Class as Part of Diversity

There are some of us in the academy whose parents were not professors. But there’s a whole whole lot whose parents were professors. Like, way more than you’d think, even if you expected it. This piece on how this reality can get in the way of diverse hiring practices is important. But I think that one of the stories here as well is one that a lot of people don’t want to have, which is that class also has to matter as a diversity initiative. I’ve seen this work a couple of ways. I’ve seen schools clearly seek to have more students of color–but students of color who can pay. Is reaching out specifically to middle-class or wealthier Black students really increasing diversity? I mean, it is, but not nearly as much as they are claiming.

There is a ton of racial privilege in higher education. There’s also a ton of class privilege. This being America, they overlap in huge ways, but it’s not a perfect circle. There are differences between rich and poor whites, or the children of academics and the children of, say, plywood mill workers. That doesn’t matter to me now, though I think some of my, how shall we say, roughness around the edges and bluntness, comes from these circumstances. But it certainly very much matters for who gets into top Ph.D. programs, who has the training and wherewithal to know how to write fellowship applications, etc. Poor people of all races don’t have that training and the children of professors do.

More broadly though, this matters throughout all of society. We simply don’t take class seriously as part of diversity initiatives or in hiring practices or really in society period, not as a discreet group of people in the way we do race or sexuality. We are in a place where a lot of people are more comfortable talking about and promoting transgender issues than we are about class. I’m very happy we are in that place for the former, I think that’s a huge step in our society. But just in terms of the sheer numbers of affected people, the latter is a lot more people.

Of course, the problem here is that the use of class in our society gets reduced to the white working class. This is wrong on any number of levels. The actual most diverse part of American society is the working class. That’s where most people of color are, as well as lots of whites. But the media never talks about class this way. And one could easily see how a false class analysis could be used as a wedge that would actually reduce racial diversity. That’s exactly what should not happen.

However we want to talk about class or diversity, creating a special class of professors passed down through generations due to family connections and privilege is a deeply problematic issue and needs to be addressed.