On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life by Sara Ahmed (review)

On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life provides an ethnographic account of the experiences of diversity practitioners in higher education. Ahmed conducted interviews with 21 diversity professionals at universities in Australia and the United Kingdom to understand what diversity actually means and how diversity is framed. In addition, Ahmed supplements interview data with her own recollections of racialized and gendered experiences while performing diversity work.

The book is divided into five chapters and bookended with an introduction and conclusion. In the introduction, Ahmed chronicles how her professional experiences led her to write a book about diversity. She also provides background information for the research study.

Chapter 1 focuses on the role of diversity administrators in implementing diversity. They may encounter resistance within their institutions that maintain Whiteness and institutional racism. Therefore, the bulk of diversity work entails developing relationships with university stakeholders and communicating about the importance of diversity. In addition, diversity workers may also increase the racial diversity on their campuses with their raced bodies.

Chapters 2–4 focus on the language of diversity as an appealing concept for institutions to use to market themselves. Diversity has positive connotations, signaling that difference should be celebrated. Recognizing this, diversity practitioners have also used the language of diversity to gain buy-in from stakeholders. Institutions, through statements and policies, proclaim their commitment to diversity or statements against racism. While these statements could be used to hold institutions accountable for implementing diversity, they are often used to announce that diversity is valued, that the institutions are in compliance, or that universities are doing good work. Essentially, institutions do not take responsibility for implementing diversity. Therefore, diversity workers and possibly the committees in which they work have to take ownership of this task.

In Chapter 5, Ahmed centers the discussion of diversity on racism. Because racism has negative connotations, she suggests that institutions use diversity to give the illusion that they are not racist. Based on her presentation of the findings in Chapters 1–4, she demonstrates how universities mask racism under the veil of inclusiveness. By avoiding discussions about racism, they miss the opportunity to create transformative change.

The conclusion discussed how diversity practitioners are conscious of the racism within their institutions and knowledgeable about how to navigate through obstacles to transform these institutions into inclusive spaces.

Based on the title of the book, I assumed racism would be more explicitly mentioned, even with Ahmed’s disclaimer in the introduction that she would focus on diversity first. Racism was briefly mentioned in Chapter 1 and did not appear throughout Chapters 2–4. I was extremely frustrated as I read these chapters, since it was obvious that their examples and content documented racism. In Chapter 5, Ahmed skillfully centers the discussion on racism and links to it content from the previous chapters. Throughout the book, Ahmed describes diversity work as a “banging-your-head-on-the-brick-wall job” (p. 26). She even provided two illustrations of brick walls to remind readers of the concept. However, what was more powerful was how she captured and recreated the feelings of frustration and disappointment that diversity workers experience. By not discussing race and racism in most of her book’s chapters, she emulated how institutions ignore these issues and render them invisible, making readers possibly want to bang their own heads against a wall.

While not mentioning racism until the final chapter may have been intentional and brilliantly executed, I felt that the researcher could have presented how diversity workers made meaning of the racism they experienced in performing their work. Ahmed drew mainly from the literature and her experiences to connect racism with diversity. She stated that only one of her interviewees mentioned racism in the context of her work—and then only after the formal part of the interview was concluded. In these instances, Ahmed could have included a question in her interview protocol to ask...