By Long Beach State’s new Beach Pluralism Project champions civility in dialogue, but its focus on politeness risks diluting the urgency of justice for the sake of comfort.
The project seeks to enrich student discourse on race, religion and politics, and envisions a campus culture that is driven by empathy and diversity.
Funded by President Jane Close Conoley and supported by Provost Karyn Scissum-Gunn and College of Liberal Arts Dean Deborah Thien, the project includes the Conoley Fellows Program, encouraging students to explore pluralism through the Department of Religious Studies.
While its mission to bridge divides and foster understanding seems commendable, prioritizing polite conversation compromises the pursuit of equity to a performative act.
Sophia Pandya, the project’s director, described it as creating a “third space” for difficult conversations, especially on campus.
“The pluralistic approach definitely helps keep people together at the table,” Pandya said. “And so we’re not so polarized because that doesn’t solve systemic forms of discrimination and oppression.”
However, history demonstrates that progress often stems not from polite conversations but from bold resistance to systemic inequalities.
The civil rights movement, feminist revolution and other transformative social shifts succeeded because they disrupted, defied and dismantled entrenched structures.
By placing civility at the center, a barrier to justice is built, sanitizing the discomfort necessary for real change.
Kathryn Chew, the project’s co-director, highlights “active engagement with diversity” and cultivating curiosity over assumptions.
“You kind of lay aside the assumptions you make about other people and approach differences with curiosity. That’s what we want to inspire in students,” Chew said.
Pandya echoes this sentiment, stressing empathy in engaging with different opinions.
“At least I can empathetically engage and try to understand them, and just be able to make another community feel heard and not come at them antagonistically,” Pandya said.
But what happens when those “differences” include viewpoints rooted in maintaining systemic oppression? Dialogue without accountability can equate harmful ideologies with marginalized voices, favoring the powerful.
“We’re trying to get our students and our campus to be a little more intentional and less reactive with how we interact with other communities,” Pandya said.
Intentionality is valuable but insufficient. Meaningful progress requires breaking down systems of injustice, not merely discussing them.
Marginalized communities can’t afford slow, half-hearted actions born from comfortable dialogues while enduring oppression.
Despite Pandya and Chew’s perspectives, Nayawiyyah Muhammad, a fellow Religious Studies instructor, offers a critical counterpoint.
“We need to find a way to accept that we are not all the same,” Muhammad said. “We need to broaden our understanding of how all of the pieces in society fit together, especially when it comes to religion.”
Her stance underscores a key failure of pluralistic frameworks: their tendency to oversimplify deep-seated disparities.
“We can still find ways of being American, upholding the best of what America has to offer, or in our religions, seeing what we hold in common,” Muhammad said.
Chew also acknowledges the sense of community and how it’s significant at Long Beach State.
“The communities out there are just so supportive of each other, and that’s something special to see… that sort of human feeling,” Chew said.
While community support is invaluable, it doesn’t directly address the institutional forces perpetuating discrimination and may ultimately become a passive exercise in “understanding” without tackling these deeper issues.
The university’s stance on social justice is also contradicted by its recent implementation of the Time, Place and Manner (TPM) policy, which severely limits when and where protests can occur on campus.
This exposes a contradiction within the project: while it champions open dialogue, it stifles the very forms of resistance that could challenge the status quo.
Protests, by their very nature, are meant to challenge normality, yet Long Beach State prioritizes order over justice.
How can Long Beach State promote its bold speech through its Speak Boldly & Listen Bravely initiative while silencing dissent with policies like the TPM?
To align with its rhetoric of justice, the university could reconsider TPM restrictions, pursue tangible change and be more accountable.
Conoley’s recent campus-wide email, Reflections as October 7 nears, illustrates this contradiction. Her appeal for peace, devoid of any mention of inequalities, reduces the calls for justice to “darkness and hate.”
“Instead of killings and rage, I wonder if we can reflect on how to promote peace,” Conoley wrote. “I understand the attraction toward darkness and hate in times like these, but these are inevitable companions of more war, more loss of innocent lives and more broken families.”
This framing positions the calls for justice as part of a cycle of violence, obscuring the reality that peace without equity is simply a denial of true progress.
In her On Calls for Divestment email, Conoley reiterated that the institution has addressed global issues but doesn’t “engage” in contested geopolitical divides.
“The university remains an active forum for discourse and perspective-sharing, not a participant itself,” she wrote.
The Beach Pluralism Project, in this context, appears to be the university’s attempt to pacify difficult conversations, offering a superficial band-aid solution to a deeper problem.
Justice is rarely polite — tokenism and civility ideals fall short, and progress demands empowering the community to act.
Anything less than genuine action is merely an illusion of progress.
