitive, and easily offended are those who use the term “snowflake” most freely.

But that’s kind of the point. We speak of identity politics—but we all of us have an identity, and the world tells us relentlessly that central to our identity is our race, our gender, our sexual orientation, our economic class, our physical, mental, and emotional ability. We are more than these things, and none of us likes being reduced to them, stereotyped because of them, criticized or disregarded because of them.

I have written sympathetically of the way in which heterosexual white males have, in recent decades, been at the receiving end of this reduction, this stereotyping, and this criticism. They don’t like it, to say the least, and the popularity of Rush Limbaugh—to whom I promise to return—is largely built upon El Rushbo’s ability to articulate that resentment.

Underpinning resentment is anger, and anger is generally underpinned by fear, and fear is ultimately underpinned by hurt.

And that is what strikes me. Diversity (or inclusion, or multiculturalism, or whatever you want to call it) raises issues that hit all of us where we live. But it doesn’t so much generate hurt as it calls attention to hurt, forces us to confront the ways in which we live in a world that was constructed to work in favor of some people at the expense of others; in that sense, a world constructed to hurt.

That confrontation is overdue. It is messy. It is sometimes badly framed. But it is necessary.

So am I comfortable in my environment? As a heterosexual white male (who can hide or disclose my mental disability at will), I am very definitely comfortable. But if I care anything about the human beings roundabout me who cannot say that, I have to make myself less comfortable. I have to be willing to hurt a little (if it comes to that) for the sake of those who still hurt a lot.