By Santiago Vidales, Ph.D.
I returned to UMass in the summer of 2024 to start my job as an academic advisor. Shortly thereafter, I joined the Organizing Committee to support our contract campaign and be involved in PSU. On the Organizing Committee, I met fellow comrades with whom we founded the Solidarity Caucus to create a political home for PSU members committed to anti-imperialist and radical unionism. One of my earliest concerns within PSU was the lack of representation and participation of Black and brown members. To address this concern, and in collaboration with other members of color, we hosted two lunch meetings for workers of color in the summer of 2025 to hear their concerns and find ways to make PSU and UMass more inclusive. These initiatives led me to become the PSU Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee Chair. In this role, I have developed programming for workers of color; queer, trans, and non-binary workers; and workers dealing with disabilities, chronic illness, and accessibility needs. These populations, which are also intersecting, are amongst the most marginalized within our union and on campus.
DEI work is vital, but it is also slow-moving. As the PSU DEI Committee continues connecting with marginalized members and advocating for their demands, it is also clear that social justice organizing needs to go beyond a single committee and be the core of our union politics. This essay is both a call to action for us to center DEI in PSU activism and also an invitation to go beyond DEI and make the labor movement a conduit for our collective liberation.
Over the past few years, we have witnessed how DEI Initiatives have come under attack as part of a wider reaction to movements that seek to center the historically excluded. In the summer of 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic and rebellions against police brutality, there were efforts to seek radical solutions to chronic American problems. The profound global health crisis begged the question: why is a rich nation incapable of caring for the sick? The viral and explicit anti-Black violence we witnessed begged the question: why are Black lives still so devalued decades after the Civil Rights Movement?
As the summer turned to fall, there were partial answers to these questions in the form of direct action against police brutality, a reawakening of prison abolitionist politics, demands for universal healthcare, and the necessity to center the marginalized instead of the profits of capital. Tragically, demands for radical change were co-opted by the platitudes of party politics.
From today’s vantage point, our situation is more dire: universal healthcare is even more distant, state violence and police brutality continue unabated, people’s fundamental rights are curtailed, and liberation seems unreachable. Instead of democratic reform and popular empowerment, we received DEI.
Though diversity, equity, and inclusion are worthwhile aspirations, they fall far short from providing food for the hungry, treatment for the sick, and dignity for the oppressed. DEI initiatives have mostly become opportunities for universities to hire administrators and push out campus climate surveys. But the fundamental problems remain: life is expensive, wages can’t keep up, state violence is ever-present, and war is the only thing people in power are willing to fund.
But campus unions have the opportunity to do the work that universities are unwilling to do when it comes to empowering the marginalized. That work may need to start by having a clearer political identity as PSU. Rather than having DEI work be done by a handful of committee members, the demands of the historically excluded should be at the core of everything we do as a union.
Instead of relying on euphemisms and slogans that were workshopped by university administrators, we can always find inspiration in movements for emancipation like the Haitian Revolution and the Paris Commune. With this history in mind, let’s rely on our own radical traditions, which give us labor’s lasting principles: solidarity, bravery, and a rebel spirit.
When enslaved people burned down the plantations that dominated them, they did it through solidarity, bravery, and a rebel spirit.
When Indigenous people resist colonialism, as exemplified by Palestine, they do it through solidarity, bravery, and a rebel spirit.
When workers mobilized for the eight-hour work day (led by anarchists, socialists, and immigrants), they did it through solidarity, bravery, and a rebel spirit.
As we approach bargaining committee elections and start thinking about our next contract campaign, we will be back debating issues such as wage scales, the Cost of Living Adjustment, health insurance, parking fees, grievance procedures, and remote work. We must hold these debates with our own DEI in mind— but what if we also double-down on our radical traditions and organize for Black Power, queer liberation, Indigenous reparations and Land Back, the emancipation of the working class, and the abolition of capitalism? Instead of DEI, we should demand an end to Whitmore’s rule because a democratic, decolonized, and demilitarized UMass will actually empower the least among us.
Let’s go beyond DEI as we organize and bargain for a fair contract. Let’s collectively build a wider horizon of possibility: a future where those that fight for the oppressed gain everything and those that oppose us receive nothing.
To connect and talk shop, email me at svidales@umass.edu. Cafecito is on me!
