Ciphers and Constellations in Love with a Woman (1941), Joan Miró

How to Quit Your EDI Job in 10 Easy Steps

Step One: 

Dawn is breaking. Your son cries out for you as you leave the cozy warmth of your rumpled duvet where he’s still dozing, and you reluctantly wrest his tiny arms from around your neck. You put on your best blue ruffled shirt—is it too much, you fret, maybe too fancy? A black lace J. Crew skirt. You hop on the number 501 bus to University X in the dark. When you get there, you sit outside the Dean’s Office on a park bench, shivering, watching the sun rise. You should have worn a thicker jacket, but vanity got the better of you. Why are you doing this again? Oh yes, you want to work in equity. That’s why. You’re going to make a capital-D difference. There’s that naïve, mixed-race optimism again.

You shiver again and glance at your watch. 6:55, 6:58. You’re about to walk into the building when the Dean of All Things Important strides towards you. He sticks his leathered gloved hand in your face, all confidence and swagger. You take it, but nervously. Not a matching of equals, not by any stretch of the imagination. He says politely, “I just loved your radio show.” It’s with just enough unctuousness to be seductively believable for you. But be honest, you’re just so thirsty for it. Then he puts out his fist for what?—to be bumped?—yes, to be bumped. Ah, you didn’t get that. A little side order of performative Blackness from the white guy for the kinda white-looking woman of color. You know your role here. 

And so, your first meeting begins with a reluctant fist bump.  

You will walk side by side with this man to a nearby Starbucks, this early in the morning, for this is the only time slot he had available, to talk about a new position, an opportunity at Important University X. He is vague, but not irritable. In fact, he is downright cheerful. Of course he is. He has a job. You don’t. Meanwhile, you are flop sweating with nerves. He pays for your small coffee, which sits quietly in sharp contrast to his large mocha latte on the counter. He slaps down his university credit card without a thought. You sip delicately at your desolate little drink and burn your tongue as he tells you that there are no positions available, nothing can be done anyway. He shrugs. Maybe, in the New Year. . .

You came out here in the dark for this? 

You could be cuddling your son at home. 

As you walk out of the coffee shop, he tells you how great you are again. You are walking by the Fancy Ivy League Library when you run into the provost. You know his face from the website that you studied for weeks to prep for this interview with the Dean. He is perfectly coiffed, with short, carefully frosted hair and a fashionable but not garish tie. The Dean and the Provost exchange pleasantries, laugh loudly about some television show that was on last night. You laugh nervously along with them—what are they talking about?—you don’t even know. You laugh anyway. The Dean doesn’t introduce you, and why should he? You are a Nobody. The meeting ends with a thin smile from the Dean, and a paltry, “Please let me know if anything comes up?” from you, uttered so weakly that you berate yourself for weeks after about your Oliver-Twist-style begging. 

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Step Two:

Someone then forwards you an ad for a job as Advisor to the Very Important Provost on Race Relations. You look at it, you read it and then you read it again. You try to contain your enthusiasm as it bubbles up in you. It’s like it was written for you, and you know it. You immediately throw together the application and it writes itself. When you get the interview, you’re not surprised. You walk into the Fancy Library and head to the penthouse floor where the very important meetings take place. And when you do, you see a crew—what do you call a group of white women? A coterie?—sitting around the table, most of them looking very dour. It’s been a while since you’ve been at the university, so you’ve forgotten—the university has never been a site of joy. Still, they all look so damned miserable. 

The questions begin, though, and suddenly you’re having such a good time that you’re actually leaning back in your chair, your arm resting on the back of it all casual. You’re having FUN. You get one of the white women to crack a smile, and victory! The one woman of color in the room gives you a surreptitious wink when she thinks no one is looking. Someone asks you a question about what you’re reading, and you cheekily rattle off the names of three books by women of color. You’re unabashedly political and you don’t care. When you walk out, you almost want to sing. The Provost says they will be in touch and you know, you know you’ve got this. 

It won’t be until later you discover that only two other people interviewed, and both were long-term, tenured Black faculty members. You find out that the questions they were asked were different—so hard and unyielding that one of the candidates left in tears, and cried most of the night. Ah, so that’s why they wanted me. The mixed-race candidate: always the most palatable. 

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Step Three:

This is when you should have started paying attention, but you chose to ignore the signs. The Provost calls your references. He grills them on the phone, asking about seemingly unrelated matters on your CV. One of your references calls you to tell you to maybe rethink things. You ask her why. She says because the Provost asked her this question: “Dr. Mahtani seems to be. . .political. A bit of an activist. Is that the case?” Your reference tells you that this question seemed off to her, and she didn’t know how to answer it. A colonial question that didn’t deserve an anticolonial response. 

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Step Four:

After some grueling finagling about course release, you get the job. You are so, so relieved and grateful. A little too grateful, though, a little too, “has this really happened?” even though you know you worked hard to get it. You walk into your very first meeting with the Provost and there is another person at the table. You were not expecting this. The other person is the top administrator in EDI, and there is a moment of confusion. Were we double-booked? Why are we here together? The Provost smiles wryly, shrugs innocently. “Oh, I'm so sorry,” he says. “My bad.” 

What happens next you can’t fathom until later. It feels like the Provost is subtly telling this other person something that you can’t quite discern. You feel a little shell-shocked leaving, but brightly say your goodbye anyway. What just happened there? You know it was something, you just don’t know what. When you get home, you look up the word gaslight—just to make sure you really know its meaning. You’re not sure anymore. 

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Step Five:

“How may I best be of service to you?”

This is how your first one-on-one meeting with your new boss begins. You are immediately smitten. When you call your mentor in another city later, and excitedly tell her about these magic words later, you can hear her rolling her eyes down the line. You didn’t really buy that line, did you, she says. The word charm offensive comes to mind. You saw the phrase in the New Yorker a little while back. You shrug it off. There’s that mixed race optimism again. 

You recall that when you walked into that meeting with your new boss, you babbled. Because Lord, have you prepared for this meeting. You have charts. You have a PowerPoint that would impress Steve Jobs. You have facts, figures, plans. Lots of plans. Your scaffolding for the next year is so tight. With charisma, he tosses off each one of your ideas until you are not sure what even happened. With a deftness you’ve never seen, you realize at the end of your time together, when he stands up from his desk five minutes before you are supposed to leave, that he has carefully and unceremoniously undone every single idea you have had. 

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Step Six:

You think you’re doing OK. Until you aren’t. You hold an event celebrating the Provost’s supposed commitment to racial equity. You’re all about fun, food, and festivals now—creating odes to multiculturalism, because that’s all you can do. You’re the cheerful non-white Julie McCoy on The Love Boat, cruise director at the SS University X. Smile for the camera, sweetheart. They need pictures for the EDI website. 

The cheap white wine flows, and there is fancy cheese, prosciutto, sausage, all the things you can’t eat because you’re Muslim. At the event, the Provost tells you he can only stay for a half hour, and then while he’s there, you can see he’s champing at the bit to escape. After the detailed lecture from the honored guest, a guest who is an expert on EDI, the Provost tells you, thoughtfully: “It was OK. It would have been nice to at least have something to take away.”

Later that month, he will call you. He is stingy with his praise, but with his critique, he is verbose. He will reprimand you, actually, saying you have to stop advocating. “You are not an advocate,” he says dryly. “You are an advisor. There are offices for that,” he says. That stops you in your tracks. If there are offices, then you must be really stupid, because you know of none of them. You have forgotten that you must know your place, even if your place hasn’t been made clear to you. You are nervous, though, so you stutter, “Yes, absolutely, I won’t do that.” But you don’t know how to do your job otherwise. Isn’t advocating, hearing those stories, sharing them, part of what your job is—pointing out patterns of systemic racism? Aren’t stories just data with heart? But then you realize that by hearing the stories, it means he’s accountable. And he doesn’t want that. 

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Step Seven:

You start to recognize that you are getting uneven access to important documents: Black Caucus recommendations. Plans for a new VP Equity. You hear about things secondhand, information rarely gets filtered down to you. When you ask for these documents, you are told not to worry, that it’s just a work in progress, you’ll get it eventually. But you don’t. You start to hear about new initiatives related to your portfolio through other people. To feign the element of surprise you feel, you start to practice your poker face in the mirror. When you start getting thrown under the bus by a more acceptable Muslim woman who has been hired alongside you, but who has no critical race optic—she looks the part but doesn’t address questions of systemic racism— you begin to shake during meetings. Your old case of shingles, buried deep, emerges again on your shoulder blades. You take it as a sign that you’re just not good enough for the position. You don’t yet understand that the position isn’t good enough for you. 

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Step Eight:

You are asked to give a talk about your own research to a department that Shall Remain Unnamed. Afterwards, you go for lunch with a few faculty members. It’s all very pleasant, and a welcome break from your daily frustrations in your job. The head of the department doesn’t come to your talk. Then, at 8 a.m. the next day, your cell phone rings shrilly. It’s the head of the department from the department that Shall Remain Unnamed and she doesn’t sound happy. You are rubbing the sleep from your eyes, barely awake, trying to pour milk into your son’s cereal bowl, when she starts to berate you. “How dare you, she says, “How dare you tell me how to do my job. I hear you’re going to come in to discipline me!” You are shocked, and the milk spills all over on the counter. You start to shake again, and your son asks where his cereal is. “Coming, honey,” you call out and start to stammer on the phone. You apologize profusely and try to explain. A half hour later, she’s sweet as pie, asking you for a coffee the next day. But you’re left feeling unsettled. Was it you, disciplining here—or  ultimately, her disciplining you? 

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Step Nine:

          The lines on your forehead are becoming more pronounced. You are starting to get jowls. Jowls! You’re only forty-nine, for God’s sake. You’re drinking more than you should. One bourbon a night turns to two, then three. And you’re starting to drink a lot earlier. You drink according to the number of frustrating emails you receive. You start to order facial masks from Amazon, products that promise perfect results. It never dawns on you that there might be another way to achieve the appearance you’re looking for. Like, maybe leaving the job.  

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Step Ten:

Then the day comes when you receive an avalanche of emails from various people all over the university to commend you on your reappointment. You watch as a bulletin goes out with your name on it, in bold font, announcing you’re going to continue your work for another term. When you see this, you want to throw up. What good is it, you think, to be in a resourceless, powerless position which is purely cosmetic, a form of white currency to demonstrate an institution’s supposed commitment to racial equity? It’s when you can’t stand to see your own name next to the word “reappointment” that you find yourself drafting your own resignation letter. The word resigned is exactly how you feel: resigned to recognizing the impossibility of this work, as Katherine McKittrick suggests. Of seeing how your body has been used as a salvo for violence. When you sign your name with a flourish at the bottom of the email, it’s not necessarily relief you feel, but simply self-preservation. As Audre Lorde says, an act of political warfare. 

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MINELLE MAHTANI is a professor, broadcaster and journalist. Her work has been nominated for two national magazine awards and won a Digital Publishing Award. She is of Muslim Indian/Iranian descent and her memoir, May it Have a Happy Ending, is out now and available to purchase at Doubleday/Penguin Random House. 

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