Abstract

Sara Ahmed’s work On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life shows how diversity discourses shape institutional life within universities. Three related concepts in this work are ‘non-performativity’, ‘doing the document’, and ‘plumbing’. In this essay, we examine these concepts in the context of diversity policy within Dutch universities and municipalities. We draw from ethnographic fieldwork to expose how commitments to diversity fail to effect change, how policies circulate without profoundly altering institutional practices, and how administrators strategically navigate institutional resistance. By doing so, we give these concepts a specific situated understanding for the Netherlands. In addition, based on our material, we engage with and advance two arguments from Ahmed’s work. First, we argue that using data as ‘institutional switch’ lays bare bureaucratic anxieties about reproducing institutional racism. Second, we reveal how doing the document engages in a white politics of time. We end with a note about breaking the ‘brick wall’ and embracing alternative ways of being, thinking, and relating. This means finding each other despite institutional isolation, especially when institutions see us as ‘the problem’. This also means attentive listening, seeing, and learning from uncomfortable histories that shape our present. Only then we can dismantle whiteness.