*Insert Your Ideology Here*

Even in the hands of the well-intended, diversity leaves us without a language for making sense of ongoing racism or deliberating effective policy responses. A rigorous study by sociologists at University of California-Berkeley, Harvard University and University of Minnesota shows that corporate diversity trainings are especially counterproductive, despite being the most popular program in the multibillion-dollar diversity management industry. These trainings do not move white women or most people of color into management, and they actually decrease black women’s odds of becoming managers by 7%, perhaps because they can breed resentment. Likewise, in the neighborhood I studied, politicians promoted small-scale homeownership housing programs for the middle class in the name of diversity — but these race-blind programs were altogether insufficient for addressing the displacement of the low-income, majority black and Latino renters getting railroaded by condominium conversions.

The African continent endured unspeakable brutality under European colonial rule.

I hold too many stories in the back of my mouth, I am not always sure where they come from, or if they are even mine.

I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow. Women aren’t expected to flow. I read feminist leisure research (who knew such a thing existed?) and international studies that found women around the globe felt that they didn’t deserve leisure time. It felt too selfish. Instead, they felt they had to earn time to themselves by getting to the end of a very long To Do list. Which, let’s face it, never ends. I began to realise that time is power. That time is a feminist issue.

The story of my life is the story of half-finished projects and half-read books.