Many things need to happen at once. Faculty experts on racism should be consulted for on-campus initiatives and compensated for their time/expertise with appropriate resources, as per @profgabrielle. But they also need to be fully empowered to say no.. especially junior faculty.

This requires, among other things, chairs and admin who understand that untenured faculty must be protected from excessive service requests. But, then, we also have the significant problem of over-burdened Black and Brown ASSOCIATE professors who risk not being promoted to full..

A lot of people, especially women (in my experience), are afraid to say no to service requests even after tenure. I have had to say no with my FULL CHEST to many under-resourced/waste-of-my-time requests. It was not always easy but I did it and continue to do so..

A chair can play a critical role in protecting *associate* Black faculty and faculty of color as well by fully supporting our autonomy in taking on service that fits our needs and declining "opportunities" that do not. I'm fortunate to have had such support. It really is key..

But anyway. One thing that doesn't get acknowledged enough is the fact that some institutions overburden Black and Brown faculty with "diversity work" whereas others may not - NOT because their politics are better, but because they're not even PRETENDING to try to do the work..

Like.. you can't overburden Black and Brown faculty with diversity work if there are no functioning diversity committees. The mistake, in such cases, is to uncritically demand such top-down committees. It's much better to organize strategically from the ground up..

While we're thinking about resources and "diversity work" please understand the following: 1) diversity work, as a rule, does not work, as per Sara Ahmed. 2) If you take on this work anyway, you need to ask for collective resources, not just individual compensation..

It is NOT enough to compensate faculty with individual resources (like a course release or even a stipend). The "diversity work" itself needs to be accompanied with GENEROUS resources (e.g. institutional funds for implementation.. staffing, programming, research and so on)..

Please understand that institutions will sometimes offer *individual* faculty resources like a course release or a small amount of funding to do "diversity work" as a form of TOKENISM. If the PROGRAMMATIC funds are not there, it is waste-of-time-window-dressing. Periodt.

Even WITH abundant funds, you are probably dealing with window-dressing for the institution because that's what institutions typically do. So the struggle within "diversity work" is to build a critical mass of folks (faculty, admin and staff) who refuse to be mere tokens..

ALL university admin, chief diversity officers, "task forces" and faculty need to read @SaraNAhmed's ON BEING INCLUDED. You need to read it and understand it otherwise you are wasting everyone's time.

Many institutions that are newly (and cynically) claiming to believe that "Black Lives Matter" are creating opportunities for TOKENISM. Our job is to name and disrupt this insidious form of institutional racism and resist with organized efforts for meaningful transformation.

In all the work I have done across the country on the perils of "diversity", I've only ever seen ONE administrator publicly get up and say the things I am saying in this thread--the brilliant Dr. Leigh Patel ( @lipatel), inaugural Associate Dean of Equity and Justice at U Pitt..

Which is to say that admin and faculty can play an important role in transformative change right now, but only if they (we) reject tokenism and tell the truth about the ways in which our academic institutions are bound up with racism, colonialism and multiple forms of violence..

When I delivered a keynote for Pitt last year that echoed many of these themes, @lipatel also gave a keynote strongly condemning settler colonialism and white supremacy within academic institutions. It is VERY rare to have both an internal and external speaker say these things..

Usually institutions bring in "outsiders" to snatch their wigs and then pretend as though they've solved their many problems. The challenge is always to figure out how to institutionalize the transformation we seek. That requires transforming administrative leadership, too..