INTERSECTIONAL ISOTOPES.

The problem with contemporary hierarchies of oppression is they enable people to create ever more granular partitions of identity, with ever increasing probabilities of identifying a divergence between that sub-population's share of good jobs and that sub-population's share of the population, which, under the innumerate reckonings of the diversity weenies constitutes prima facie evidence of discriminatory underrepresentation.

It's always possible to provide more granularity.  Apparently "black, indigenous, other people of color" is too aggregate, and "people of color, not elsewhere classified" calls for more classification.

During her first three years at the University of Wisconsin, Dana Tabaza saw the month of March marked as Middle East North African Heritage Month on university calendars. But when she searched around campus for events to celebrate her heritage, she found none.

“The acknowledgement and recognition of MENA Heritage Month [by UW] didn’t exactly come with action,” Tabaza said.

Tabaza’s observation emboldened her to shine light on the strong community of MENA students she knew existed on campus. As first steps for more MENA-centered university support, she advocated for the creation of a permanent MENA Cultural Programming Intern position, which she stepped into January 2023. With her co-chair Haruka Padilla, she created the MENA Collective — a group of 40 MENA-identifying student organization leaders responsible for planning the 2023 heritage month celebrations.

And here I thought "Mena" referred to a druggie airport in Arkansas allegedly tied to the Clintons.

Currently, there might be reason for Middle Eastern students to hang out together.

MENA students need a dedicated space now more than ever, according to Tabaza.

After nearly three months of war in Gaza, deaths have surpassed any Arab loss in wars with Israel in the past 40 years, according to the New York Times. At the time this article was published, over 21,991 Palestinians have been killed in the war in Gaza in the past 85 days, according to health officials in Gaza.

During the first weeks of the Israel-Hamas war, MENA students at UW gathered to mourn together wherever they could — in various rooms, buildings and houses around campus.

“People didn’t know where to go,” Tabaza, who is Palestinian-Jordanian, said. “At times like this, the only thing that can get you through is community. Having each other and just being in a space where you don’t need to explain or defend yourself and can just simply exist.”

There's a serious point in that story, lost in the ethnic special pleading.  Students far from home in time of war might benefit by fellow-feeling and empathy.  Furthermore, in time of war, an academic setting is precisely where explanation and exploration of positions might be particularly desirable.  For instance, why are Middle Eastern students continuing their education in the United States?  What happened to their educational opportunities in Jihadistan or greater BFE?  Seriously.  There was a Persian intellectual tradition of long standing.  The very word "algebra" brings to mind an Islamic intellectual tradition, including the concept of the zero.

What might be going on in the United States for overseas students to buy into, and do ever more granular dedicated spaces prevent domestic students from buying into their aspirations?  Finally, what is the role of Christian or Jewish students of Middle Eastern or North African extractions in that dedicated space?

Unfortunately, it's innumerate quantification for the win.

Tabaza said Siddiqui, who does not identify as MENA, has been a generous supervisor for MENA students and has enabled them to have a voice at the table. But she said MENA students need a staff member who reflects them and can use their lived experience to help with specific accommodations and needs unique to MENA students.

The MSC is in the process of drafting next year’s budget proposal to include a full-time professional staff member to support MENA students. The staff member would supervise programming interns, put together monthly programming throughout the year and advise the MENA Collective.

“We have very few MENA faculty and no MENA-identifying administrative staff,” Tabaza said. “If MENA students have concerns about anything related to their identity, accommodation or something that happened in the classroom, they have no one to go to who has that identity. So when we’re building the infrastructure for MENA programming, it’s more than just the events. It’s creating that ecosystem of support for MENA students.”

It's so easy, under the rubric of Belonging, Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Nonsense, to fall into the solipsistic narcissism permeating that passage.  If your go-to strategy as an advocate is always to look for somebody "who has that identity," you're counting on the process-worshipers in the diversity bureaucracy to do a talent search, rather than, say, developing that empathy and fellow-feeling in the university, perhaps beginning with the people involved in that "something that happened in the classroom," you're always going to be disappointed.