A Dystopian Post-Civil Rights Era: Black Lives Matter and the Rhetoric of Change 2023 PSA Presidential Address

Introduction

Conference themes tend to lean toward the interests of the President, often in collusion or collision with societal issues emerging at the time. This one is no different. Unfortunately, however, it also speaks to what I, and others, have been struggling with—the persistence of rhetoric in a futile attempt to show support for social change while set on keeping some of us “in our place.” This year’s conference theme, “We Will Do Better and Other Myths: Social Institutions and the Maintenance of Oppression,” was created to encourage participants to examine these issues through research, teaching, activism, and public sociology. It also spoke to my personal experience with my university and as President of the Pacific Sociological Association.

In this address, I reflect on the displays of support for Black people’s presence and treatment both during and following the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in 2020. All too often, symbols of support were accompanied by words of support to show that “we”—all people—were in this struggle for equity together. In reality, there was no “we” but, rather, the desire to be seen as staunch allies who always cared about the well-being of Black people. Almost three years later, the sheen of support for BLM has worn off revealing a cheap and tarnished metal of no discernable value.

The manifestation of “woke washing”—an acknowledgment of racism and the glomming on of causes calling for the elimination of racist structures and practices but where no real consequential action is taken—became the raison d’ȇtre for individuals and institutions in the summer of 2020. Prior to the BLM protests, both had blithely ignored previous calls to action. As the protests continued, it seemed like everyone wanted to get into the game of avowing their support. It became a race to see who could get their statements out the quickest. Behind those statements, unfortunately, change has ranged from superficial to nonexistent. After the race to respond to BLM protests ended, we were left with the appearance of support for BLM and social justice. Unfortunately, some of the more earnest efforts were thwarted by those unwilling to engage in any efforts that might effectuate meaningful change to the existing social order.

In critiquing where we were before the BLM 2020 protests and where we are when it comes to the resulting rhetoric of change, I begin by discussing the civil rights era and the promise of a more equal society through legislation. I then discuss the rhetoric of institutional responses to the BLM protests that took place in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by drawing upon my experiences with claims of equity and social justice at my own institution and as President of the Pacific Sociological Association. In each of these spaces, anti-Blackness appeared to be present but cavalierly dismissed by those who claimed their actions were not about race. I end by discussing why it is crucial that we become more attentive to what is happening in spaces that are microcosms of the larger society such as our workplaces and professional organizations. These provide us with the best examples of a postracial America that never was, as well as the realities of possibilities or barriers for actual change.

Change through Legislation: The Civil Rights Era

The civil rights era was a contentious period that today is captured in an image of Martin Luther King, Jr. giving his “I Have a Dream Speech” at the 1963 March on Washington. The focus on King as an individual, unfortunately, eclipses the significance of the March on Washington as part of a social movement. The mention of the bodies of Black men, women, and children, beaten and murdered, are forgotten “mistakes” as audiences expect that they can relive the power of the movement simply by listening to King’s speech, particularly, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day which commemorates his birthday. Nor do they consider the importance of how two missing White men during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project brought the reality of southern murders and kidnappings of Blacks into the homes of those who were unaware how bad things really were. Mainstream media had been negligent in showing what was happening to Black people who were being brutalized. It is troubling that, even today, Black bodies are only important when they are dead.

The 1960s brought the promise of equality based on race, gender, and sexual identity. The road was certainly not an easy one when it came to identity politics. Executive Orders 10925 and 11246, passed, respectively, in 1961 and 1965, required affirmative action be taken to ensure that access to employment was not banned due to race, color, or national origin. It is also important to mention a few facts about this period. The first is that, like today, there were people who were determined to not let the past continue and another group that was intent on ensuring that it stayed the same. In other words, there were allies and there were foes. Whites who participated in the CRM did so with an understanding of their privilege. Some Whites became leaders in their own right, participating with the knowledge that they were becoming involved in something that was new, dangerous, and uncomfortable. Malcolm X lamented that after he was asked by a young White woman what Whites could do in helping to address racist structures and society to which he had succinctly responded “Nothing” that he wished he could tell her and any other sincere White person that they could help by starting “on the battle lines” within their own communities because it is not Black people who are the racists (Haley and Malcolm X 1964:376). What he had recognized is that they work within their communities and wherever possible to address racism at its core. Malcolm X highlighted the need for sincerity, or what some may consider “authenticity,” of Whites in order to address the reality of racism in the United States. Nevertheless, he also made rather pointed observations about how Whites impeded the progress of Blacks when they became involved in Black organizations because even if a Black person has the title, Whites will be “the real controllers” (Haley and Malcolm X 1964:377). This is why it is so crucial that a balance be struck between White allyship and White privilege.

A second issue that is important but often ignored is that police brutality was a problem that groups like the Black Panther Party, founded in 1966, sought to end, but so was the violence inflicted upon Black people by ordinary White citizens. This had been evident throughout the Southern Civil Rights Movement as Whites of different occupations and social classes participated in racialized violence against Blacks. There are those today who continue to frame racism as something that only the police engage in, not other groups or individuals. This imposes limitations on what needs to be done to address racism and racialized violence.

Third, the addition of sex in the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 opened doors to women, and while these doors were not opened as widely for Black women, women as a group were struggling to obtain access to birth control which was inextricably linked to women’s reproductive rights. The subsequent U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 was considered a significant win that gave women control over their bodies. However, it would be only 50 years later, that antiabortion activists would celebrate their significant win with the Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which overturned the Roe decision and has led to limited access to abortions and prosecutions of those who failed to comply with their state’s abortion bans.

The Stonewall Rights and the birth of the Gay Liberation Movement is a fourth area that was accompanied by battles with the authorities and a defiant “We’re not going to take it anymore” approach (Hall and Harrell 2018). Gay and trans activists took a stance similar to that of minoritized racial groups that no longer thought the turning the other cheek response of the early Civil Rights Movement was an adequate reaction to their oppression. Their response mirrored those of groups that had become much more confrontational with the police and other authority figures, all in an effort to feel safe within the communities in which they lived, worked, and socialized. They became more political in their response. Like members of the Chicano Power, Black Power, and American Indian Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they went from being local activists to running for political office (Gorman 1998). The gains of the LGBTQ+ community have been increasingly under attack, physically, politically, and socially in recent years, even going so far as to threaten parental rights and making accommodations such as preferred restroom usage in schools difficult.

A final area that was often overshadowed by the identity politics accompanying many of the movements of the 1960s is poverty. David Zarefsky’s (1986) President Johnson’s War on Poverty: Rhetoric and History discusses the multitude of problems faced by President Lyndon B. Johnson that made his early focus on poverty appear somewhat misplaced within the context of the Civil Rights Movement. What had become clear about the Civil Rights Movement was that “widespread social reform would be needed in order to achieve its objectives and that poverty was the issue which would expose this need” (Zarefsky 1986:25). The passage of programs such as Job Corps and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) (now a part of AmeriCorps) as well as the Food Stamp Act, and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, were some of the President’s successes. Even so, by the late 1960s, the War on Poverty was no longer President Johnson’s concern.

As President Johnson’s tenure and his focus on poverty were coming to an end, civil rights and antipoverty leaders and organizations remained intent on bringing attention to poverty through what had been one of King’s projects, the Poor People’s Campaign. For six weeks in May and June of 1968, makeshift houses were built near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. While this event did not have the draw or staying power of the Civil Rights Movement, it did, for a short time, highlight the problem of poor people regardless of race or age, many of whom had no place to live. Today, the high rates of homelessness and the inability of people to remain in their homes due to economic instability are a problem that has yet to be adequately addressed.

I bring attention to these varied events of the 1960s and early 1970s to critique how attempts to solve problems or enact change do not ensure their permanence. There are limits to what legislation can do. There are also limits to how much change people and institutions are willing to commit to. What one says and what one does are often two different things. The postcivil rights era was embraced as a period in which problems had been solved or obscured from view sufficiently enough to give the impression they no longer existed. The need to continue discussions about race, in particular, was embraced by segments of the population that considered there to be sufficient racial equality that it was unnecessary to address it. If one did, then one was being racist. We had, after all, become “post-racial.” The postcivil rights era gave comfort to those who were satisfied with how things were. And then, three events occurred: the 2016 Presidential election, the arrival of COVID-19, and the BLM protests in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020. I will limit my discussion to the third event.

BLM and the Rhetoric of Social Justice

For institutions of higher education, including mine, BLM protests in the summer of 2020 resulted in laying claims to supporting Black people that never quite manifested in any meaningful way. Social justice seemed to apply to what other institutions like law enforcement or the courts needed to do, implying that higher education had either done so or been in the process of doing all along. I found that efforts related to racial equity did not apply to those like me who had constantly sought the assistance of administrative leaders to address barriers that impeded our ability to feel included and that far too often were accompanied by an intersectional onslaught of racism and sexism. When I shared my concerns with those who I thought might be in a position to help—deans, directors, Human Resources, the faculty union, the Office of Global Diversity and Inclusion, the provost, and the president—I was listened to but not heard. The responses were either a sad smile or shocked expression and then apologies for my “having to go through that.” There was never any action. In fact, two union reps told me “It’s too bad you aren’t complaining about race or gender because then we might be able to help you.” During all of these encounters, I kept wondering why is there all of this talk about social justice that does not seem to include me? I was bewildered, annoyed, and disappointed, but not completely surprised.

As a Black woman professor on the campus of an institution in a city that claims to be progressive, I observed how stingy it could be with regards to how social justice was disseminated. Ruby Hamad’s (2020) White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color explains,

Women of color who attempt to address an issue that is detrimental to them in some way almost invariably come up against a wall of white fragility so immovable, so lacking in empathy, so utterly unrepentant, that the first few times it happens, you naturally assume you are imagining it, that you are the problem, that you should have gone about things differently and you will go about things differently from now on (p. 13).

What I learned in the last several years is that social justice does not apply to me or other Black women in the way they apply to Black men or White women. As my union made clear, in order to receive its help, I needed to be one or the other, Black or a woman, but not both. Attempts at achieving justice become subsumed and subsequently erased by perceptions of sexism as something that applies to women but not Black women and racism as something that applies to Black men but not Black women.

Dystopian Futures and Realities

In Dismantling Institutional Whiteness: Emerging Forms of Leadership in Higher Education, Mangala Subramanian and Zeba Kokan (2023) cast doubt on the effectiveness of statements made by university leaders about racism. They contend that it is important to examine “the processes of how the statements come to be, what policies follow the statements, and how they are implemented” (p. 42). I concur with their appraisal but would add the following: “What claims were institutions making about racism prior to their most recent statements?” In particular, what is it that they are now planning to achieve that they failed to do before? How might such avowals that they would “do better” be evidence of a continued show of attention rather than a new effort to focus on a problem that had been long ignored? These questions are ones that we must ask. They tell us much about the sincerity of institutional change and that of those in positions of power. If they were already doing something meaningful, then it would be unnecessary to promise they will do better in the future.

With platitudes of “We will do better” and “We support Black Lives,” coming from my university’s administrators and other institutions in 2020, I began looking at the revolving door of Black faculty and staff at the university and the prevalence of White administrators who always seemed to stay in place or even advance. I noticed that those pledging allegiance to BLM were merely engaging in lip service. Their false words of support were exemplified in the consistent way in which they ignored pleas for help by Black faculty and staff who had to face the reality that help was not coming. BLM and social justice were for people “out there” and not for those of us who were standing right next to or behind them. The reality was that change is something that many people talk about, but when the rubber meets the road, they are working the hardest and ensuring change does not occur. Keeping things as they are and either ignoring or silencing voices of dissent are tactics used by those who are engaging in retaining the status quo. It is the comfort in sameness that helps to maintain oppression.

Are claims that institutions will do better accompanied by changes that are meaningful or superficial? Do these changes result in a consequential payoff—economic or otherwise—for those who do performative politics on social media, through diversity-enhanced advertising, or by increasing the number of students or employees who are targeted for inclusion? What have institutions done to increase opportunities for advancement in the workplace of the populations they claim to be making efforts to include and maintain? How does inclusive pedagogy play a part in social justice efforts? How are students and student groups creating change? How are communities and community organizations responding to social justice efforts? And what are social institutions (including higher education) doing that show their efforts are more than empty rhetoric? The result of all of these questions is to encourage and inspire us to think about how we might participate in this reckoning of rhetoric—on the sidelines or on the frontlines, and from places of comfort or contention.

In June 2020, a few weeks after the death of George Floyd, an interim dean at my university sent an e-mail apologizing for being “remiss in not responding sooner” to the protests that were taking place in the city and around the country, and promising to “do better.” I could not help but let out a sarcastic laugh and roll my eyes. It was the epitome of administrative posturing, yet his response was commonplace. On other campuses, there were similar letters and statements showing support for BLM and for social justice. All were attempts to engage in a form of damage control where if they could point the finger at those folks over there, no one would see that they were no different. If they did not know what was going on behind the scenes and put out a message stating they personally would take responsibility and could perhaps unveil some initiative that had been hidden under wraps, they may come across as sincere. However, if the message that is being sent implies that the institution and everyone in it have done absolutely nothing to stop the racism and sexism that they had repeatedly been told was occurring, then they are being honest while also disingenuous in their new-found support for BLM and social justice.

There were times when I felt hopeful in 2020. I thought that the end of my battle to get my university to recognize the harm that it had done as it watched me participate in interviews locally, nationally, and internationally where I talked about BLM protests and the state of activism in a predominately White city where gentrification had erased the presence of Black residents. I wanted my university to see the irony of the lack of presence of Black faculty and staff on campus. Instead, my university was, like so many Whites in Portland, reframing BLM to their liking; one that did not involve Black people. I became less convinced that things were going to be different as my university embarked on its new “Reimagine PSU” campaign. What I was trying to imagine was a safe place to work. The university had, in fact, lost a large number of Black administrators, staff, and faculty since my arrival in 2016. Many left angry and confused. Angry because the very people who welcomed them with open arms were also using them to prove they were not racist and that there would always be a place for them—that is, unless they had a difference of opinion or asked for more than what it was willing to give, and then it was time to show them just how unwelcoming the institution could be.

Though my institution claims to promote diversity, it has also been party to silencing, ignoring, and harming Black faculty and staff. In January 2016, when I arrived at Portland State University, I began to see how the process of “diversity” works to maintain White privilege and gender privilege at institutions that call themselves progressive. Progressive is something that many institutions and individuals aspire or claim to be but which is nonetheless realized in few. At an institutional level, empty rhetoric and insincere gestures prevail, but there will never be a shortage of those who jump to be at the front of the line to receive a handshake and pat on the back, even when it has not been deserved. In January 2022, when I read that my university was the recipient of a “Racial Justice and Equity Program Award,” I could not help but be disheartened. After all, what was this racial justice and who were its recipients?

On December 31, 2020, months after the BLM protests had settled down (for the most part) around the country, I received a letter from Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries, informing me that it had found “substantial evidence” to support my claims of racism and sexism at Portland State University. Ironically, the findings of the institution’s own investigation the previous December found no such evidence. Yet, that hopeful feeling I had at a few isolated points during the BLM protests in 2020 re-emerged. Perhaps my institution would actually, like the title of Spike Lee’s movie, Do the Right Thing. After several months filled with anxiety but also hope that my years of dealing with racism and sexism would finally be addressed, I realized that there would be no such help coming from my institution or its administration. The flicker of hope had dissipated and was replaced by anger. I felt like Alex, Glenn Close’s character in the 1987 film Fatal Attraction (without the rabbit): “I’m not gonna be ignored!” Yet, through several years of complaining to all of the right offices on campus and the right people, including those at the top, I was being ignored. It was clear that they just wanted me, the problem, or both, to just go away.

Portland State University’s motto, “Let Knowledge Serve the City,” has failed to resonate for those who brought knowledge and experience from a multitude of institutions and locations to a place that was less honest about its inability and willingness to listen to them and take their concerns seriously. At a party celebrating her departure from the university, one Black woman asked in wonderment about the propensity for there to be a simmering anti-Blackness, “What is it? Is it the lack of Vitamin D?!” Those who decided to cast their professional futures in places that were more honest about their hostility, particularly toward Black women, left—never looking back. It seems like they finally left the abuser who had attempted to crush their spirit but had been unsuccessful. Others, like myself, who are aware of the emotional harm we face if we are visible, choose to periodically or permanently “go underground” where we do what we need to do to complete our jobs but give our attention to other opportunities that bring us the respect and satisfaction we deserve. As for my long and protracted struggle to receive a modicum of justice from my university, suffice it to say that there was an agreement of sorts and I am underground less often than in the past but take efforts to protect myself from additional harm.

The implied validation of the BLM movement through the inclusion of Whites speaks volumes about the hierarchical arrangement of race and privilege in the United States. The inability of large numbers of Whites to acknowledge neither the existence of BLM as a growing movement nor its demands prior to 2020 has shown the power of whiteness with respect to the value of Black lives. The chorus of “Black Lives Matter!” too often focused attention exclusively on the police and policing in the United States. This rendered invisible other sources of institutionally generated emotional and psychological harm done in the workplace and in mundane daily activities that the movement was attempting to spotlight.

“The House that Becky Built”: Black Women Entering the White House

The intersection of race and gender continues to impede the treatment and progress of Black women. Far too often, White women academics claim a sisterhood with all women. This can only be accomplished by their inability to see their exclusionary practices that treat BIPOC women, especially Black women, as though they are to be tolerated, but not included. At my own so-called “progressive” university, when I first arrived as the newly externally hired chair of the Black Studies department and the only full-time tenure-line Black woman in the School of Gender, Race, and Nations, I heard about a writing group that had been organized by a faculty member in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department. As a newcomer to the university, the school, my department, and the building, I had to ask to be included. I also learned, much to my chagrin, that although my research and teaching focus on gender, and I had taught and developed cross-listed courses for sociology and women’s studies at my previous institution, I never received an invitation to become an affiliate faculty member. It appeared as though my credentials were irrelevant or somehow not of the same caliber as faculty in other far-flung areas of campus who were invited and yet, had no such formal training in gender and had far less experience conducting research and in teaching courses on gender. Where was that sisterhood that was supposed to exist? It appeared to be mere rhetoric, not reality.

There is room in all spaces, including our academic institutions and professional organizations to do better, but it takes all of us to ensure this happens, not just a few. The loud and boisterous and the silent witnesses must check their behavior and assess its appropriateness. When I noticed that past presidents of the PSA had gone missing in action, I realized how much their behavior was much like BIPOC faculty on campuses who go underground to avoid the microaggressions and macroaggressions occurring around them. Too often, such absences are unacknowledged or dismissed as a personal decision rather than an indication of a much larger problem. PSA is a microcosm of society. Within it, we can see many of the same issues “out there” in sharp relief.

Jessie Daniels’s (2021) Nice White Ladies explores the responses of White women to situations and people involving non-Whites that, while appearing innocuous, have long-lasting repercussions on the harm they cause to others. In fact, many fail to recognize their behavior as being inappropriate or racist. During my presidency of the Pacific Sociological Association, I was shocked by what some of my Council members could not see as being racist because a Black-identifying woman not only participated in but often led their attacks against me. For them, the fact that they were not calling the police on me, yelling racial epithets, or other often identified forms of racist behavior, they refused to see what was a more hidden, and often unquestioned, form of racism—the protection of White womanhood.

I was asked to take on the role of President-Elect, and subsequently, President, of the Pacific Sociological Association following the resignation of the President-elect. Although things appeared to be going well during my time as president-elect, once the new Council came on board in 2022, things changed, and not in a good way. I realized that something had happened during the months when I was simultaneously familiarizing myself with my new role and attempting to gain clarity on a failed restructuring of the office staff. The lone White woman employee had complained for some time about the workload so when she told me she was considering resigning from her position with the organization, I listened with a supportive ear and responded, “You have to do what is best for you.” I did not take her statements as a threat but as someone who had made a decision that was hers to make, and I respected it. Months later, I realized that I had done the unthinkable. I had done something that no other president of the organization had done—I took her at her word.

As the months went by, it appeared to me that something had changed in our relationship. Although it had never been strained, something was going on below the surface and likely in phone calls, e-mails, and Zoom meetings to which I was not privy. My subsequent treatment by a select group of Council members who seemed to characterize me as their enemy followed me throughout my tenure as the president of the PSA. It was uncanny how much the events that unfolded seemed so familiar to what had been happening on the political scene. I had been struck by the irony of BLM as a “new” thing for those Whites who seemed to center their attention on the relationship between Black people and the police rather than the treatment of Black people in their day-to-day lives in places like school and work, housing, the education system and in professional organizations.

I perceived this group of Council members as digging in deep when it came to maintaining the status quo of the PSA even if it meant doing great harm to its Black woman president. Other Council members watched in horror and in silence in Zoom meetings the bullying that was inflicted on me for reasons neither they nor I could grasp. In one case, a Council member kept attacking me in a meeting and when I pointed out that and asked that she stop doing so, she explained she was upset because she had flat ironed her hair that day and it had rained. I tried to laugh it off although the reason she gave for her treatment of me was a peculiar one. Not long after, this individual demanded that the Council call for an emergency meeting to discuss the tears of a White woman that had been shed in a meeting. I had attempted to conciliate by informing the Council members in attendance that I needed to continue gathering information on the structure of PSA as compared with other regional and national organizations before I would be ready to discuss the matter.

In all honesty, I found it baffling that an emergency meeting was being called because a White woman cried. My explanation that I was already aware of and working to address the problem was ignored. However, the emergency meeting that was demanded was to take place three days later, which also happened to fall on the Friday before the last national holiday of summer. Unsurprisingly, a sufficient number of Council members failed to appear so there was no quorum. There was, however, a demand weeks later from the person who asked the meeting be called that I explain why I did not attend.

I saw a pattern emerging. If I called for a meeting—mainly to discuss the one problem that consumed most of, if not all of, my presidency, the staffing issue—the same Council members who made it their duty to give me grief at every meeting, would complain that there had not been sufficient notice provided. My call for the meeting as PSA President would face conflict, but a Council member could ask, request, or demand a special meeting take place in three days while I would be told that I needed a week or two out and yet still receive complaints. The contradiction was not lost on me.

I was learning more about the organization and how I should, as President, best serve its members and understand my new role. In the fall of 2022, I sought out advice from other sociology regional organizations and contacted a number of former PSA presidents to get an idea of what I could expect, what concerns they had about the organization, and how they thought they might be addressed. Although I had informed the Council of my intention to engage in this fact-finding mention, after I submitted a draft of my findings that shared concerns of the past presidents and advice provided by other regional organizations, I was told by the same group of Council members that I did not have Council’s permission to talk to anyone. They were attempting to silence me and my findings, however, as I soon found out from then Executive Directors of other sociology regional associations, these same Council members were running their own parallel investigation with impunity. They were not subjected to requiring the permission that was, after the fact, being demanded of me.

During this same meeting, one of the group members demanded to know the names of the people I had spoken to. They also demanded to know why I had not responded to their report. I asked what report they were referring to and the same Council member angrily responded as though I was purposely being obtuse and had ignored it. Council members quickly started going through the e-mail threads that they had been sending each other and realized that they never included me, and thus, the report a select number of Council members had written was never sent to me, the PSA President. Council members, particularly those who were my allies, sat in stunned silence.

In a string of e-mails that followed the discussion of my report, a Council member accused me of having “cherry picked” the former PSA Presidents I had spoken with. Her characterization of my quest for information contributed to my realization of how much PSA was in dire need of change. I noticed that there were those who seemed hesitant to speak up, but it was immediately prior to and immediately following the 2022 meeting that one person said what I had not realized at the time; those within the organization who were friends with one person were sufficient to silence any voices of dissent. This individual, and others, I soon learned, feared that if they spoke up, there would be people in the organization who would attempt to do them professional harm.

As the fall and winter months went by, the incessant attacks against me did not stop. I learned quickly that I had done an unforgivable act. I did not attempt to put out a White woman’s tears nor attempt to infantilize her by telling her that I knew better than she what she wanted. In doing so, I learned the hard way why claims of equity and fairness do not apply to some of us. I also learned why it is difficult for those who do not get their way to fight tooth and nail to maintain what has not worked in the past, simply because it worked for them.

Conclusion

Almost three years have passed since institutions of higher education that had previously claimed to be attentive to Black Lives and social justice began the race to see who could claim “wokeness” and begin the process of establishing or re-establishing their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. What this told me, and I am sure many others, is that they clearly had not seen this as a priority prior to the BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd. Somehow when we hear about social justice, it reverberates in the hallways of the academy. It is as though it is about “those people out there” and not those people “in here.” It is easy to see ourselves as though we are “good people” on the right side of justice, even when we are not.

Pseudoprogressive politics encourages people and institutions to position themselves as supportive of social justice and immune to such nastiness as racism or sexism. They would “never” and yet they “do.” Institutions and professional organizations should explore restorative justice. While many campuses have DEI offices and academic programs that focus on social justice, administrators—presidents, provosts, deans, and legal counsel—are not sufficiently acquainted with the literature or the solutions. The solutions that are proposed rarely involve all faculty and all administrators at the top of the administrative hierarchy. As a result, their canned responses are the rhetoric referring to what they claim is their mission and what they plan to do. These plans tend to take the place of swift and meaningful actions. They all too often rely on the labor of minoritized faculty—a Black woman here, a queer person there, and a non-White immigrant from the global south tossed in for good measure. And for that moment in time, the spotlight is on them as they work on a plan that will be accompanied by institutional structures that will ensure their recommendations will never bear fruit.

Within the PSA, when I attempted to maintain integrity and fairness in how I handled my role and how I had hoped the organization would run, I knew I would forever be tarnished and assumed to be guilty of causing a White woman harm. When the Council member I considered the ringleader demanded that the president not work closely with the PSA staff member, I knew there were different rules that were being applied to me, but also that there was something that was being said about me to which I still had no knowledge. It was clear that friends of the staff member were painting me in a way that best suited their narrative. While they were clearly obtaining her opinion, not once did anyone attempt to obtain mine. It was assumed it was deficient or simply did not matter. I was in a dystopian environment where the social and political environment outside the PSA was occurring within the PSA. I was experiencing on a personal level what Black people deal with in their day-to-day lives—pro-whiteness hand-in-hand with anti-Blackness.

Claims to address oppression must go beyond scapegoating one social institution and those who work within it (e.g., law enforcement and the police). By not doing so, there is the preservation of the status quo because institutions are never going to change if the people who hold positions of power remain the same. In his Education for Critical Consciousness, Paulo Freire (1974:6) drew the same conclusion, stating that, if individuals “are unable to perceive critically the themes of their time, and thus to intervene actively in reality, they are carried along in the wake of change.” He observed that what is required is “an especially flexible, critical spirit,” but, if such a spirit is lacking, individuals “cannot perceive the marked contradictions which occur in society as emerging values in search of affirmation and fulfillment clash with earlier values seeking self-preservation” (Freire 1974:6). More succinctly, change requires that we examine and critique how the actions of institutions can belie their rhetoric about creating and supporting change.

In the process of undergoing the psychical harm I experienced as president of the PSA, I gained a deeper understanding of why those who believed Trump was wronged had such a hard time letting go. It is much easier to claim a faulty election process than it is to comprehend that someone other than your candidate could win an election. If we remain comfortable with what we have had or what we want without understanding the problems the past has caused others, then change is not likely to ever occur. We will forever be intent on maintaining our candidate was the rightful winner when no such evidence exists to support this position. We can also claim to be antiracist but engage in behaviors that not only reinforce but also maintain the existing status quo.

I was interviewed many times in the summer and fall of 2020. Very early on, several reporters asked if I thought the marches would result in change. I was cautious in my response saying that it felt different, primarily due to the large number of Whites who had suddenly realized that BLM was real. However, I was also cautious because what I saw was a movement that had only garnered widespread attention because of the number of Whites who participated. In addition, I was concerned by the narrow view held by those who focused their attention solely on the police as though other institutions and persons were not part of the problem. This was a shortsighted perspective that ignored the systemic racism of institutions and individuals elsewhere in society. That was my concern then and it remains a concern for me today. I am still waiting for justice but I am no longer convinced it is coming.