Spotlight

Youngju Ryu
Professor, Asian Languages and Cultures

Difference and Belonging: Thoughts on DEI

Back in the day when I applied to become an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, which feels like ancient history now, a DEI statement was not a required part of the candidate’s dossier. So it was that when I started drafting this essay, I realized with surprise that in all the years I have spent doing DEI advocacy work at the University, both as a steering committee member of Women of Color in the Academy Project (WOCAP) and as the first faculty representative from ALC for Michigan Humanities Emerging Research Scholars Program (MICHHERS), I had never sat down and thought about my own philosophy toward DEI beyond the more personal question I entertain often, “What does it mean for me to identify as a woman of color?” At a time of heightened skepticism and scrutiny over DEI both in terms of its necessity and with respect to its efficacy on university campuses, I am grateful for the opportunity to weigh in with some reflections of my own. To do so suddenly feels much more urgent after the recent publication in The New York Times of a broadside against the university’s DEI initiatives (“The University of Michigan Doubled Down on DEI. What Went Wrong?”).

Perhaps a pair of relatively recent experiences I had with two words adjacent to DEI can help anchor these reflections. The first is “difference.” Every summer, the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the International Institute hosts thirty economically disadvantaged students from Korea for a month-long experiential learning program, pairing them up with Michigan undergraduates interested in learning about Korea. Two summers ago, I happened to be giving a talk to this group about the Peace Corps when a discussion of the organization’s slogan—“Going the distance to make a difference”—led to an unexpected digression. The Korean students and the Michigan students in the room responded in diametrically opposed ways to this phrase. The Korean students, to a person, viewed the word “difference” negatively and remained puzzled about why it was being used to mean something like “positive impact” in this context. The Michigan students, in contrast, were inspired by the slogan. They took it as an invitation to leave one’s unique mark on the world, for the better. An ensuing discussion about what the term connoted for the two groups revealed that to the Korean students in the room, difference was only a small, and inevitable, step away from discrimination, whereas their Michigan counterparts associated the word with distinction. When I threw the expression “The Michigan Difference” into the mix, the discussion got even more lively.

The second word that led me to reflect on DEI afresh is “belonging.” On a visit to Berkeley as an external reviewer two years ago, I encountered the acronym DEIB for the first time. When I asked one of my hosts what “B” stood for, they answered, “Belonging, because this is Berkeley and mere inclusion is not good enough.” The occasion caused some embarrassment on both our parts. I was embarrassed by my own ignorance of the more recent developments in the discourse and policy surrounding the inclusive university, despite my DEI commitments over the last decade. As to why my host was also embarrassed, which they clearly were judging from their pained expression, I will never know precisely. But their cocked eyebrows as they muttered an apology was suggestive; perhaps they thought that their campus might have gone too far in dictating that everyone now belong, in addition to being included. Finding myself in a cynical mood at the time, I said to myself, “No better place to look for DEIB, especially the B, than in the Big House on a game day.” To the extent that belonging takes us into the realm of subjective experience, there may be some validity to the argument that no mere implementation of policy focused on equitable representation, however finely thought out and calibrated, can ensure the feeling of belonging at the individual level. And yet it is also true that no one can be happy in aspace where they don’t feel they belong.

Thinking back on these two experiences, I now feel that the coincidence of “difference”and “belonging” can actually give us a measure of clarity about DEI. Can a sense of belonging be forged upon a ground of difference rather than identity? And why must the university be the place where we should be engaged with the question? Such questions would have puzzled my Korean students from two summers ago.Though Korea is rapidly becoming multiethnic, it is still a relatively homogeneous country where verticality and meritocracy are largely accepted as chief principles of organizing a stable society. Korean people’s desire for justice is fiercely strong and but expressible only as a demand for a greater equality of opportunity. Funneled into a societal vortex that rarely distinguishes between equality and equity, that desire has given rise to a culture of intense competition that reinforces rather than challenges elitism. The university is central to the reproduction not only of elite privilege but of elite aspirations. No wonder the Korean students were reluctant to embrace difference, sensitized as they were by their economically disadvantaged backgrounds to theviolence of difference when it is immediately understood as indicating one’s “level” (geup in Korean).

In contrast, the fact that a phrase like “making a difference” can exist at all in the first place is testament not only to the very reality of America’s diversity and investment in individuality, but to the fundamental wager that difference of parts, always understood in qualitative rather than quantitative terms, can motor the progress of the whole. Difference is how something new comes into the world. It is fundamental and  constitutive to the social contract that is America’s. Difference, in other words, belongs.

Over the years, then, this is how I have come to understand the imperative of DEI: as less a commandment than a commitment, less a prescription than a declaration. For me today, DEI means that, having affirmed the simple truth that “difference belongs,” I organize the everyday business of my life in the university in such a way to bring that truth to bear and to show fidelity to it. DEI is not a matter of ensuring that every member feels a sense of belonging—an increasingly impossible task at a time when our students are encouraged to misrecognize a feeling of discomfort, which is a natural consequenceof being in the presence of difference, as an experience of unsafety—but a decision to adopt “difference belongs” as a maxim that orders how we act and what we do.