sarah xerta

Sometimes you can only stand up by standing firm. Sometimes you can only hold on by becoming stubborn. A social standing can thus be a material standing. Audre Lorde once wrote: “In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone” (1984: 160). It would be hard to overestimate the power of Lorde’s description. Social forms of oppression can be experienced as weather. They press and pound against the surface of a body; a body can surface or survive by hardening. For some bodies to stand is to withstand. We can be exhausted by the labour of standing. If social privilege is like an energy saving device, no wonder that not to inherit privilege can be so trying. There is a politics to exhaustion. Feeling depleted can be a measure of just what we are up against.

Diversity work is emotional work because in part it is work that has to be repeated, again and again. You encounter a brick wall. Even when a new diversity policy is adopted somehow things stay in place; they keep their place. I have many examples of these “wall encounters” that I shared in my book, On Being Included. To those who do not come against it, the wall does not appear: the institution seems open, committed and diverse: as happy as its mission statement, as willing as its equality statement. Things appear fluid. I have said this before: things are fluid if you are going the way things are flowing. We can reflect on the significance of frustration here: it is not only that the wall keeps its place, but those who don’t come against it, don’t notice it. This can be profoundly alienating as an institutional experience. No wonder that when the wall keeps its place, it is you that becomes sore.