It has taken me a while to read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, but I picked it up recently because my daughter suggested it as one of the books she wanted us to talk about on our podcast Classics & Coffee. There’s a lot in Americanah, and I do not have the space to even scratch the surface of topics that Adichie covers. Today, I want to focus on the speaking engagements that companies offered to Ifemelu once the popularity of her blog, Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Knows as Negroes) by a Non-American Black, started to receive praise and a large readership. The increased recognition led corporations and educational institutions to reach out to Ifemelu for their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainings.

The organizations reached out to Ifemelu to speak at these DEI events to check a box and to signal to their constituents that they were engaged with DEI work when in fact all they were doing was virtual signaling and placing a paper-thin mask over their true selves. Ifemelu confronts their false posturing at her first DEI speaking engagement for “a small company in Ohio.” She entitled her talk “How to Talk About Race with Colleagues of Other Races”; however, when she looked at the crowd, she noticed that the entire audience was white, and she asked herself who these people at the company would be talking to since everyone looking at her was white. Her answer, “Perhaps the janitor was black.”

Ifemelu, both before and during the speech, felt apprehension. She began by telling the audience, “I’m no expert so don’t quote me,” and they laughed. Yet, she concluded her prepared speech. the looked at her in frozen stares and their “leaden clapping deflated her.” There’s no mention of a Q&A period following her speech; instead, Ifemelu ends up with the HR director who only talks about soccer because “he knew Nigeria played well” and he appeared to want to talk about anything other than the speech she just delivered to the company.

That night, in her hotel, Ifemelu received an all caps email saying, “YOUR TALK WAS BALONEY. YOU ARE A RACIST. YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL WE LET YOU INTO THIS COUNTRY.” The email revealed to Ifemelu that the company, and other organizations asking her to speak at DEI events, simply came down to performative acts with no real impact on the institution. She comes to recognize that “[t]he point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves.” It was nothing more that performative justice and a panacea for the white audiences to feel better about themselves without having to institute any real change to the structures that impact their own communities and the world.

The company “did not want the content of her ideas; they merely wanted the gesture of her presence.” In fact, they did not read her blog; instead, they invited her to speak because of the publicity she received, her name recognition. They used her as a token, a false image of their desire for progress, hidden behind the paper-thin mask of business as usual. Ifemelu’s experiences drive home the ways that company’s put on the veneer of DEI initiatives, paying lip service, merely for credibility and support from consumers and constituents. Following George Floyd’s murder, organizations rushed to add DEI positions and statements. Curtis Bunn points out that the Society for Human Resource Management said that “DEI roles increased by 55% following demands for broader racial equity and justice after Floyd’s murder.” Only two years later, “[t]he attrition rate for DEI roles was 33% at the end of 2022, compared to 21% for non-DEI roles.”

As Chris Meltzer told Bunn, “DEI senior vice president at the National Urban League, “Most of your diversity professionals at these companies report to human resources, which are headed by white women and in some cases, white men,” he said. “So, it doesn’t surprise me that Black diversity officers . . . are being moved out. It’s increasingly becoming a dead-end job. Corporations are saying one thing and demonstrating something else. It’s going back to checking the box versus hiring and keeping qualified workers who can impact change in the company.”

All of this brings to mind Four Fist’s 2018 song “Joe Strummr,” a song that calls upon us to stop being performative and to wake up to the issues impacting us. The song appeared following the Unite the Right March in Charlottesville in 2017, and Astronautalis raps, in the second verse,

They’re rioting in Virginia
We watched it from our phones
And changed our Facebook pictures
To congratulate ourselves
We make nervous jokes and whispers
About the sexts we’re sending out
And how the NSA’s always listening
I wonder if they’re turned on?

Here, Astronautalis points out that the simplest action, changing our social media profile pictures to show solidarity or outrage is nothing more than performative. It serves as a way to “congratulate ourselves” without having to say or do anything except adding a picture to our online presence. This act mirrors the company that Ifemelu spoke to because it provides an out, a mechanism to say, “Look, we stand with you and think this wrong.” Yet, it merely checks a box to make the person or entity feel better about themselves, nothing more. It does not enact change.

This is something I think about a lot. What do I do? Do I just engage in performative acts? We all have our positions and our spaces, and when i think about this question, I think about what I do in the classroom, as an educator, and in the positions that I occupy. Do I teach students about these systems, history, and literature? Do I provide opportunities to individuals who may not get them elsewhere? Do I use my words to push back? I try to do all of that.

In the chorus to “Joe Strummr,” P.O.S. raps,

We don’t fight
We don’t riot
Even when the war’s outside our door

What do you do if you “don’t fight” or “don’t riot”? What are the ways that we fight or riot? While P.O.S. is speaking literally here, I think about the figurative nature of fighting and rioting. It doesn’t always involve marching in the streets. It involves the actions we choose to take every day of our lives and the impacts those actions have on the world around us. Fighting is teaching accurate history. Fighting is using your position to provide opportunities for individuals. Fighting is using language to call out hate and systemic oppression.

We all have roles to play, and we need to realize that performative acts do nothing to bring about change. Only true action will ensure change. What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.