On performative equity, emotional labor, and the cost of clarity in institutions not built for us.
“We are no longer asking. We are remembering what we have always known.” – Élodie P. Goodman
Introduction
As usual, it took me a long time to gather my thoughts. It took even longer to decide whether to share them. But when I learned that another woman of color had decided to leave – quietly, with the little fanfare or institutional reckoning – while others are disappeared, I realized that my silence would not protect me nor would it honor them.
I write these words not in anger, but in clarity. Not with the intent to accuse, but to witness, to name what has, for far too long, gone unnamed in institutions that speak equity while practicing erasure.
NCORE is Not a Retreat – It’s Survival
The National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE) is not a luxury, nor is it a reward. It is not a retreat. For those of us who live equity work in our bones and not as an institutional initiative or committee, but as a matter of ancestral survival, NCORE is a site of labor, community, reckoning, and repair. It is one of the only places where our presence does not need explanation, where we are not asked to translate our pain into pedagogy, or to package our truth in ways that are palatable to those who benefit from not knowing.
And yet, year after year, women of color who seek to attend NCORE are asked to justify their participation. To explain the “return on investment.” To prove once more that our presence will yield institutional benefit. As if our labor is only legitimate when it serves the very systems that exhausts us. As if rest, reflection, and collective truth-telling must be earned through proximity to institutional gain.
To question our attendance at NCORE is to question the legitimacy of the very work this institution claims to champion. It suggests that diversity is performative, not transformative, that the institution will invoke our identities in brochures but deny us access to the spaces that sustain us. When support for NCORE is framed as a ‘nice-to-have’ rather than a necessity, it reinforces the same structures of exclusion we are fighting to dismantle. This erasure is not incidental: it is institutional. The unpaid intellectual, emotional, and restorative labor that women of color perform in service of this institution’s diversity rhetoric has yet to formally acknowledged. Our work is relied upon, extracted, and expected, yet there are no explicit policies to compensate, credit, or sustain those of us who carry the burden of educating others about race and equity beyond symbolic gestures and diversity statements. The institution must ask itself: Why is professional development unquestioned for some, but a privilege to be earned for others? Why is the labor of women of color only recognized when it is extractive, but dismissed when it is restorative?
This is not equity. This is extraction.
This is not about discretionary travel funding. This is about institutional accountability and about whose growth is supported, whose pain is acknowledged, and whose labor is valued. If this institution is serious about equity, then it must be serious about sustaining those who carry its heaviest burdens. But perhaps the more urgent question is not whether this institution will change, rather whether it is willing to confront the truths that change requires. The truth that equity is not a slogan but a structure. The truth that women of color are not resources to be managed but people whose dignity, labor, and knowledge have long been exploited. And the truth that this space, as it currently stands, was never built for us to thrive.
On Performative Equity and Institutional Fragility
The deeper injury, however, is not the scrutiny itself: it is the institutional response when we speak about it. In the wake of recent conversations, particularly those involving some committee members’ reacting to the word “performative,” I find myself asking: Does the institution truly want to understand what is performative about its equity efforts? Are they genuinely open to hearing our truths even when those truths are uncomfortable, when those truths disrupt curated narratives of progress, and speak directly to what has long been systemically ignored? Or, is this yet another invitation to “speak openly,” followed swiftly by retaliation, silencing, erasure, or strategic indifference?
Because those of us in this group don’t just do EDI work as a task. We live it. We carry the weight of it in our bodies, in our classrooms, in our offices, in our interactions. Every. Single. Day. And when we name what we witness, when we say this feels extractive, or this is not enough, or this harms us, we are met not with accountability, but with defensiveness and excuses. With deflection. With statements like “That’s not fair,” “It’s just a perception,” or “That wasn’t our intention.”
So I ask this not rhetorically, but relationally: What would it mean to speak with full clarity without apology? What might it look like to name together the toll of symbolic gestures, the harm of unacknowledged and invisible labor, and the violence of being expected to smile through it all?
If we are going to be asked again to help “guide” or “advise” or “build trust,” we must first ask ourselves: At what cost? And on whose terms?
I’m raising this not from a place of withdrawal, but from a deep commitment to integrity. If we choose to engage, let it be in ways that center and protect our well-being, uphold our sovereignty, and affirm the truth we carry. Let’s not contort ourselves into something more palatable for systems that claim to seek change while resisting transformation.
I want to be precise here. When those of us who inhabit this work name the gaps between rhetoric and reality, we are not launching personal attacks. We are not undermining efforts. We are calling for alignment between values and practices, between policy and principle, between stated commitments and lived experience.
We Know What Performance Looks Like
We’ve lived inside performativity. We are living inside it still. We’ve been featured on the flyers. We’ve sat on the panels. We’ve written the reports that are never implemented. We’ve served on task forces that dissolve once the political winds shift. We have been rarely celebrated in public, and oftentimes sidelined in private. And still, we show up.
From Diplomacy to Integrity
I wrote recently to a colleague that I have spent years walking the tightrope between diplomacy and truth-telling. Between institutional loyalty and personal integrity. And like so many women of color in higher education, I have been advised explicitly and implicitly to keep my head down. To stay in line. To be strategic. To protect myself.
But strategy without integrity is survivalism, not justice.
I can no longer participate in conversations about equity that require me to disavow my own clarity. And I will not continue to perform civility while colleagues – brilliant, courageous, exhausted – are asked to do unpaid labor in service of institutional optics. I am no longer interested in contorting myself to make systems feel less indicted by my truth.
This is Emotional Labor. This is Trauma Work.
Attending NCORE is not just learning – it’s reliving. We walk into workshops on racial battle fatigue, settler colonialism, institutional betrayal, and intergenerational trauma, and we fee it deeply in our bodies. Our breath shortens. Our chests tighten. We remember things we’ve worked hard to compartmentalize just to stay functional at work.
And then, we are asked to mentor others through it.
What I am naming is not new. It is the cumulative weight of being asked to carry a system that was not designed to carry us. It is the emotional labor of mentoring staff and students through NCORE while processing our own retraumatization. It is the spiritual weight of holding space for others while our own wounds remain unacknowledged. It is the burden of care without care in return.
This is not a call-out. It is a call to remember what equity actually demands: accountability, humility, transformation, not performance.
So I share this not in expectation, but in integrity. I share it not because it is safe, but because it is necessary. I am no longer interested in requests for feedback that cannot bear the truth. I am interested in creating spaces where truth is not a threat, but a threshold.
Because some of us are done asking. We are simply naming what has always been true.
The institution continues to benefit from our presence, our labor, our insight, our courage to stay. But our engagement is not owed. It is a gift. Let’s treat it, and ourselves, as such.
