HISPANICS, TRUMP, AND WALLS WITHIN
Imagine a flagship-state-university in a majority-black state with only a handful of Black professors. Imagine these Black instructors earning much lower salaries than any other group, regardless of merit. Imagine Black faculty nearly absent in 85 % of all departments, schools, and centers. Imagine this university with a sprinkle of Black males and no Black females among hundreds of top administrative positions. Imagine this institution with no Blacks leading centers of bioengineering, artificial intelligence, or financial innovation. Black faculty would only lead centers on things “Black.” Imagine, however, this institution with a globally renowned Black Studies Center led by White directors since its creation dating back 79 years. No university would tolerate such gross discriminations. Yet this is what happens to Latinx faculty at the University of Texas-Austin daily. This is not new. It has been around since UT-Austin was founded 130 years ago.
Eight Latinx full professors at the University of Texas recently completed the Hispanic Equity Report. In the report, we offer statistics of gross inequities of Hispanic faculty as well as a scathing sociological analysis of their segregation.
There is nothing surprising to the report’s sociology of segregation: social networks reinforce privilege through appointments and perpetuate the continuous marginalization of those with little social capital. Hispanics have little social capital and therefore are rarely rewarded or promoted. Less obvious, however, is our findings on faculty elections. Using the archive of the General Faculty Council, we show that in the past 50 years the predominantly White faculty of UT-Austin have elected only four Hispanics to positions of leadership of the Council.
At the University of Texas-Austin, patronage and elections have kept Hispanics from getting endowments, promotions, rewards, prizes, and positions of leadership. The report demonstrates that regardless of their record of publications, tenure- and tenure-track Hispanic faculty earn on average 25,000 less than their White peers do. In fact, Hispanics are the only group on campus whose salaries show absolutely no correlation to their record of publications. Worse, no matter how talented, only four of every ten Hispanics get tenure and remain on campus.
UT-Austin has a bloated bureaucracy that constantly compiles data on diversity and that publishes aspirational glossy brochures on equity and inclusion daily. How is it possible then that such grotesque inequities have remained hidden? This seems like a revelation in a state whose largest high school population is Latinx (46%).
Why did it take eight Hispanic professors to unveil something that is in plain sight? The eight professors have 150 years of combined lived-experience of unwitting yet systematic discrimination. Yet many of our White colleagues cannot see any pattern to our complaints. Why is the obvious so difficult to see?
French Arabs share almost identical racial Mediterranean backgrounds with French republican Whites. French Arabs, however, suffer obvious systemic segregation due to their accents, names, religion, and clothing. They live in separate neighborhoods and go to different schools. There is no need to document their marginalization in French universities. Hispanics have also endured systemic discrimination for generations in the US. Unlike French Arabs’, markers of Hispanic differences in the US are not just ethnic. Yet in a society that sees differences as white-and-black racial polarities, the discrimination against Hispanics is both ignored and difficult to see.
Trump seeks to build a wall to keep “Hispanics” from “crossing’ the border and changing the racial and ethnic makeup of his nation. This is all fictional nonsense. There is no “border” to cross. Hispanics have been in this country much longer than Whites have. Many are actually Native Americans. Trump’s walls have become fictions that matter because there are millions of real-yet-invisible walls within in the first place. This is the lesson of our report.
