“You know how this university treats its faculty of color, but I don’t think you realized that it treats us differently than it treats you. Not until you started dating Deja, at least. And that was okay. I could always count on you to help faculty of color, especially Latinx faculty, but I haven’t been able to count on you to notice that there are no women of color in your department and bring that up to Sheila when she crows around here on her diversity kick. I haven’t been able to count on you to point out to Dean Ward that while we’re doing better than any other college in the university hiring faculty of color, that’s not the entire picture. We’re doing just as bad in retaining women of color as everyone else. Meanwhile, we teach most of the students of color, and the burden of retaining and mentoring them falls on us.

So, when you run to Deja and see how anxious and depressed she is, I want you to remember that she’s one of the better ones. She doesn’t think she is, and certainly, she needs better coping skills, but she’s smart as fuck. And her department might suck, but they know there’ll be hell to pay if she leaves or doesn’t get tenure. The Dean will literally throw a fucking fit. She has so many resources; she’s just too afraid to ask for help. So, when you go to her and probably do some real cute shit to help her get back on track, remember that not everyone has you in their corner, so look out for all of us, not just the men.”

At some point, while she was talking, Alejandro had sat heavily in the chair on the other side of her desk. More than once, he’d wanted to interject and remind her of people he’d advocated for, but he didn’t because it would have been petty, and the more he listened to her, he realized that she wasn’t necessarily wrong.

It wasn’t that Alejandro ignored the women of color in the faculty. It was simply that, as Toni had noted, there were fewer of them, and every fall, it felt as if one or two had disappeared. And it wasn’t that he didn’t notice and talk about it with Dean Ward, it was that he didn’t talk about the problem in terms of gender. He pushed for a more racially diverse faculty, without noticing how often those new hires were men. And crucially, he never noticed how, when he took on a new service assignment and needed to call on already overworked people, it was more often than not the women that he could count on to rearrange their schedules and say yes.

“I haven’t been the best ally to you,” he admitted quietly.