BY LOUIS HOWARD PORTER

Why are we diversifying a profession that exploits a majority of its professionals?  What are the consequences of diversifying a profession where many are either forced to leave it, or take jobs as contingent labor making poverty-level wages?  Is the consequence of such diversification really “social justice”?  Or is it exploitation of Black labor in a new form?  I want to argue that, at this point, contingency makes diversity in our field an ethically questionable practice.  And so I propose that addressing contingency is a precondition for diversifying the field.

I want to explore this issue by talking about my own experiences.  I have been wrestling with this tension between diversity and precarity since I completed my PhD at the University of North Carolina in 2018.  That year, I had started teaching as a visiting lecturer at UNC, making $8,000 a semester with no health insurance.  At the same time, a confederate statue on UNC’s campus called Silent Sam became the object of large protests in the wake of white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville the previous year.  I supported this cause.  But I found the intense passion around this symbolic issue kind of odd.  I had been one of maybe two, and definitely not more than three, Black people in my year’s cohort, so presumably I should have been one of the people most offended by this statue.  But I had other things on my mind that were more important.  I was desperately applying for jobs—and not just academic jobs, but any job at all.  This was so I could afford health insurance to see a doctor about the crippling panic attacks I was having that made it difficult to leave the house; let alone do my job and teach.

Eventually, I did get a tenure-track job after winning a national award.  It was February 2020, a month before the pandemic hit.  Like many other people, during the lockdown I ordered groceries and takeout.  To do this, I relied on an underclass of likely uninsured gig workers who risked their lives to deliver spaghetti or pizza to my home.  That spring, it felt like the whole system of economic exploitation had been laid bare—not a system of “white supremacy” in isolation.  Rather, an economic system that screws over a healthy portion of our population and implicates everyone.

But then George Floyd was murdered.  The conversation shifted to a singular focus on race.  In this context, many rightfully sought to shine a spotlight on how race is fundamentally intertwined with economic inequalities in housing, healthcare, and debt.  Yet the net effect of the George Floyd protests in academia was a renewed commitment to diversity and inclusivity, with little discussion of the economic implications of this diversity and inclusivity.  Meanwhile, the academic job market had tanked, and adjunctification seemed to be accelerating due to the financial exigencies of the pandemic.  It seemed as though academia, including our field, was toppling symbolic statues in the ivory tower while ignoring the economic exploitation upon which this ivory tower was based.  Of course, it’s nice to include Black people in our classes.  I personally want to see more Black people in my classes because I think what we teach is important.  But what happens if they take us too seriously and apply to PhD programs?  Will there be jobs with health insurance waiting for them afterward?  Will we remember in 2026 that Black Lives Mattered in 2020?

My fear is that the current push for diversification is taking place at the same time that precarity is increasing.  It is well known that as traditionally underrepresented people enter a profession, the prestige and pay of that profession drops.  There are studies of this, particularly when it comes to women entering professions once reserved for men.  My concern is this: a quarter of all academic jobs are on the tenure track, so how does inclusion and diversity in our field empower Black people?  How is diversity empowering Black people, if for every Black person who obtains an assistant professorship, three find themselves faced with the choice of either leaving the profession or remaining adjunct faculty.  Most of these adjunct faculty, by the way, make less money than the median starting salary of a recent Black college graduate.  A quarter of adjuncts rely on some type of public assistance.

Why should Black Americans, a people steeped in historical poverty, want to pursue careers that do not lift them out of poverty?  The fact is that data shows a significant portion of the Black community considers higher education valuable insofar as it offers an exit from the poverty that has afflicted the Black population since slavery.  I come from a family where this is axiomatic.  My father grew up in public housing in East Cleveland and was the first in our family to go to college.  So for my family, education was a ladder out of the projects, out of a life of precarity, poor health, crime, and an early death.  Education was not an end in itself, but a means to an end.  Thus, the myth of meritocracy was sacred because it provided hope.  Hope that future descendants of the ancestors of slaves would know the financial comfort well-to-do white people had supposedly attained through education.

We may all be jaded and know that this meritocratic narrative is not the case.  But that is not the point.  The point is that it should be the case.  It should not take winning a national award to get a job with health insurance after receiving a PhD.  It should not take an article, book contract, or whatever other criteria search committees use.  A PhD should be enough.  If you’re a hard-nosed realist and believe adjunctification is inevitable, then ok.  But let’s drop the pretense that diversity initiatives will inevitably empower the people they recruit.

Louis Howard Porter is assistant professor in the Department of History at Texas State University.  His article, “The Contingent Problem: A Counter-Narrative on Race and Class in the Field of Slavic Studies,” was reposted on this blog from the Slavic Review.  The above remarks were delivered at a roundtable discussion of “Academic Precarity: Labor, Race, Gender, and More” at the annual meeting of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in New Orleans, November 19, 2021.