To the Editor:

Perhaps inadvertently, inclusion was a theme of the last issue of the Review, with stories about the new trans* policy and the controversy surrounding Solarity. This illustrates the prominent place of debates about diversity and inclusion in campus politics and College policy more broadly.

Because inclusion is (rightly) an issue of such urgent concern here, the concept and its practice deserve more critical scrutiny than they receive. To begin with, it’s worth noting that the verb “include” comes from the Latin includere, which is translated variously as “to shut in, enclose, imprison, insert.” Its linguistic roots hardly carry the positive connotations that accompany “inclusion” in contemporary politics.

These dark roots are reflected, I think, in historical and contemporary policies and practices of inclusion. For example, in the original U.S. constitution, African Americans were infamously “included” in the political community — as three-fifths of a person. This linguistic and political trick “worked” not only because of anti-black racism, but because of the way that this racism could be adorned with the democratic trappings of inclusive politics. Its effect, moreover, was one of both insertion and imprisonment. African Americans were inserted into the political community, as bodies and persons that were not seen to properly belong, and they were imprisoned in it by the terms of their inclusion. To ask for more was impermissible. To leave would be to lose what meager trappings they were granted. The persistence of exclusionary and racialized inequality, exploitation and domination suggest that the terms of African-American “inclusion” continue to do their work today.

The histories of African Americans and trans* Americans are very different ones, though they overlap at the fraught intersections of racial and gender identity. Nevertheless, the lessons of the history of African-American “inclusion” should give us pause when we think about trans* inclusion at Oberlin. On what terms will we include? On formally equal terms, no doubt. But at what price equality? Are we, too, improper bodies and persons inserted into the Oberlin community? Is our impropriety somehow to be made “proper”? Are we, too, imprisoned in a community by the very terms of our inclusion? Will a trans*-inclusive policy imprison us in our very trans*-ness, so that in a fundamental sense who we are is not up to us? Will it mark us, indelibly, with the sign of disturbing difference?

Undoubtedly, this is not the intent of the policy or its drafters, to whom we should be very grateful for their hard and thoughtful work. But as we strive to make Oberlin a more inclusive community, we should think very, very carefully about what we are doing.

– Jade Schiff

Politics Department