"Woman of color, self-identified," said the diversity officer
How many professors in the English department were black women?
Let it be understood that I propose no answer to this question. It isn’t an interesting question, in my view. It isn’t even a meaningful question. My view of racial categories is basically anti-essentialist. It was formed in 1993 by reading Barbara Fields’ essay “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America.” I may have changed my mind a little bit in the intervening years, but not much. From reading Fields, I came to understand that racial categories are historically real but not biologically real, and that one should try as much as possible not to contribute to their pernicious historical reality.
Thus my policy in this newsletter has been to avoid placing unnecessary emphasis on the racial identities of my colleagues. In these stories, the racial identities of my colleagues sometimes emerge through their own statements (usually in emails).
However, it is not my policy to avoid the subject of race. I am interested in the meaning of race at the school where I work.
How many professors in the English department were black women? First answer: one.
This was the answer given by the associate dean who served as the college’s diversity officer. She is one of the most interesting characters to appear in these pages. A relentlessly positive, warm, energetic person. She talked to you as though sharing a secret. As though you were her favorite person. Yes, you. Her manner was conspiratorial. You were the only member of the faculty in whom she had perfect confidence. If you were on her side, she didn’t care what anyone else thought.
For decades, she had been using her considerable charisma to recommend diversity in hiring at the college. At every opportunity, she also recommended the Implicit Association Test, which she believed could be used to measure implicit bias.
I met with her one morning in May 2019 to discuss problems in the English department and make preliminary arrangements to hire a mediator in order to work through the problems. It was the first time I had spoken openly about these problems with someone from the dean’s office. Despite the occasion, it was a very pleasant meeting. Her charm, which was difficult to resist, made it pleasant. She seemed to understand the personalities in the English department, and she sympathized with my position.
At one point in our meeting, I referred to “women of color” in the English department. The diversity officer seemed to think that the racial identities of the professors had something to do with their expertise in the fields of literary study. I was trying to make the point that we did not hire faculty to teach their racial identities: within the past 10 years, the English department had employed professors of various races to teach courses in American literature, the canon of which included books by writers of various races. It happened to be the case in 2019 that the tenure-line faculty who specialized in American literature were “women of color.” (I guess I was doing my best to speak the language of diversity.)
The diversity officer corrected me. Professor Toni was a black woman, and thus a woman of color. Professor Herman was a “woman of color, self-identified.”
(I am but a humble reporter of the words of the diversity officer!)
I responded by putting up my hands, as if to demonstrate that I was not carrying any weapons. If my gesture could be translated into words, the words might be these: “I have no opinion on that subject. In fact, I don’t know what you are talking about. Most likely I misheard you.”
I did not mishear her. Herman was from Toronto, a descendent of Moroccan Jews. As far as the dean’s office was concerned, not only was Herman not black, she was not a person of color, either, except to the extent that she called herself one.
My mistake was quite common. In job searches at the college, department chairs must submit to the dean’s office the official forms called Search Reports I, II, and III, in which they document the progress of the search and the diversity of the pool of job candidates. In these forms, they may note the identities of Arabs, North Africans, and Persians, mistakenly believing these to be underrepresented minority groups. However, the U.S. census classifies members of these groups as white people, and the dean’s office assigns them no value when assessing the diversity of the college.
The diversity officer was giving the strict institutional answer to the question, “How many black women were there in the English department?” There was only one: Toni.
Remember: I didn’t say it. The diversity officer said it.
The workplace investigator sometimes seemed to have a different number. One of the main areas of complaint in the investigation report was: “Kunin Disrespected Complainants as Black Women.” More than one, in other words. Two complainants, both claiming to have been disrespected “as black women.”
The testimony collected by the investigator is unclear. At some points in the investigator’s summary of the testimony, it is implied that faculty in the English department saw only one black woman among their number.
They recognized that, as white faculty members, they may not experience Kunin’s behavior in the same way as Complainants and that they cannot speak to how Kunin’s behavior might affect or come across to a Black woman.
Not women, “woman.” On the other hand, “complainants,” plural. Did the English faculty think that Toni and Herman were experiencing my behavior -- saying the word “please,” for example -- in similar ways because both were having the experiences of “a black woman”?
In other passages, the report presents the same testimony with the explicit premise that both complainants certainly were black women. For example:
Several department members stated that while they were not personally offended by Kunin’s alleged misconduct, they understood how Complainants, as African-American/Black women, might be offended by Kunin’s conduct, and how his conduct might be perceived as micro aggressive and implicitly biased toward Complainants.
“Complainants,” plural, “as African-American/Black women.”
The first page of the report identifies the races of the parties in the investigation according to the strict racial categorization favored in the dean’s office. Toni was “female and African-American/Black”; Herman was “female and of Arab-Jewish North African descent.” In this index, the report uses “Black” only for Toni. The names of the identity categories for Herman are different.
What happened in the passages where the report classifies Herman as a second black woman? How did the investigator make two where there was one?
One possibility is that the investigator may have understood African and black to have the same meaning. She might have argued: Herman’s ancestors were Moroccan Jews. Morocco equals North Africa, which equals African American, which equals black. Herman was a black woman. QED.
The investigator suggested a second possibility in a footnote to her index of the racial identities of the professors:
Based on Herman’s complexion, many might mistakenly presume she is African-American/Black.
Interesting. Herman might not have looked like a black woman to the diversity officer, she might not have looked like a black woman to the U.S. census, but if someone -- “many” people -- many professors? -- made the mistake of thinking that she was a black woman, then, for the purposes of the investigation, that was what she was. (This is exactly the kind of thinking that Barbara Fields uses to argue that racial categories are historically but not biologically real.)
Perhaps the investigator was merely spelling out the distinctive way of seeing race in the U.S., which is still based on the one-drop rule, a legacy of segregation laws. According to this way of thinking, a person who has any black ancestry at all, even one black ancestor -- even one ancestor who was black by virtue of having one black ancestor -- is black. The investigator went a step further: based on her skin color, people might “mistakenly presume” that Herman was black and treat her according to this presumption, and, in this way, Herman might accrue the experiences of a black woman.
A third possibility is that Herman frequently spoke on behalf of black people. For example, recall her emails to the dean’s office about my 2015 article in Nonsite: “One of my African Americanist colleagues in the field referred to his [Kunin’s] writing as ‘hate speech.’ Another famous Black poet and theorist whom I will not name had unprintable things to say about him [Kunin] and his writing.” Clearly Herman felt comfortable invoking the voices of famous but nameless black people to express her own opinions.
Was she invoking the voices of black people, though? Her email contains an ambiguity strangely similar to that of the investigation report. The second voice in the email clearly belongs to a “famous Black poet and theorist.” But the first voice is “one of my African Americanist colleagues in the field.” “African American” refers to a racial category. “African Americanist” refers to a field in literary studies: that is, someone who studies African American literature. And a student of African American literature, as I tried to explain to the diversity officer, can be a member of any racial group.
Herman projected her own opinions onto black writers and scholars of black writing, “whom,” she truthfully declared, “I will not name.” She produced language for them to express these opinions. She even invented a guild of “Black artists” who she said had organized “boycotts of the college.” She went further still: she invented and projected a race onto the critics of Vanessa Place’s conceptual poem Tweeting Gone with the Wind and my essay “Would Vanessa Place Be a Better Poet If She Had Better Opinions?” Contrary to what Herman thought, most of these critics were not black writers. They included, among others, an African Americanist who is not African American, a poet from Brazil (a country that has its own distinctive way of seeing race), two poets (of different ethnicities) with family in Singapore, a poet from Los Angeles (with Korean family). And so on.
Seeing someone’s racial identity doesn’t tell you about the person’s opinions on literary subjects. Some of Place’s critics were black writers. The other side of the coin is that different black writers have different opinions. There were black poets who counted Place as a friend, and some who defended her work publicly, in essays and interviews. At least one of the defenders was part of Herman’s immediate circle of friends. To be fair, so was one of the critics. By far the most vocal critic of Place’s poem was an anonymous Twitter account that could have been authored by a person or persons of any race.
Herman muddled the distinction between black writers and scholars of black writing, assumed that all critics who condemned Place’s poem for racism must be black writers, and that all black writers must speak with one voice. Which was Herman’s voice. With her so involved in deciding what black people can say and think, might she not be considered a black woman?
Sometimes Toni also confused racial categories with fields of study in literary history. As we have seen, when the workplace investigator asked her to identify herself, Toni said: “female” and “African-American/Black.” No other category.
In an email thread discussing her courses on Native American literature, Toni claimed special authority based on other ancestry.
Subject: Re: Brief meeting clarification
One more thing: as I am ¼ Menominee I felt doing the Native Lit courses was contextualized by a responsibility to the indigenous community and my own ties to indigenous history and culture.
Thanks I’m done,
Toni
Thank you for this work, [Toni]. I really appreciate your labour here.
Herman
I hope it has served a decolonizing purpose.
Many thanks, [Herman].
Toni