Resilient Resistance

I recently attended two national convenings of diversity officers in higher education (BUSDEIC and NADOHE). This is a weary bunch, and I count myself among them. Proliferating legislative challenges, misinformed media portrayals of our work, and sweeping layoffs and budget cuts are assailing us. Once public and avid supporters have moved into the shadows or, in some cases, turned hostile. And yet, there we were, publicly convening to sharpen our skills and recommit to our values. Persisting in the face of increasingly adverse conditions.

Resilient Resistance in the context of organizational change is the ability to continuously adapt as a strategy to sustain the pressure necessary to influence systemic change. The concept is borrowed from scientific literature that uses the ideas of resilience and resistance to describe how the natural environment responds to environmental factors (Luthar & Cicchetti, 2000). It seems like a fitting way to consider the adaptive responses of diversity officers in this unstable climate. As organizational change agents, our role is to challenge the status quo and remove barriers that prevent the creation of more inclusive and equitable communities. The organizational environments in which we practice are constantly shifting due to factors like administrative and legal changes. We are continually being forced to adjust and shift to accommodate individuals uncomfortable with or threatened by the change they are experiencing. 

So why do we persist? What brings us together at a time when we are all so publicly under attack?

Collective Resilience is a powerful force. While conventional portrayals of resilience would have us believe that resilience is individual, we know better. DEI work is fundamentally relational, and these communities are a critical source of our resilience. There is growing attention to collective resilience in the social psychology literature, especially as an adaptation to mass tragedies like COVID-19 (Liu et al., 2022; Drury, 2012). When groups of people impacted by emergencies and disasters come together, it provides psychological support that aids resilience. These national gatherings of diversity practitioners create an interconnectedness that buffers against the fight or flight mechanism these relentless attacks trigger, making us more likely to persist. Collaborating with amazing thought partners, connecting with friends and colleagues, and making new connections does not make me immune to the vicissitudes of this work but it reminds me that Resilient Resistance is not an individual pursuit but a collective endeavor.

“Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.” - Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches