The actions of actors within the UNC system – the BoT, BoG, System President Peter Hans, and Interim Chancellor Lee Roberts – are superficial uses of neutrality and thinly veiled exercises of white supremacy.
The BoG and BoT’s main critique of DEI as an institutional policy is that it’s grounds for unequal treatment (ultimately constructing an ironic moral dependence on “equality”). In a 2023 decision repealing DEI consideration in hiring, the BoT equates anti-discrimination to “anti-preferential treatment,” which, although is a digestible face-value relation, fails to consider the ongoing reality and context of racial discrimination and white supremacy in this country. It ignores equality as a perpetrator of inequity.
The fall 2020 Faculty and Staff OIRA demographic report and 2020 US Census highlight a clear over-representation of white professors and under-representation of professors of color among UNC’s tenured faculty in comparison to the racial demographics of the state. While many have tried to create race-neutral justifications for such inequities (although this is not an outlier but a common theme persistent across institutions throughout the nation), it is an undeniable fact that actions and policies that perpetuate racial disparities can never be considered race-neutral.
There is no neutrality of power in a country fundamentally intertwined with race. Anyone uncritically wielding power in the US validates the “supremacy” and status of whiteness. No matter how uncomfortable it may be, we need to sit with the reality that our country is still very much wrapped up in the question of race. Equality means nothing if it results in inequity.
The danger of neutrality is one thing, but racism under the guise of neutrality is UNC’s crime.
Take for example the tenure controversy over Nikole Hannah-Jones. Suddenly a board that believes in an “equal” race-blind hiring practice feels entitled to consider an applicant’s personal and professional relationship to race and racism as ongoing projects. Or take the fact that in a recent BoT meeting, $2.3 million in DEI funds were voted to be reallocated to university “public safety,” a suggestion made directly following protests on campus which pointed out the racism behind this University’s refusal to acknowledge or support the lives of Palestinians. UNC, your neutrality is transparent and your reality is oppressive.
It is too considerate to give actors of the UNC system the benefit of the doubt when they run one of the most prestigious public universities in the country. To be poorly “neutral” in the face of a plethora of data and education at your fingertips is ignorance. Unfortunately, it is also too considerate to label actors of the UNC system as simply ignorant when they actively undermine their own “neutrality” through the inconsistency of their words and actions. BoT member Marty Kotis called DEI “divisiveness, exclusion, and indoctrination” while in the same breath stating that we need more “diversity of thought” at this university. Kotis doesn’t want diversity of thought. He wants renewed acceptance to speak out loud validations of white power.
To Peter Hans, Lee Roberts, and the members of the BoG and BoT,
As a student, I am sick of you pretending to be neutral and I’m even more disgusted by what you won’t admit is racism. Stop saying you are neutral on genocide when you fund it; stop saying you value this university’s history of student protest while proving you would’ve brutalized decades of student activists just the same as you have now; stop insisting you care about your students and then only listening to the ones who benefit from the white supremacy you protect and maintain. While you may attempt to utilize language neutrality, your intentions are comically and thinly veiled. Your anti-DEI, anti-student organizing, and pro-genocidal funding efforts are not neutral. Your students see right through you and history will not remember you kindly.