The Equity Myth is a necessary book that draws on new and existing statistical and qualitative data to describe the routine reproduction of race inequities in the academy. As they undercut the prevailing image of the university as an ivory tower insulated from the rest of the social world and its ills, including colonialism and racism, the authors provide devastating evidence of the institutionalization of whiteness and the ongoing marginalization of racialized minorities and Indigenous persons in the academy. They observe that these reproductions of inequities exist despite equity policies over the last 30 to 40 years and despite affirmative action practices around hiring, which have benefited white women but not racialized and Indigenous scholars.
Worse, the authors document a systemic, self-interested unwillingness by the government and the university to speak about and document, much less challenge, racisms. This book therefore performs the labour that the authors would like to see across the academy, more broadly, and in government policy. That is, the authors systematically examine the evidence, which shows the reproduction of race inequities across the university, and then, against self-interested refusals to name the source of the problem, they forthrightly point to racism as the cause. The authors’ underlying political aim is to challenge racism in the authors’ own workplaces, transforming the university into a space where “Indigenous and racialized faculty are recognized or accepted as legitimate members of the academy” (308), despite their historical and ongoing exclusion and marginalization.
The authors grapple with their concerns across 12 chapters, some co-authored, that together tell an unhappy, if not unexpected, story of an academic workplace in which “unchecked biases produce socially unjust outcomes that disadvantage qualified women and racialized minorities” (294). Using both existing and new statistical data, the initial chapters describe the underrepresentation of racialized and Indigenous faculty, especially racialized women, in senior administrative roles and among the professoriate across the social sciences and humanities faculties. They observe that racialized men are concentrated in a few faculties, especially engineering and the sciences, while Black faculty are radically underrepresented across all disciplines. Next, they provide evidence of the concentration of racialized and Indigenous faculty in contract positions and of the underpayment of those in tenure-track and tenured positions, especially racialized women, relative to white women and men. This marginalization holds true even though faculty racialized as “visible minorities” publish more and secure more Tri-Council grants than faculty racialized as White.
In the subsequent, more qualitative chapters, the authors use interviews with racialized and Indigenous faculty to draw out narratives about the many ways these individuals are Othered by their colleagues, students and administrators. These chapters give voice to visible minority and Indigenous faculty, in their own words, laying bare both naked racist attacks and wearyingly familiar micro-aggressions. These encompass a wide range of actions and comments, including but not limited to insinuations that an accent is disqualifying for an academic position during a hiring process; dismissals of whole fields of research (for example, Indigenous studies) as insufficiently mainstream and scholarly for tenure and promotion; being made to feel invisible when participating in a meeting, or conversely, being made to feel hypervisible as racialized or Indigenous faculty, especially when raising issues that challenge colonial racisms; being confronted by colleagues who make no effort to understand experiences that do not resonate with their own whitestream histories; and being subject to condescending, racist remarks like “You know, you speak very well for a Black person” (240). These combine with closed white and, often, masculine networks among senior administrators and associate and full professors in a way that leaves racialized and Indigenous faculty feeling, too often and even usually, like precarious guests in their own workplaces and classrooms.
As other chapters document, the available formal remedies tend to be organized in ways that individualize complaints, often at human rights offices that are understaffed and underfunded. Reports that seek to specifically name institutional racism as a problem are censored because they depend upon a willingness to acknowledge the realities of racisms that many white faculty pretend do not exist in a supposedly colourblind academic universe and because they demand major, institutional change that challenges entrenched interests and cultures. Informal remedies tend to lead to the overburdening of (relatively scarce) racialized and Indigenous faculty, as these faculty are sought out as mentors by an increasingly racialized student body, all while being (over)solicited for service to address decolonization and racisms across the university. Among senior administrators, similar patterns prevail, with racialized and Indigenous women especially underrepresented. When they do hold relatively important administrative positions, these women are often isolated and undersupported, in a world that defines leadership in ways that valorize embodied and culturally white displays of masculine authority.
What hope is there? Movement toward equity will be difficult, the authors suggest, since such innovations go against the grain of entrenched interests. Yet there are pathways, some of them straightforward—for instance, cluster hires of racialized and Indigenous faculty to help develop a critical mass and prevent isolation and tokenism. Other pathways strike at the root of a dominant white culture, including those aspects expressed informally in racialized networks of deeply felt affinities. These require intensely personal reflections, including the rethinking of naturalized feelings of friendship that reproduce racist exclusions and of how these can translate into bias at hirings, in mentorship and in collegial relationships.
Finally, the authors remind us that, however bleak the present, there is much to be won. Arguing against persistent ideologies that imagine zero-sum games of “equity versus excellence, diversity versus ability” (240), the authors observe that contemporary racisms mean the loss of excellence and talent, as well as a (related) failure to ensure students are competent in the full range of world knowledges, which extend beyond a narrow, Eurocentric canon. The anti-racist political orientation that guides this book therefore reminds us of possibilities, not least of the university as a site of true scholarly excellence, where the intellectual talents of each and all are supported and where students may engage with knowledge in its real diversity. As the final line in the book contends, so doing, “means taking up the collective challenge to stop denying racism and get serious about equity” (316). Although I have stressed the overall arguments here, I urge critical engagement with the full text of this impressive book, which is a rich resource of quantitative and qualitative evidence of the race inequities baked into the academy—and an absolutely vital call to all of us to do our part in ending them.
