I Was a Diversity Hire. Then They Unhired Me.

In March of 2020, shortly after my final interview for a tenure-track position in creative nonfiction at Mississippi State University, I received a note of welcome from the department chair — an affable man named Dan, with whom I’d been in consistent contact throughout the process:

At a meeting today we voted to make you our top candidate. Now I will say that I need to run this through the dean’s office and discuss with them before making an official offer, but I hope that will be coming early next week. Again, this is a report on the faculty vote but the dean pretty much always allows us to go forward with our first pick. Still, the official offer email has to wait until I dot the i’s and cross the t’s.

This official offer never arrived because, two weeks later, the search was upended by a complaint of reverse racial discrimination. Dan said little about the source of this complaint, though he revealed that it had come from within the English department. This puzzled me; I had connected well with every member of the hiring committee, we had spoken substantively about my teaching philosophy, and I later learned that they had voted unanimously in my favor. I had remained in touch with a few of these faculty members, discussing their research and recommending books, though our communication ended at the time of Dan’s final email to me. In the hazy days afterward, I drank too much, reread email exchanges, and tried to square the warmth of those budding collegial relationships with the silence that suddenly followed.

Under normal circumstances, I would have traveled to campus for a two-day, in-person interview. But this was the height of Covid, so the interview was held through a parade of Webex meetings. In a peculiar and fitting twist, the department, which normally gifted finalists with a box of cheese from the campus farm, had sent two bottles of muscadine jelly and another of honey. One of these bottles had shattered in transit, leaving shards across my kitchen floor that, despite my vigilant and angry sweeping, kept cutting my feet.

Shortly after moving to Louisiana a decade ago, I began serving as a consultant for William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, a civil-rights organization based in Jackson, Miss. Through this partnership, much of my work as both a writer and educator came to center around Mississippi’s K-12 public education system — a system that pays stubborn tribute to the old South. Because white teachers are overrepresented in public schools (Mississippi is 59 percent white, and white teachers compose 72 percent of the teaching force; the state is 37 percent Black, and Black teachers compose 27 percent of the teaching force), white children in Mississippi are likely to have been taught almost exclusively by white teachers, who were themselves taught by generations of white teachers.

To walk across a college campus in Mississippi is to see the way these forces punch upward into the world of higher education. Both Mississippi State and the flagship, the University of Mississippi, are predominantly white (72 percent and 75 percent respectively). But culture is about more than numbers. In 1896, the University of Mississippi was rechristened by its nickname, “Ole Miss,” an antebellum term that referred to the mistress of a plantation. In 2015, the university voted to remove the Mississippi state flag — then marked by the Confederate emblem — from campus, though it drew the line at removing the moniker “Rebels” from its sports teams. This is a common sight throughout the South: little white boys, clad in jerseys and T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Ole Miss Rebels.”

The day after I received Dan’s welcome email, when I had every reason to believe the job was mine, I went for a hike with my family in Mississippi’s DeSoto National Forest. The kids ran ahead, and my husband, Aaron, and I hung back to discuss the changes this opportunity could mean for us. Would we sell our house in New Orleans and relocate? Could I find some way to commute four hours — each way — back and forth every week?

At the heart of this conversation was the fear I felt on behalf of our three children. In addition to the standard anxieties of uprooting one’s family, I wondered how these brown-skinned kids would settle into a place like Starkville, Miss. — a town bluntly divided along racial lines. I didn’t worry that they would be mistreated because of their skin color. On the contrary, I worried that their non-Blackness, combined with the privilege of having a parent employed by the university, would propel them to lives of unearned benefits. Being brown in the South is a funny thing. I remembered something that happened years back, when I was giving a talk at the University of Mississippi, I was standing next to my breakfast table at the campus hotel when a white man, assuming I was the server, placed his dirty plate in front of me. Afterward he was contrite, and it was this detail that struck me anew every time I told the story. He would not have assumed I was the server had I been white, but perhaps he wouldn’t have apologized had I been Black.

Photographs by L. Kasimu Harris for The Chronicle

I couldn’t have raised any of this during my interview, as all but one of the faculty members with whom I spoke were white, and none could be fairly asked to speak to such personal concerns. This is not to say that we did not discuss race. In its abstract form, race was the focal point of many of our conversations over the two-day period. The job description had stated, “This search is part of a cohort of three departmental hires this year intended to increase faculty diversity and to help further our goals of promoting equity and inclusivity across the department.” Every interview question seemed to stem from that commitment. Had I actively mentored students from underrepresented backgrounds? Could I describe a time I had advocated for diversity within an academic environment? Which writers did I intend to teach and why?

I didn’t envy my interviewers. Despite the carefully streamlined process of academic hiring, there is no elegant way for a nearly all-white panel to ask brown and Black candidates how they might advance the cause of racial justice. It was perhaps because of this discomfort that the questions, though plentiful, were surprisingly basic. (Of course I had mentored students from a range of backgrounds. My entire career had been devoted to equity and representation in schools. I had drafted a sample syllabus for the interview; to look at this was to see the writers I planned to teach.)

Hoping to elevate the conversation, I talked about the impact of historically white institutions and an exclusively white literary canon on the psyche of all students — not only students of color. I discussed my hopes for an interdisciplinary writing course that would draw students from across the humanities and push them to investigate the complexities of family and personal history. I envisioned a class in which this new generation of Mississippians learned not only the art of narrative writing, but the patience and humility to listen to each other’s stories. Later, I drafted a statement of my beliefs on diversity and inclusion and sent it to Dan. The interview, though long, had felt incomplete, and I wanted to speak more autobiographically to the emotional and intellectual imprint that race can have on our lives.

I am a child of Indian immigrants and grew up in the suburban New Jersey of the 1990s. As with most demographically similar communities, racism took two distinct forms: so pervasive we were hardly aware of its existence, and then suddenly so virulent that it left a permanent scar. Throughout my adolescence, I would find racial epithets scribbled on a desk. I would hear jokes about Apu and 7-Eleven convenience stores. But I also grew up in a town defined by redlining and housing discrimination, a beneficiary of uneven resource allocation. My family didn’t suffer the impacts of environmental racism, the violence of law enforcement, or the brutal reach of mass incarceration. Though stories of people of color were absent from my childhood curricula, I attended schools well-supplied by books.

I entered the field of education shortly after college, determined to address both the structural racism from which I had benefited and the overt forms from which I had cowered. I attended graduate school at Columbia University’s Teachers College and immersed myself in discussion of education policy and practice. I researched democratic schooling models and culturally responsive curricula, insistent that my future students’ identities be reflected in our syllabus and that their voices shape our classroom.

In my later graduate years, I had the privilege of working closely with a number of talented writers and scholars. I also confronted the persistent underrepresentation of writers of color in traditional courses within the English department. I spoke up actively on the subject, meeting with the director of the university’s Center for Humanities to hold professors to a higher standard in the development of their syllabi. In my own undergraduate course, I ensured that my students read a wide range of novelists and essayists whose perspectives, arguments, and imagined worlds reflect the evolving canon of global literature and scholarship.

During the last stretch of my interview, when I met with the directors of graduate and undergraduate studies, I was eager to discuss the underrepresentation of students of color across the university and within the English department. They told me that the university had launched a few initiatives, though with mixed results. They described efforts to reach out to predominantly Black high schools throughout the state, and to collaborate with Mississippi’s strong network of publicly funded HBCUs to draw more graduate applicants.

In theory, these ideas offered the full promise of affirmative action — the benefit of increased diversity for the institution, and a solid (and funded) educational opportunity for students who have historically been underserved. But they also risked serving the institution at the expense of the student. What made Mississippi State a better choice than Jackson State or Alcorn State? Morehouse or Spelman or Howard? Institutions at which, to paraphrase Nikole Hannah-Jones, scholars could reach their full potential without being stifled and questioned and doubted. Or, for Black students who were not seeking an HBCU, why not a more diverse, highly regarded program outside of Mississippi?

The directors’ answers to these concerns weren’t perfect, but I was not seeking a perfect department. I was seeking one that was moving, even if clumsily, in the right direction. More importantly, I wanted to help bolster these efforts. When I first applied for the position, I talked with my friend Von. He is a native of Sunflower County who now lives in Jackson, a veteran civil-rights activist, and a Mississippian to his core. “Mississippi can always be counted on to Mississip,” he cautioned me. I agreed, but I gave him my rationale, which I still hold onto today: It is in the gap between the South’s most human-centered ideals and its hard realities where educators need to wedge themselves. I admired the Mississippi teachers I had met over the years, who showed up and chipped away day after day.

My conversation with Tommy, a dean of arts and sciences, was the final meeting of my interview, and the most memorable. His interest in diversity appeared less cosmetic and more fundamental, and he was frank about the amount of chipping away that Mississippi State asked of its faculty — particularly faculty of color. “We have professors here who believe that, even in Mississippi, racism is a thing of the past,” he told me. “And we have students who subscribe to this view.” This was not a belief he had ever heard within arts and sciences, he quickly qualified, but in disciplines that were able to wall themselves off from political and cultural discourse. This led us to a challenge he had been trying to address in his role as dean: The influence of arts and sciences only reaches students inclined toward its coursework and underlying intellectual principles, but the need for a strong humanities education is felt in every facet of campus life.

We agreed that this gap could be addressed through a strong, interdisciplinary nonfiction-writing program. Mississippi State is a land-grant institution, deeply rooted in its history as the state’s agricultural and mechanical college, and Tommy saw an opportunity to bring students together around some of these shared, elemental principles of land and community history. Our meeting was scheduled for an hour, though we talked for nearly two. Three weeks later, having received Dan’s welcoming email about the faculty’s vote, I told him just what I had told Tommy at the close of our conversation: “I cannot imagine a more engaged, supportive, and exciting department to make my home.”

After Dan’s good news, a week passed. He notified me of a small administrative delay, sending updates with hopeful deadlines. Monday. Any time. Tomorrow morning. When we finally spoke, he revealed that, after the faculty votes had been cast and the dean’s signature granted, human resources received an anonymous complaint of discrimination. I pressed Dan further. “Is this related to the department’s diversity push?” I asked. He told me that it was.

He also told me that he felt confident that this was a flimsy complaint and would be received as such. But one week later, I received the following: Our search is canceled. I’m so sorry. Maybe we can talk in a day or two just to wrap up. When we spoke over the phone, he explained that the university had ruled in favor of the complainant — a decision that affected my offer, as well as that of two other candidates for positions in the English department who were also awaiting their official letters.

Long before I considered myself a writer, I was a teacher in New York City and New Orleans public schools. My colleagues and I arrived bleary-eyed in the morning and left after dark. We leaned on each other for help with lesson plans and behavior challenges. We stepped into each other’s classrooms when someone needed a break. We also acquired a peculiar range of ailments: strep throat, secondary trauma, urinary-tract infections. My lips were perpetually chapped. The balls of my feet ached. I woke in the middle of the night remembering parent phone calls I had forgotten to make and curricular modifications that suddenly felt urgent. In my first trimester of my first pregnancy, my fourth year of teaching, I bled so much that I assumed I had miscarried. When I finally saw my obstetrician, she revealed a heartbeat and evidence of a seven-week embryo. “Have you been under particular stress?” she asked.

I knew about the lives of professors in the same distant way in which I knew of Danish health care or German parental leave. They seemed great. All of the professors I had ever known appeared to be happy, and I was happy for them. And it followed that my friends who were entering academe were all clambering for an impossibly small number of tenure-track positions. In secondary education, we faced the opposite problem. There were never enough people willing to take it on. In the years when I was responsible for recruitment, I would imagine the disastrous possibilities if we were unable to fill an open position. Would we collapse the classes? Cram 40 kids into a single room?

Over the course of interviewing at Mississippi State, as I peeked down the rabbit hole of blog posts and Reddit threads devoted to the higher-education job market (including my favorite, the retrospective of those who earned a job the previous year), I became aware that I was an unconventional candidate — a walk-on to a team of aspiring professors who had been training for this moment their entire academic lives. Though I had published widely, I did not yet have a book under contract. I held an M.F.A. from a well-respected program, but for the years prior, I was a union-card-holding public-school teacher with unrelenting stacks of student papers and an alarm that buzzed at 5:30 a.m. At Mississippi State, I had stumbled upon a department that viewed those years as a qualification that distinguished me from other applicants.

But it is possible that at another university, or in another department, I could have been passed over in favor of a candidate who had spent their adult years climbing the internal rungs of the academy. And it is not possible to gauge which of us — this mythical person or I — would have been more effective once we stepped into the role. There is no objectively best pick. Most college graduates can recall, on our personal lists of professors who have changed our lives, both graduate assistants and established scholars. Many of us have sat before professors whose work we admired but whose teaching style was cold, or daunting, or indifferent. For some of us, the honor of that proximity was worth it. For others, it was not.

When I told the Mississippi State story to friends and colleagues — overwhelmingly progressive supporters of affirmative action — they were appalled on my behalf. Those in higher education, familiar with the toll of the academic-job search, felt my loss most acutely. They consoled me over Zoom and phone, assured me that I’d dodged a bullet, and laughed at the absurdity of the situation: a charge of reverse discrimination in the deep South. When I later received a formal email from the university, informing me that the search had been canceled due to “external circumstances,” a friend quipped, “About as external as a Pap smear!” This joke sustained me for weeks.

But there is a critical truth that nobody acknowledged over the course of these long conversations. Race did boost my candidacy. Even in a tight circle of like-minded friends, this is a difficult point to concede because advocates for affirmative action — myself included — are more comfortable speaking to the larger policy benefits of race-based consideration than to stories of individual beneficiaries. We have good reason to be afraid that, by acknowledging the impact of race-conscious policies on a particular candidate, we are both denigrating that candidate and feeding a culture of grievance hungry for stories of well-qualified white people who were unjustly turned down. For candidates of color, there is a material cost to this discourse. It is one thing to publicly support affirmative action, and it is another to accept a permanent asterisk next to one’s name.

Yet if we believe in affirmative action, then we have to justify the role of race, not just systemically, but in the narrow world of each particular example. In the case of Mississippi State, I could point out that the English department was in dire straits and the happenstance of three people’s skin color would have transformed it from egregiously white to cosmetically diverse in the span of a single hiring cycle. Here, the push was never about the candidates, but about the face of the institution. This is not a great reason, but it is a reason.

I could reflect on the grim statistical condition of teacher and student segregation in Mississippi, the damning result of which is that white students arrive on university campuses having primarily known white teachers and that we see the cultural consequences of this on everything from political dog whistles to game-day culture. I could reflect on my teaching years — years marked by countless challenges, but never among them a complaint of anti-white racial discrimination. I could ask this of my anonymous complainant: “Where are your grievances when the work isn’t elite? When it’s simply important and hard?”

But each of these responses would treat race as merely incidental, a physically defining but substantively meaningless detail that either advantages or disadvantages us because of the accident of our birth. And what does affirmative action mean for a candidate like me, an Asian American who was educated in white institutions, who grew up sheltered from systemic racism and who benefited, prior to my family’s immigration, from generations of inherited privilege? Such a hiring decision certainly can shift the demographic landscape of a university like Mississippi State, but it is also a superficial fix to a brutal and entrenched problem.

When I am asked about race and education, what often surfaces is a dated but pointed set of memories from my second year as a teacher. It was the early 2000s, and I was working in a small and selective public middle school in New York City. Roughly 40 percent of the student population was Chinese American — mostly first- or second-generation Cantonese-speaking kids from Manhattan’s Chinatown. Our student body was often characterized as “white and Asian,” and though this was an important reminder of the underrepresentation of Black and Latinx students, it was also a strange amalgamation of communities bound by very different circumstances. Once, following a field trip to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a student named Ben asked if we could make a small detour. A few blocks later, we stood in the doorway of the butcher shop where his father worked. With the manager’s approval, Ben translated a brief question-and-answer session between his classmates and his father: How many hours a day do you work? Do you like the job? Do you ever get used to the smell? Ben was normally a mild-mannered kid, a little goofy and a little self-deprecating. That afternoon, he looked prouder than I had ever seen him, and maybe a touch defiant.

I taught two out of four sections of eighth-grade humanities; my colleague, whom I’ll call John, taught the other two. John was delightful and warm, and the students loved him. He taught stern texts about race and class (A Raisin in the Sun, Of Mice and Men) and fabulously irreverent works by primarily white authors (Brighton Beach Memoirs, First French Kiss and Other Traumas). For the first semester, I stuck with John’s curriculum. The books were good enough, and it made sense that all students — since they were arbitrarily assigned to either John’s class or mine — were given a uniform experience. But the selections began to make me feel uneasy. I didn’t want my students to live in a literary world in which Black characters were all victims; Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous characters were nonexistent; and white characters were the real stars, coming to life in hilarious kitchen scenes and fraught sexual awakenings.

During our final unit, in which students wrote their own short memoirs, I veered from John’s curriculum. Rather than teaching First French Kiss, a funny and sloppy white kid’s coming of age, we read from a range of memoirs, some light and some wrenching, but mostly somewhere in between: When I Was Puerto Rican, Funny in Farsi, Bad Boy, The Woman Warrior. I wasn’t making a point, necessarily. These were just changes that felt right for my class. But at the close of the semester, when John and I were sharing the names of students to whom we would present writing awards that year, I noted that every single one of his intended recipients was white. Mine represented the demographics of the school.

This is not to say that only teachers of color think critically about race, or that any small curricular fix is enough to repair educational inequity. Or that I, simply because I fell under the same census classification as my Chinese American students, possessed an intimate knowledge of their academic or emotional lives. But the story highlights the power we automatically cede when we think of race as something we’re born into that doesn’t touch us again. It’s true that I was a good teacher who liked my students and knew how to listen to them. It’s possible, too, that I was a good teacher because my entire life — every ethnic slur, moment of cultural dissonance, every time I held my tongue in class — had prepared me for the job of seeing kids from multiple angles and digging beneath the veneer of academic performance to find out what they fundamentally need.

In our final phone conversation, Dan blithely asked me to stay in touch, as the university planned to reopen the search in the coming year. I was stunned by our respective distance from the same event. In a later email, I tried to capture — to him and to the three creative-writing faculty members who would have been my close colleagues — why this shook me so profoundly:

Given the department’s stated commitment to diversity and inclusivity, I wanted to share a few thoughts on the university’s decision to undo the search. I’m sure that you can imagine the professional upheaval, but I would like to speak more personally to the loss. Perhaps these thoughts will be useful as you move forward with the search next academic year.

Though I was still awaiting the official offer letter, I had begun mapping out my syllabus. Perhaps this was premature, but the prospect of a new course is exciting, and it is hard not to jump in and start planning. I envisioned a class in which students, through memoir and personal essay, explore the complex corridors of personal, family, and community history. It is a hard thing to let go of a course — even in its most nascent stages. It is devastating to know that, were it not for the color of my skin, I would be looking ahead to a classroom of students in the fall.

I am preparing to explain the outcome to my 12-year-old son. Though I had told him that the offer was not official, we were discussing the changes that would likely come of this. I am now going to explain the situation as fully as possible. I am going to have to tell him the position that I was chosen to step into is no longer available. It is one thing to experience racism. It is another thing entirely to explain it to a child.

I wonder how many students at Mississippi State, or prospective students, face a similar aggression. If faculty who complain of reverse discrimination are empowered to remain in their jobs, and the larger institution supports such complaints, what does this reveal about the daily experiences of students — particularly students of color?

Dan responded by letting me know I’d jumped the gun, as the other faculty members hadn’t yet been informed that the search was canceled. I appreciate the sentiment here, but this cancellation won’t be announced to the faculty until tomorrow. Not the biggest thing in the world, but a bit awkward. He expressed no concern over the outcome itself.

A friend of mine, a Mississippi-based civil rights lawyer, offered to speak with one of the university’s lawyers. I expected the lawyer’s version of the truth to differ from Dan’s, but she confirmed his account. I was selected for the job, an internal complaint was filed, and the position was taken away. To her, the issue lay with the language used by the English department during the interview process and documented by the complainant. The faculty members were too honest about the demographic problems of the department in its current state, and too direct in their preference for candidates of color.

This is a believable scenario. One can easily imagine a dynamic in which a predominantly white department, padded by the comforts of in-group membership, is both candid about their whiteness and aware of its cost to their public image. Cultural norms evolve quickly. Faculty turnover is rare. And universities like Mississippi State must contend with a difficult truth: People of color — both faculty and students — might be better served and supported elsewhere.

Scholars such as Kimberly Reyes argue powerfully that, in the case of student admissions, affirmative action should be implemented “as part of a broader reparations program,” not as a means of diversifying a college campus (though the advancement of a diverse student body remains the only legally protected basis for educational affirmative action). Here, Reyes is specifically discussing the experience of Black students who, regardless of the academic excellence or educational privilege that positioned them to even apply to the institution of their choosing, have been denied access to generational wealth and invisible levers that have moved their white counterparts from preschool through college. This is a fundamentally humanitarian argument, a counter to the diversity rationale that Black students should be courted because they have something to offer predominantly white institutions. What matters, Reyes argues, is not what minority students can bring to a university, but what they are owed.

But from an institution’s perspective, what matters is its own survival, and the stakes are higher for a college or university than for any individual candidate. There is no outstanding graduate applicant or aspiring professor whose career hinges upon admission to Mississippi State, or UNC-Chapel Hill, or any single academic program or department. This isn’t to discount the loss one experiences when denied an opportunity — whether it’s due to the cruelty of racism or the reality of numbers. Still, though the immediate power is with the institution, the ultimate power is with students and faculty of color; they will find their home, but without their presence, an institution loses credibility.

Yet it is this fear for institutional survival that strips the process of its humanity. I have no doubt that Mississippi State will hire three strong candidates to take the place of those selected last spring. I am confident, too, that at least one will be a person of color. From the university’s position, this is a swift fix to a catastrophic error. They can swap us out — people with whom they spent hours, whom they hand-picked to join their department — with the same optical results.

In the days after the cancellation, when part of me still believed that the decision would be overturned, I waited to hear from the faculty members with whom I had discussed every detail of life at the university — from the creative interests of the students to the produce selection at the local Kroger. The two women in the creative-writing department did contact me. Later, when I knew the job no longer existed, as I dug up the details in preparation for this essay, I recalled the decency of their messages. At that point, it no longer mattered that I would not work at Mississippi State. I would not have accepted the position if it were offered. But the basic expressions of humanity counted, as did the expressions of indifference.

Where was Tommy, with whom I had spoken in detail about the courses I would teach? Where was the acknowledgment from Dan that this experience — “awkward” for him — had been devastating for three others? Where were the faculty members who had presumably crafted and polished their department’s statement on diversity but could not apply this abstract preference to the meaning and worth of three individual candidates?

In both academic hiring and student admissions, educational affirmative action invites a critical and charged policy debate, divided along partisan lines and fueling healthy disagreement within politically aligned groups. Some argue for programs that emphasize race as a factor, and others for special consideration of economic disadvantage. Then there are factors of gender and geography. (Though I am a few years away from my eldest child’s college applications, I often wonder about the ethical implications should this relatively privileged kid from Louisiana have a leg up over the droves of applicants from Westchester County and Northern Virginia. Should he get a point for the regional hardship that hasn’t directly touched his life, but has hampered the institutions that served him?) In a diverse, pluralistic society, these are fair questions to ask. But the debate must also consider the toll of diversity programs on applicants of color. What is the obligation of a university, beyond declaring a self-serving interest in racial inclusion? Are all institutions deserving of the diversity initiatives they seek to promote?

In one of the two warm emails I received from faculty members following the cancellation, one professor wrote, “I am so sorry, and so sorry for our students who won’t have the chance to work with you.” The line was simple and genuine and striking, capturing the immediate cost of Mississippi State’s racialized grievance and indifference. Though I was angry, and myself aggrieved, what I felt most deeply was the loss of an opportunity to serve students and shape their creative and intellectual lives. It was a job I would have loved, and I would have done it well.