“The duties of the Diversity Chair shall include: facilitating the implementation of training and appropriate practices related to encouraging and promoting diversity and inclusion within the organization.”

Have you ever heard of a club having a “diversity chair” on their executive board? Yeah, me either– up until joining one of the intellectual sport clubs on campus during my freshman year. When one of the upperclassmen introduced themself as Diversity Chair, I didn’t know how to feel; of course I didn’t mind that the program made diversity and inclusion a priority, but why did they need a chair for that? Was that position always part of their student leadership, or did they have so many discriminatory instances that they felt the need to add it? 

My suspicion was proved to be partially correct– at the time, there were a handful of former and current members of the club that had mistreated their peers in the past. There have also been a few instances of the coaches making decisions that were ultimately harmful or hurtful to students. While their intentions may not have been to hurt anyone, the way they weaponized their various types of privilege in these situations left a mark on my perception of them and a desire to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So, come election time, I decided to run for Diversity Chair, and this is my second year holding the position.

During the first meeting of this semester, a new member posed the question, “what does the Diversity Chair even do?” And, well. I understood why she asked, especially when the head coach proceeded to stumble through an explanation about my plan to do a “Microaggressions in [name of sport]” presentation. He wasn’t even able to explain the purpose of the position when asked by a new member (which, as you can imagine, made me feel fantastic).

Reflection

On one hand, I have found that the activity itself is incredibly enriching for me; it makes me think about information in a way I was never asked to before, and I’m learning a lot about myself, my capabilities, and a plethora of other skills that I know will be useful in my adult life. I’ve also met some of my closest friends through this club, and I’m confident at least some of those friendships will long out-live my time in college.

On the other hand… sometimes it feels like the activity is literally sucking my soul out of me. As Diversity Chair and a friend of many people in the program, I unfortunately hear about almost all of the actions and words of my peers and coaches that have negatively impacted many people I care about, on top of the experiences that had a negative impact on me. While I feel I’ve done my duty to provide training and workshops to prevent these things from happening, they are only as effective as the listeners are open-minded. It’s also difficult to ensure that my presentations are actually focused on the right concepts when I’ve never been formally trained to give diversity training.

Which, for me, raises another question: why is a student leader giving diversity training to their peers and coaches in the first place? People get degrees to do exactly that, and with very good reason. While I consider myself well-versed in issues of diversity, inclusion, privilege, and oppression, that is not the same as getting a specialized degree in dealing with and educating others on those topics.

Another aspect that makes this activity feel soul-sucking for me is the fact that I experience emotions deeply and often wear my heart on my sleeve. This means that hearing or experiencing instance after instance of mistreatment and having to mask my disdain or discomfort with a person while working directly with them, it gets emotionally draining for me very quickly.

Solutions

Now, you may be thinking, why hasn’t there been an intervention with the people who are causing these problems? For one, we’ve certainly attempted to have a few, with varying degrees of success. We also have a policy in place to democratically remove our head coach if he’s done harm to students. However, after discussing the possibility of removal with my fellow board members and some individuals who have been impacted, we agreed that these instances haven’t met that caliber and are things that can instead be improved upon (especially since we don’t have a coach available to adequately replace them).

Additionally, confrontation is already difficult on its own– combined with the competitive nature of the activity, intersections of race and gender identity involved in these situations, and various power dynamics among both members and coaches… it’s a lot to consider. Words need to be careful and thought out, and it’s never guaranteed that the confronted will take criticism well. I often wonder whether it would even lift that much weight off my shoulders to confront these people, or if the aftermath of confronting them would just weigh down on me even more. When individuals have privilege to weaponize against those without it, it sometimes feels like it’d be easier to keep your mouth shut.

Final Thoughts

For the past couple of months I have become more and more convinced that I would be better off quitting this club entirely and focusing on nurturing the friendships that I actually care about. Join a different one that doesn’t foster such a toxic environment and hopefully gives me the same enriching experiences, even if it’s in a slightly different way. But what keeps me there– for now at least– is the fact that I’ve put so much time and effort into this already, and I’m scared of how I would feel if I quit. Thinking about the emptiness I may feel after such a huge part of my undergraduate life would be gone is enough to drive me insane.

I purposefully tip-toed around the type of privilege that is being exercised in these scenarios. But here I want to be clear: the people causing these problems are white, while the rest of the team is composed mostly of people of color (me being one of them). Of course there’s more nuance to each of the situations, but in almost all of them race seems to be a main point of conflict.

If you’ve reached the end of this, I want to thank you for actually reading it all the way through. I didn’t realize I had this much to air out about this topic, and like many things there’s no satisfying “ending”– and I don’t know if there ever will be.