Meet Chief Diversity Officer Dr. Kristin Nicole Dukes
In case you haven’t already heard, Dr. Kristin Nicole Dukes joined Chatham this summer as the Chief Diversity Officer and Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Previously, Dr. Dukes served as the Dean for Institutional Diversity at Allegheny College, where she was charged with shaping and implementing policies, strategies, and initiatives in support of Allegheny’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Prior to assuming the senior diversity officer role at Allegheny, Dr. Dukes was an Associate Professor of Psychology at Simmons University. We recently sat down with Dr. Dukes to learn more about her path to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work, her academic research, and how she hopes to influence academic policies at Chatham. Read on to get to know a bit more about Dr. Dukes.
Tell us a little bit about what led you to diversity, equity, and inclusion work as a career.
Dr. Kristin Nicole Dukes
Kristin Nicole Dukes: I originally grew up in a small town in Texas named Greenville, about 15 miles northeast of Dallas. It was a highly racially segregated town and working class for the most part. One of the things I remember very vividly as a kid is that you could feel the racial tension. Some of it was current, some of it was from the past. My town is known pretty widely for two things. One, when they used to do postcards of lynchings, one of the most famous postcards that circulated in the early 1900s was of a lynching that happened in the courthouse square of my hometown. And two, until the early 70s, there was a sign up on Main Street as you entered town that said, “The Blackest Land, The Whitest People.” It was supposed to signify that the land was fertile and the whitest people was supposed to signify the purity of the heart of the people. . At one point, my hometown was known as the cotton king of the world. The most bales of cotton were produced in a cotton gin that was located in my hometown. But this was in the early 1900s, the cotton gin had since burned down, and 70 years later, the sign was still up. That gives you a little flavor of the historical racial tensions within my hometown.
I started getting interested in DEI work without knowing that it was DEI work when I was in high school. I was interested in the racial composition of students' friend groups. I thought I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. I was doing an independent study mentorship program with a therapist who gave me access to preschools and I was able to study the racial composition of little kids' friend groups. I was interested in where and when racial identity development starts? Is it something that happens because of our environmental conditioning? When I went to my admission interview at Rice University and talked about this research project, I was connected with a professor and once I got to Rice, I started working in her research lab. That's how I was introduced to social psychology. I entered undergraduate [as a] pre-med and in the process of being there as a first generation college student, I learned about a PhD. Here I am in Houston at this big R1 research university and someone is telling me that I can be a doctor in a different way.
That is what set me on my track to being a social psychologist. I was intrinsically interested in intergroup and race relations. Once I was in graduate school, and even as an undergrad, I started studying about stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination that evolved into a social justice lens. I became a tenured professor, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Simmons University in Boston, and it wasn't as fulfilling as I thought it would be. I felt like I was missing some part of my true purpose in life. I had some personal tragedies and I started to reflect. I did something that people would think is crazy, but the moment I got my tenured professorship, I went on the job market to be an administrator. I spent my sabbatical on the job market looking for Director of Diversity Education positions. I interviewed for them and failed miserably but I started getting calls for senior diversity officer jobs, too. I interviewed for two Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) positions and I accepted one at Allegheny. That was my transition into being a full-time DEI practitioner and administrator.
“I think I was born to do DEI work and was doing it at a very young age. I just had to figure out the right fit in terms of what I wanted to do. I wanted to find a way to make the lasting change in higher education that opens access and equity for folks with marginalized identities.”
From this perspective, are you aiming to make change on more of an institutional level?
KND: Absolutely. [I gained] the ability to impact policies and procedures at a top level. As an instructor in the classroom, I had the opportunity to affect individual students lives and career choices. But in my heart, I knew that the bigger impact would be being able to change access to higher education in general.
What aspect of your career—so far—has been the most fulfilling?
KND: I would say the policy aspect of it—to be in the room, to see the inside of higher education, and to see how the sausage is made. My family was not [widely] exposed to higher education and what it was like on the inside. From this perspective, I got to see that this is where the big decisions are made about who is admitted into an institution, what their financial aid packets look like, what is included in the curriculum, what the student experience is as a whole, and what the actual facilities look like for students. At the administrative table, I have an opportunity to share what I know from social psychology and from my experience as a student with a marginalized identity. [I can] bring all of that lived experience, expertise, and scholarship to the table to inform policy and procedure. When I can see policy tweaked to remove a barrier for a person like me coming down the pipeline, that is the most fulfilling part.
What are some initiatives and/or projects that you are hoping to kickstart at Chatham?
KND: With almost five weeks under me, I can't speak too much to specific policy changes. I am really excited about being able to assist the institution in developing a DEI strategic plan by using the data we've collected from the Whitworth Kee Climate Survey and other internal surveys to make an informed decision about Chatham’s priorities. How do we live our deeply held values about diversity, equity and inclusion and how do we move forward in a way that creates better systems? I'm really excited about that opportunity to be at the table with different constituents to uncover what those priorities are and to come up with an action plan to addressing them.
What would you consider the markers of a campus that is truly inclusive to everyone?
KND: [It is] a campus where every individual can say they feel like they belong to the community, [where people feel] a deeply held and true sense of belonging, a sense of camaraderie and community. [It is] a place where people feel safe to make mistakes and brave enough to address those mistakes, where people are willing to come together and lean in on difficult topics. [They can] look each other in the eye and have disagreement but know that it doesn't change the way a person is seen on a deeper level. It doesn't change their humanity. Those to me are the signs of a healthy campus climate or a healthy community regardless of the context. [It is] a place where you can dream big, and know it's possible to make an attempt at those dreams, to be your best self and authentically live your values out. From a student perspective, I always try to remember that for many students, Chatham is home. [It is important to] make sure that Chatham feels like a true home where you're safe, secure, protected, and supported. Notice that I didn't say comfortable.
Can you speak to that a little bit?
KND: I think many times people conflate safety and comfort. When they say a place feels unsafe, what they mean is, I've been challenged and I feel uncomfortable with how I've been challenged. The places where we grow are the places where we are challenged. I'm very careful about language around safe spaces; brave spaces is what I lean into. A place where we're brave enough to embrace that discomfort and know the difference between when someone is uncomfortable and when they are sincerely unsafe. There are different safety levels and different comfort levels for everyone. If you did not like what I had to say or you disagree with my opinion, that's a situation that makes you uncomfortable.
We all mess up, I mess up. And that is okay. Just because I make one mistake in life does not mean that I have morally failed indefinitely. And of course, there's a difference between complete bigotry, intolerance, and hurtful and truly damaging belief systems. We have to come to conversation and community with an openness and a willingness to give other people grace.
“Allow the space for those folks that are in the middle that are rational and reasonable to enter the conversation, because they’re not all the enemy. There has to be space for grace. Not every battle is the battle you need to fight. Know when to replenish yourself, retreat, and be with your people that understand where you are, people that are like-minded—your allies.”
Is there a particular element of your research that you’d like to share with the larger community or that you hope to make more widely known?
KND: One of the last major projects I was on as a faculty member was co-editing an issue of the Journal of Social Issues on police violence against racial and ethnic minorities. The entire volume looked at police violence from a global perspective—the antecedents and the consequences. What is leading to the inequities that we see in policing marginalized folks in their bodies? What are the consequences of it in the immediate term and downstream? The piece that I contributed to the volume was on Black racial group stereotypes, and how media stories have the potential to influence jury decision making. In this study, we shared a story that sounded a lot like a cross between the Trayvon Martin case and the Michael Brown case. There were some folks that get into an accident, they have an altercation, witnesses say that someone may have been armed, ultimately, a victim was killed. It turned out that the victim was unarmed. We manipulated the race of the victim and the shooter, and we manipulated the types of information that participants in the study were able to see about the victims. We found that using negative stereotypes about Black men had a negative impact on jury decision-making. They assigned more blame to the victim and gave lighter recommended sentences for the shooter. There was this intersection where there was a greater difference in that particular effect when there was a white victim and a Black shooter. What I found pretty profound about the whole thing is that even if you had a white victim and painted them with Black male stereotypes, more blame was assigned to them.
You take someone like Tamir Rice, who was gunned down in Cleveland. The information that was released about him focused on his mother, potential involvement of social services, and things about his home life that were not germane to the actual killing. This is a 12 year old boy who was shot within 30 seconds of a police officer arriving on the scene. Why do we care about his mother's past employment? Those negative stereotypes are enough to sway public opinion and color the way in which the victim’s humanity is portrayed. If you think about Trayvon Martin's case and the emphasis that was placed on the marijuana in his system, why was that important? Or Michael Brown and the allegations that he had a previous criminal record, why was that important? None of those factors were important because these were all unarmed Black boys that were killed. I did an interview with NPR right after the decision was made not to pursue criminal charges against the officers that killed Breonna Taylor. [I discussed the] stereotypes that were coming out about Breonna and how in her death she was not allowed to be human anymore. There was this polarization—a demonization of her boyfriend or ex-boyfriend and his potential drug activity to an almost angelic portrayal of her. There was no wiggle room for Breonna to just be Breonna.
What advice would you give to young people who are hoping to start doing work that positively impacts diversity, equity, and inclusion in their communities?
KND: I guess what began to frustrate me as an instructor was a culture of increasingly "woke people." People that were so woke that they were unable to see the humanity in the other side of the argument. They were blinded by the bigotry to the point where they were unable to take things from a human perspective, and understand the way in which we’re all being conditioned by the society that we live in. Those folks over there were conditioned as well. They have lived in this stew of stereotypes, prejudice, injustice, oppression, and being pitted against one another so that the rich get richer. That's where those deeply held beliefs are coming from. Chances are they probably have never truly interacted in an eye-to-eye, connected way with anyone that looks like you and you're woke-ness is actually pretty damn scary. It feeds into their fear of being replaced. If we can take for a moment—this is excluding the extremes—those folks that are in the middle that are reasonably minded that have never been challenged and pushed to hearing the other side. When we are so up in arms and so woke, there is no level ground for conversation or [mutual] understanding. Now, that is not saying that you should lay down and let people trample over you. It's not saying that you don't call them out when they're wrong or call them in, if you will.
What are three fun facts you’d like the Chatham community to know about you?
KND: I am naturally inquisitive. I love documentaries. The weirder the documentary, the better it is. One of my favorites is the documentary, Finders Keepers. It was about this guy who lost his leg in a small plane accident. After it was amputated, the hospital allowed him to take his leg home with him because he wanted to have it preserved in some way. He got on hard times and left the leg on a grill that ended up in a storage unit that went to auction. Someone bought the grill and found this man's leg. The natural response is to give this man his leg back. But instead, that man keeps it and turns it into a sideshow attraction at his home. They ended up going to small claims court with Judge Joe Mathis so that he could get his leg back. I also love post-apocalyptic sci-fi or apocalyptic sci-fi. No matter how corny it is, I'll watch it. I also love genealogy. I can trace my family back about nine to ten generations in every direction until emancipation. Oh, and I have a seven month old baby!
Special thanks to Dr. Dukes for talking with us! To learn more about DEI initiatives at Chatham, click here.