A Flat Tire Deflates. Weariness and DEI

How does a genderqueer Professor keep their head above water in the often hypocritical debates surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), at their university and beyond? In weariness, Nicole Erin Morse finds an affective attitude that allows for resistance. Weariness is 'that which is burned up yet keeps burning' and, unlike ambivalence, effectively exposes systematic oppression.

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On March 26, a bridge collapses in Baltimore, Maryland. When right-wing pundits blame the horrific disaster on a ‘DEI mayor’, the city’s mayor, Brandon Scott, responds by joking that the letters stand for ‘Duly Elected Incumbent.’ He also proclaims: ‘We know what they want to say, but they don’t have the courage to say the N-word.’

DEI stands for ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,’ and it has rapidly become a major target of the American right. Is Scott for or against DEI? His comments bypass this binary choice, neither embracing nor repudiating DEI. Online, memes of Scott’s comments immediately appeared, joining a plethora of digital ephemera through which people who care about diversity, equity, and inclusion express their utter exhaustion with debates over DEI.

For Barthes, weariness is a dynamic answer to the insistent pressure to establish a decisive position on the fashionable political issue of the day.

‘Weariness: the demand for a position,’ writes Roland Barthes, in his 1978 seminar on the Neutral. For Barthes, weariness is not indifference; instead, weariness is a dynamic answer to the insistent pressure to establish a decisive position on the fashionable political issue of the day. Ultimately, Barthes writes that weariness is ‘creative’ for ‘new things are born out of lassitude – from being fed up.’

In Scott’s comments, weariness becomes explosively creative, and there is a ‘“burst”, by blow or pressure,’ as the Mayor names what isn’t supposed to be said: the attacks he faces are racist. Subsequently, this ‘burst’ is followed by ‘a slow, progressive deflation,’ as the comments become a meme and transmitted online. They become what Hito Steyerl (2009) calls ‘poor images’, highly compressed digital files that circulate, deteriorate, and reiterate Scott’s state of ‘being fed up.’ Following Barthes, inspired by online humor, and grappling with my experience as a genderqueer educator who has appeared on Florida’s DEI blacklists, I argue that weariness is an affective state with resistant potential in the face of seemingly fruitless and frustrating contemporary battles over DEI.

Burned up, Keep Burning

Weariness is particularly useful in confronting the demand to take a position on DEI given that DEI is primarily known for being a capitalist initiative that has become increasingly popular in corporate America. Drawing on its etymological roots, Barthes connects weariness (‘fatigue,’ as well as ‘lassitude’) to labor , and describes it further as ‘a burden under which one totters,’ adding: ‘General image of sagging, of one’s being squashed’ (du tassement sous quelque chose).

Crucially, weariness is more extreme than ambivalence. Ambivalence – which I would describe as being unable or unwilling to choose between available options – is a familiar affective response to the demand to stake out a stable political position from among limited and disappointing choices. However, weariness goes further. It responds not just to the choice at hand but to the entire context from which the demand to choose emerges. In the case of DEI, that context includes centuries of structural racism, misogyny, sexual harassment, legal inequality, homophobia, trans-antagonism, ableism, classism, and everything else that constructs our necropolitical system of disposability. No wonder we are weary.

A post that went viral on X (and was meme-ified on other platforms) encapsulates the weariness many experience in response to DEI in the workplace, especially those of us who recognize how it operates to shore up the status quo. User @necrobranson writes:

‘sick of conservatives overestimating DEI. Do you know what DEI actually does? All DEI does is make PowerPoints. That’s it. Then they show those PowerPoints to the most important people in the company while they text. After that, they go ignore my emails. That’s it. Nothing else.’

Nothing else happens, and yet the charade will continue, with those who want to challenge the system insistently redirected into taking a position on (or working in) DEI. As this post circulates, it allows each person who re-posts it to assert that ​​ – far from being a serious threat to hegemony – DEI work typically channels political activity into pointless exchanges that drain away the energy of everyone involved. Memes like this circulate and recirculate, continuously voicing exhaustion in the face of the demand to choose one of the two available positions.

Importantly, the choice itself is wearying because it poses the wrong question. It focuses on whether this particular intervention is appropriate, perpetually deferring efforts to attend to the underlying structures of oppression. While weariness does not necessarily offer a way out of this diversion of political will, it attends to and expresses the affective experience of seeing revolutionary energy redirected, blocked, and terminated, as well as the political need to linger with this termination.

In the contemporary language of burnout, weariness would be that which is burned up yet keeps burning.

As Barthes writes, weariness has a ‘paradoxical infinity,’ for it stages ‘the endless process of ending’; it is ‘the very touch of endlessness.’ Weariness, then, is more than just an ending. It prolongs, it indulges, it stays with, it extends, and it intensifies the process of ending, refusing to allow the ending to become quietly complete; refusing closure.

Sick and tired, weary, empty, sagging, squashed. In this weariness, we are not simply caught between two available options: pro-DEI or anti-DEI. Instead, following Barthes, who quotes a vivid metaphor from the work of André Gide, we become ‘the flat tire that deflates.’ In the contemporary language of burnout, weariness would be that which is burned up yet keeps burning. As Barthes writes of weariness, it is an ongoing process of wearing out; it is ‘what doesn’t stop leaning, emptying itself.’ Thus, the political power of weariness is in its extension, elongation, perpetuation of the process of deflation. Weariness says that there is still more exhaustion that can be drawn out of this moment. Even when it seems that our reserves of resistance have been depleted, we go on emptying. And that’s how we assert that we are alive.

Minority Tax

Like many people who show up in the corporatized workplace and are instantly assumed to be experts on DEI due to our identities, I’ve long been weary of the concept. I say ‘long,’ but in fact, DEI was something I had barely heard about until just a few years ago. According to Google Book’s Ngram, which estimates the frequency with which terms have been used in the English language through 2019, DEI as a compact concept does not even register compared to its constitutive words:

Meanwhile, Google Trends shows the sharp spike in searches for DEI between 2019 and 2024:

What happened after 2019? Most significantly, for this discussion, what happened was the Summer 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd. As protesters affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement called to defund the police, neoliberal institutions from corporations to higher education responded by accelerating DEI initiatives. To many, this appeared to be a cynical ploy to co-opt Black Lives Matter and redirect the energy generated by the movement to sustain the status quo.

At my own university, DEI committees and activities proliferated suddenly. Before this, I had resisted the continuous pressure to join DEI committees. After all, studies suggest these committees simply produce more work for the very people they are intended to serve, a phenomenon described as the ‘minority tax’ or the ‘majority subsidy.’ In 2012, Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included examined how institutional diversity workers are exhausted by the institutional ‘brick walls’ they continuously encounter in trying to do the very work the institution asks them to do.

Again and again, when I was asked to join a DEI committee (often by white, cisgender, heterosexual male colleagues), I would respond that since this work was important to them, they should seek out training so that they would be able to do this work themselves. I felt proud of my refusal to participate and thought that, when it came to the demand to take a position on DEI, I had found a solution. No weariness, no unsustainable service burden. ‘What could a flat tire ask for,’ Barthes writes, ‘if not to be left alone!’

However, as more and more DEI committees appeared in 2020 and 2021, and as the Florida Board of Governors (the BOG) identified DEI as a strategic priority, directing these committees to review curricula and incorporate DEI into our ‘academic learning compacts,’ it became impossible for me to avoid serving on DEI committees. As one of the only out nonbinary faculty members, and as a white person who didn’t want to see women of color taking on all the work created by these new committees, I found myself serving on two DEI committees at once.

Neither For Nor Against

DEI was everywhere, but real justice was still difficult to achieve – perhaps even more so, because of the surface appearance of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’ We were supposed to identify ‘DEI courses,’ and one of the committees on which I served was tasked with drawing up a list of ‘DEI learning objectives’ for all courses in the major. Summits on DEI were held.

Meanwhile, systemic oppression continued. I was trying to staff a search committee and, because of a policy that required a woman and a person of color on each search committee, I found myself reaching out to the same Black female faculty who are asked to serve on every search committee, adding to their already heavy service burden. The Chief of Campus police presented to faculty about how to identify threats, and his entire presentation was a video of a young Black man having a mental health crisis – but because he himself is Black, he told us, this presentation was not racist. In a required training for employees about LGBTQ people, straight and cisgender faculty were asked to share aloud the worst things they had ever heard or believed about LGBTQ people.

I now had to rally the energy to fight for DEI against the same state government and university administration that had compelled our participation in the practices they were now attacking.

None of this should be surprising; what appears to be contradictory in fact expresses a coherent neoliberal ideology. But these frustrating experiences made it extraordinarily difficult to participate in a full-throated defense of DEI when, in 2022, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis demanded that the State University System change course abruptly and dismantle all support for DEI. After being exhausted by the demands to participate enthusiastically in DEI activities, I now had to rally the energy to fight for DEI against the same state government and university administration that had compelled our participation in the practices they were now attacking.

It was December 2022 when Florida’s state government sent information requests to all the State University System schools asking how much state funding went to DEI and ‘critical race theory’ (CRT). Specifically, the information requests demanded lists of positions, courses, salaries, and other details related to university employees doing DEI/CRT work. As someone serving on two DEI committees, teaching classes on gender and race, and directing the Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies, I was alarmed. However, I wasn’t just worried for myself. After all, DEI had been our university’s signature for a few years, since we’re the most diverse campus in the system. I thought everyone should be worried. This felt like a blacklist.

‘Oh no,’ I was told, by administrators:

‘There’s nothing to worry about. It isn’t a blacklist, because no one is going to be named on it; only positions, salaries, and courses will be listed. Besides, the universities are going to be very strategic and report the smallest amount of DEI/CRT activity possible. We support DEI, we believe in it (don’t you?), and we must comply with the law. The government is only seeking information.’

To explain how that worked out, I’ll share an email that I sent to the University Provost on January 18, 2023:

‘Oops,’ I was told, in response to my explosive ‘burst’ of weariness:

‘No one expected this. And after all, didn’t I believe in DEI? By scapegoating a few courses and individuals, the rest of the university’s DEI initiatives could be shielded from scrutiny.’

Of course, the Governor wasn’t a fool, and the next information request came swiftly. It was much more capacious and demanded that everyone involved in any DEI work turn over our emails, text messages, and social media messages to the state. For good measure, the government also asked for details about the number of trans students on campus receiving gender affirming healthcare. And then the Governor announced that one of his key legislative priorities for 2023 would be prohibiting DEI, CRT, gender studies, and ‘other discriminatory programs’. Ambivalently, I ran for, and was elected to, the Faculty Senate’s DEI Committee – right before it was banned by the state.

Neither for nor against DEI, weariness doesn’t ‘take sides between contenders’ within the dominant structure.

DEI has become a floating signifier that no longer refers to what it seems to indicate, nor even to neoliberal, corporate practices. As Mayor Scott pointed out, racists use DEI when they want to say racial slurs without the stigma rightfully attached to those words; similarly, DEI can also function as a dog whistle for sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and more. In Florida’s information requests, people like me became DEI. Memes have campily skewered this idea, with Black users on X deploying ‘the DEIs’ to refer to Black people more broadly. Embracing ‘the DEIs’ for one’s community is a camp-inflected move that goes beyond ambivalence while simultaneously refusing to valorize what DEI once was. Instead, it represents an intensification of the compulsion to identify with and participate in DEI initiatives that were foisted on minoritized people. The tire is flat – the programs were largely superficial salves that sustained the status quo and now they are being attacked and banned entirely.

But the Mayor’s comments and the subsequent memes don’t defend DEI. They further deflate it. They contribute to the endless process of emptying out the empty signifier of DEI, cultivating an intensity of affective weariness that exposes the systemic oppressions underlying the two positions from which we’re supposed to choose. Neither for nor against DEI, weariness doesn’t ‘take sides between contenders’ within the dominant structure. It is ‘an ardent, burning activity,’ ‘outplaying the paradigm.’ As the tire deflates, let’s make sure that the air it expels fans those flames.