Fighting for Bandwidth: Prioritizing Social Justice as Essential Carework in the Age of COVID-19
Janelle Jennings-Alexander & Kate Maddalena
Keywords: racism; diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; dealing with administration; COVID-19 and teaching
Categories: Bearing the Weight of Racism through Anti-Racist Work and (Cross-)Racial Solidarity; Teaching as Carework, Teaching as Dangerous Work; Academic Pressures (or Critiques of Neoliberal Horseshit Productivity Expectations, as suggested by Amy Vidali)
Content warning: racism
Introduction
Social justice work in the university is also carework. Social justice work, as carework, strives to help students and other vulnerable people be able to safely thrive on campus. It is, like most carework, preponderantly taken on by women, especially women of color, and it is largely invisible or marginalized within the structures of academic meritocracy that serve to credit, promote, remunerate, and tenure university faculty. Social justice work at the institutional level may be formalized as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) service, but much of the most important labor happens in liminal spaces and through one-on-one connection: the office doorway chat, the solidarity-building faculty friendship, informal mentorship of students and faculty, and countless other conversations, informal consultations, and acts of participatory representation that constantly become ad hoc job requirements for faculty of color (FoC). In recent years, in the context of the cumulative tragedy of endemic police brutality against people of color in the U.S., indictments of academia’s inherent white supremacy and arguments for explicitly antiracist pedagogies and policy have finally begun to find new purchase on university campuses.
But when the SARS-CoV2 pandemic forced schools to switch from face-to-face to online modalities, social justice efforts on campus were abruptly robbed of some of their momentum. With face-to-face classes suspended, schools pivoted to establish COVID policies and most faculty, including faculty who were becoming social justice allies, hunkered down to learn how to teach online, at least for a time. Even when (and if) in-person classes returned, attention stayed focused on the pandemic, often without taking the intersectional effects of pandemic policy into account. The word “bandwidth” became an apologia when questions of antiracist work came up: “we don’t even have the bandwidth for that, now. We’re in survival mode.” And, in the systemically biased space of academia, survival mode suggests a “return” to a safe, white space that is much less safe for students and faculty of color than it is for their White peers and colleagues. Begging “bandwidth” became a manifestation of marginalization, a symptom of the backsliding of social justice carework in white-space academia during COVID-19.
What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation between two erstwhile colleagues, Janelle Jennings-Alexander (a Black woman) and Kate Maddalena (a white woman). We worked together for three years at a small institution that is very much grappling with these issues, partly because the composition of the student body was nearly 50% of color, a relatively new development in the history of the school, and the faculty remained almost entirely white. Both of us left the institution during the two years (and counting) of the pandemic. In this conversation, we talk about the invisible work that has to be done on such a campus in order to effect antiracist change in policy and pedagogy. We talk about how COVID made that work more challenging, especially in the writing classroom. Ultimately, we argue that the fact that social justice wasn’t given “bandwidth” shows that social justice is simply not central to the work of many universities. We argue that antiracist work has to be part of the most basic work of the institution, in policy and pedagogy, especially the writing classroom. We see a need to better articulate and make visible the antiracist carework that faculty do and to transform university policy to make that carework central to the goals of the university as a whole, not a marginalized project that suffers from bandwidth scarcity.
Authors’ note: We do not include a traditional literature review in our piece, but we do include a brief bibliography of recent work in multiple disciplines that takes up the same set of issues at the end of the edited dialogue.
SoundCloud link to full interview
Questions for further work
- When organizations trade-off one crisis for another — in this case, racial equity for COVID, what does it communicate about their true values?
- What is this work? What work do FoC, especially if they are the only FoC, do?
- What is the work white ally/accomplice faculty should be doing?
- How is this work related to writing — both academic writing and publishing and the writing classroom?
- How can DEI labor benefit rather than tax FoC?
- How can we articulate this work formally, on CVs and in PRT reviews, so that folks can be remunerated and credited with this work?
- How can a post-COVID campus be stronger in terms of campus equity/dismantling its (till now) inherent white supremacy?
- How can a post-COVID campus be stronger in terms of campus equity/dismantling its (till now) inherent white supremacy?
Further Reading/Resources/ References
Boykin, C. M., Brown, N. D., Carter, J. T., Dukes, K., Green, D. J., Harrison, T., Hebl, M., McCleary-Gaddy, A., Membere, A., McJunkins, C. A., Simmons, C., Singletary Walker, S., Smith, A. N., & Williams, A. D. (2020). Anti-racist actions and accountability: Not more empty promises. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 39(7), 775–786. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-06-2020-0158
Crain, M. G., Poster, W. R., & Cherry, M. A. (Eds.). (2016). Invisible labor: Hidden work in the contemporary world (1st ed.). University of California Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctv1xxwt7
Diem, S., & Welton, A. D. (2020). Anti-racist educational leadership and policy: Addressing racism in public education. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429487224
Evatt-Young, D., & Bryson, B. (2021). White higher education leaders on the complexities of whiteness and anti-racist leadership. JCSCORE, 7(1), 46–82. https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2642-2387.2021.7.1.46-82
Genao, S., & Mercedes, Y. (2021). All we need is one mic: A call for anti-racist solidarity to deconstruct anti-Black racism in educational leadership. Journal of School Leadership, 31(1–2), 127–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/1052684621993046
Gonzales, E., Gordon, S., Whetung, C., Connaught, G., Collazo, J., & Hinton, J. (2021). Acknowledging systemic discrimination in the context of a pandemic: Advancing an anti-racist and anti-ageist movement. Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 64(3), 223–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/01634372.2020.1870604
Griffith, D., & McKinney, B. (2021). Using disparate impact analysis to develop anti-racist policies: An application to coronavirus liability waiver. Journal of Higher Education Management, 36(1), 104–116. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Victoria-Vetro/publication/350849549_The_COVID-19_Crisis_and_Racial_Justice_Equity_Addressing_the_Twin_Pandemics_SENIOR_GUEST_EDITOR/links/6075d9734585151ce182e5d9/The-COVID-19-Crisis-and-Racial-Justice-Equity-Addressing-the-Twin-Pandemics-SENIOR-GUEST-EDITOR.pdf#page=104
Pathak, P. (2021). Prefiguring the anti-racist university: A systems change approach to the Race Equality Charter. Lincoln Journal of Higher Education Practice, 4(2), Article 2. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/450247/
Tate, S. A., & Bagguley, P. (2017). Building the anti-racist university: Next steps. Race Ethnicity and Education, 20(3), 289–299. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2016.1260227
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Alex Wagner at Lion Lexicon Transcription & Editing and Danica Cullinan at NCSU’s Language and Life project for transcription and editing assistance.
Bio
Janelle Jennings-Alexander serves as assistant professor of English and Chief Projects Officer at Saint Augustine’s University. Her writing reflects on critical whiteness and opportunities for using African American-authored fiction as a pathway to racial literacy.
Kate Maddalena teaches writing and media studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Dr. Maddalena’s interests include media theory, science and technology studies (STS), and science communication.