The Role of Combahee in Anti-Diversity Work

This article is focused on a critical and oppositional approach to diversity work on college campuses--what we call “anti-diversity” work—that builds on and operationalizes various principles of black feminist thought articulated by the Combahee River Collective and other black feminist thinkers. At our small, Midwestern, residential, liberal arts college, we are “doing” anti-diversity work through a new faculty/staff development initiative, a project we developed and are currently implementing, called the Decolonizing Pedagogies Project (DPP). This project draws on concepts like intersectionality and coalition building, along with centering our inquiry on the experiences and theorizing of marginalized bodies and thought, to create decolonial locations that make space for “alternative ways of producing and validating knowledge itself.” The DPP demands that those who engage with the project do deep self reflection on the ways whiteness shapes and holds them to rigid understandings of diversity and inclusion that, as a result, preclude sustained institutional change. Using an intersectional lens, the foundational assumption of this approach is that “black women are inherently valuable” and that the liberation of black women would mean the liberation of everyone, because all systems of oppression would be toppled in the process.