Your own personal inclusion rider

Today news is going around Twitter about a 30 person white male “applied history” conference at Stanford. Here it is, in all its pasty glory.

It’s likely most of these august chaps didn’t bother to ask about diversity before taking the gig. I can’t speak for what the organizers were thinking, though perhaps we’ll found out. The one speaker who responded to queries on Twitter, so far, is being smug about it.

My response is this: If you are, like me, a white dude academic and/or writer, diversity needs to be part of your INITIAL response to invitations to speak.

I’m not perfect. The answers aren’t always simple (sometimes I’m a lone speaker, then I try to make sure the overall series isn’t all white dudes). No single event can incorporate every type of diversity in the cosmos.

But we, the white dudes, can do the work of diversifying events in which we participate. We have to.

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