Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Institutional Life, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2012, 256 pages, $22.95 paper, ISBN 9780822352365.

"What does diversity do?" is a question often left unasked in the academy’s rush "do diversity," but it is precisely that which Sara Ahmed poses in On Being Included: Race and Diversity in Institutional Life. Despite an abiding engagement with phenomenology, On Being Included is markedly different from Ahmed’s other works. Drawing on her own appointment as a diversity practitioner and the experiences of diversity workers across the United Kingdom and Australia, Ahmed has crafted an empirically dense book, which, she writes, was a “nerve-racking” challenge for a “text-based researcher by training” (page 9). However, Ahmed does not abandon texts but shifts her attention to the external lives of "diversity documents." Describing her approach as an “ethnography of texts”, she aims to “follow diversity around,” attentive to “where diversity goes (and where it does not), as well as in whom and in what diversity is deposited (as well as in whom or in what it is not)” (page 12). Ahmed portrays this itinerary with simultaneous nuance and frankness, but—unlike the diversity documents she follows—Ahmed’s is not a "happy" text. Although she takes diversity’s polyvalence seriously, Ahmed brings critical focus to “what diversity obscures” (page 14) by placing race (and racism) at the center of her inquiry.

In the first two chapters "following diversity" leads Ahmed to examine how it is mobilized within the (white) institutional context. First, she focuses on diversity work(ers) and institutional life. Ahmed explores how the process of making diversity a part of the institution is a contradictory undertaking whereby making diversity into an explicit institutional goal and/or drawing attention to it prevents diversity from becoming habitual. She asserts that diversity workers often encounter a kind of institutional "brick wall," a metaphor to which Ahmed returns throughout the book to describe institutional resistance as well as racism and whiteness in institutional life. Playing with this metaphor, Ahmed notes that racism is often posited as something that can be “overed” (page 22), as in "can be gotten over," thereby erasing its continued presence in institutional structures and life. Ahmed then focuses on the language of diversity. She demonstrates how the term "diversity" is relatively hollow. Diversity workers can use this hollowness in multiple ways to “get people to the table” (page 67) to talk about race and racism; however, "diversity" has also become the preferred framework because it lacks the more clearly defined commitments of "equity," "equality," and/or "social justice." Thus, "diversity talk" can be co-opted to maintain the status quo by furthering an "action oriented" discourse that obscures the issues while making people "feel good" about difference.  Ahmed closes—cautiously optimistic—by asserting that diversity can be used as an effective tool to create conversations.

In chapters three and four, Ahmed turns to the performativity of diversity documents.  She examines UK universities’ responses to the 2000 Race Relations (Amendment) Act (RRAA), asking what happens when diversity practitioners “end up doing the document rather than doing the doing” (page 86)? In light of "audit culture" and the present preoccupation with university rankings, she notes that “being judged to have written an exemplary race equality policy is quickly translated into being good at race equality.  Such a translation works to conceal the very inequalities the documents were written to reveal” (page 100). In chapter four, Ahmed queries "commitment," noting that committing to diversity (in the sense of "pledging") cannot be conflated with being committed to diversity (in the sense of ‘being bound’).  This delineation exposes statements of commitment as "non-performative," which Ahmed—modifying Butler’s (1993: 2) august phrase—defines as “‘the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse’ does not produce ‘the effects that it names’” (emphasis original, page 117).  Non-performativity, however, is not the same as institutional torpor (although it certainly can be); Ahmed thus describes diversity practitioners as working “with as well as in the gap between words and deeds” (page 140).

Chapter five examines the silence around "racism" in Ahmed’s interviews with diversity practitioners.  She juxtaposes the milquetoast, "public relations" language of diversity—including the ways in which diversity “can be mobilized as a defense of reputation (perhaps even a defense of whiteness)” (page 151)—and "accusations" of racism. Specifically, Ahmed explores how “speaking about racism is... heard as an injury not to those who speak but to those who are spoken about” [which, by extension, transforms those who experience racism into ‘the problem’ (page 147)] and details how this perverse inversion of hurt reverberates through the lived experiences of those who are made to embody diversity in the university.

Finally, in her conclusion Ahmed suggests that diversity work can be seen as a phenomenological practice.  Returning to the themes of the "wall" and the "table," Ahmed writes that diversity workers attempt to “transform the wall into a table, turning the tangible object of institutional resistance into a tangible platform for institutional action” (page 175). She reiterates the importance of diversity work rooted in antiracism and feminist critiques to prevent institutions from "looking over" race and racism.

We, the two authors of this review, differ on how we would like to engage Ahmed’s argument in the remainder of this review. As a result, we have decided to individually address the ways in which this book both affected and (re)oriented us. We would like to note, however, that this decision arose from productive and respectful collaboration and represents not a collapse in dialogue but ongoing conversations with one another as well as friends, family, professors, and classmates.

I (Corin de Freitas), as one of the two white authors of this review, have chosen not to seek to include a "critique."  Although this choice also presents troubling implications of its own, I am primarily concerned (given the specifics of Ahmed’s project and its experiential underpinnings) about the potential for critiques to provide camouflage for "unhearing" or other technologies of whiteness.  I consider it my challenge instead to focus on "unhearing" Ahmed and to practice "unseeing (through)" intellectual, institutional, and (inter)personal camouflage.

In place of a conventional critique, I would prefer to illustrate my choice by reflecting on a graduate seminar discussion of On Being Included during which I participated in constructing and maintaining precisely the sort of racist white academic space that Ahmed describes. The classroom conversation centered on Ahmed’s implicit attention to spatial themes (which is to be expected in geography); however, the discussion ultimately revealed more about "demographics" than discipline. Although she writes about racial identity with nuance, Ahmed does not hesitate to draw some lines that white readers are not invited to cross as well as other lines around communities of shared experience (sometimes by alluding to rather than detailing those experiences). She also explicitly avoids working with intersectionality and is careful to hold identities apart when experiences are inappropriately conflated or so-called "solidarity" works against its aims. Some white students were therefore troubled by their inability to identify with Ahmed’s "we," while others asked what change Ahmed could expect to provoke without orienting her work toward the white institution. Still other white students became engaged in exposing the whiteness of these arguments without decentering it. Students of color who had suggested that On Being Included resonated with their own experiences eventually distanced themselves from the discussion when their contributions were overlooked and displaced.

Reflecting on the book after class, a white participant observed, “it’s like there’s no way out.” Conceptualized not as a critique but as one of the deliberate decisions structuring the author’s argument, this statement might be rephrased: from within whiteness, there is no way out, or, more precisely, no way over.  Indeed, although I concur wholeheartedly with Ahmed's project and its presentation, our classroom discussion demonstrated that I also replicate institutional whiteness "with ease." Even without a way "over," I would therefore suggest that it behooves other (white) readers to be mindful not merely of the spatial dimensions of ‘being included’ but also directionality, power, and affect.

I (Alex Pysklywec), would also like to engage with Ahmed’s "we" but at a more personal level. First, however, in light of Corin’s discussion of critique as (potentially) "unhearing," I would like to situate my comments as an incorporation of Ahmed’s epistemology by contributing to the conversations started in her text. My contribution is rooted in my own experience as a white, queer settler (who is actively trying to unpack and understand the implications of this positionality, recognizing this as a never ending process). I do so, however, without trying to use my (white) body to divert the focus away from the discussion of race and racism, and the critique of (institutional) whiteness. Rather, I am trying to bring my body to the table, and I do so by addressing my experience of the "we."

The "we" is never fully identified or directly addressed in the text. This led me to question how intentional it might have been. For me, it became a strategic function that caused an unsettling sense of exclusion and (potentially) productive discomfort. This "we" made the very act of reading Ahmed’s piece a phenomenological experience of exclusion that created a powerful and instructive meta-narrative underscoring that race, racism, and anti-race work is discomforting and that such unsettling discomfort is the point for some readers who (comfortably and perhaps unknowingly) inhabit whiteness. Yet this narrative goes unaddressed, which left me feeling confused and unsettled (which is not a bad thing), yet bounded. I have found myself debating whether a discussion of ‘exclusion’ would have added another (possibly inclusive) dimension to Ahmed’s piece or whether this would have muted other aspects of her argument.

From this space of informative but unsettling exclusion and boundedness that some readers may experience, Ahmed’s discussion of how racism is (re)produced and her message that race and racism are brick walls that cannot be "overed" becomes incredibly salient. Yet, I wonder, can the brick wall of racism be "throughed" (albeit slowly, messily, cumbersomely, and never completely)? And, within the context of Ahmed’s piece, is there a (or what is the) role for allies in "throughing" the wall of racism?

Returning to our classroom setting: when we discussed On Being Included, we also engaged with our department’s diversity policy; however, it did not gain traction in the conversation, which, echoing Ahmed’s observations, emphasizes its "non-performativity." It did not (does not) stick. What did stick, however, was Ahmed’s piece. It is important for us to note that not everyone will engage with this piece in the same ways, and what we have discussed here are our experiences with the book. Some readers may find this text a challenge, while other may identify with it, or both or neither. Regardless of positionality and lived experiences, this text is engaging both intellectually and emotionally. Ahmed’s unflinching candor compels reflection and tough (hopefully productive) conversations far more effectively than a conventional "diversity document." This is a text that moves to confront and change the status quo. 

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