Educators Queering Academia
Critical Memoirs
Series:
Edited By sj Miller and Nelson M. Rodriguez
Chapter Thirteen: Intersectional Warrior: Battling the Onslaught of Layered Microaggressions in the Academy
Extract
← 124 | 125 →
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Intersectional Warrior: Battling the Onslaught of Layered Microaggressions in the Academy
DARRELL CLEVELAND HUCKS
INTRODUCTION
Predominantly white institutions (PWI) of higher education across the country continue to struggle with building diversity at both the faculty and student levels. Many institutions put forth their respective commitment to diversifying their institutions via recruitment initiatives. The benefits of diverse learning environments have long been discussed in the higher education research literature (Hurtado, Milem, Clayton-Pedersen, and Allen, 1999; Milem and Hakuta, 2000; Hurtado, Alvarez, Guillermo-Wann, Cuellar, and Arellano, 2012). Still, the negative experiences encountered by non-white individuals or groups entering PWIs are being well documented (Cooper and Stevens, 2002; Turner, Gonzalez and Chock, 2004; Turner, Gonzalez and Wood, 2008). Unfortunately, when most people advocate for diversity they are advocating for skin-color or racial diversity. On the surface, this level of diversity would be the easiest to determine at-a-glance and the easiest to monitor with little authentic engagement.
However, we must then ask ourselves is a commitment to recruiting diverse individuals a passive process or a surface level diversity (SLD) endeavor? Or should it be an active process of engagement that goes well beyond the surface of skin color differences? If it is the later, then institutions need to move beyond the observing phase and explore the quality of their engagement with those who they identify as diverse. ← 125 | 126 → Institutions need to prepare existing faculty to...
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