Tyson King-Meadows loves a good sports metaphor. He’s chair of the Africana Studies department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. On a recent afternoon he used Michael Jordan and the 1984 NBA draft to make a point.“What number was Michael Jordan drafted?” he asked the room. “Just guess.”Jordan was picked third.“Do we know who number one and number two were?” King-Meadows said. “That’s the point. He was passed over. He went third. He will go down as one of the greatest basketball players of all time.”This was not King-Meadows’ usual audience of undergrads at UMBC, a public research university outside Baltimore. He was talking to fellow UMBC professors, in psychology, medieval history and computer science. They’re part of a special committee working to make the recruiting and hiring process more open and fair.Jordan was passed over, King-Meadows explained, partly because “people had expectations that a taller player would be a better basketball player.”“My point is,” he said, “sometimes you have to look at the whole person.”King-Meadows, a guest speaker at this meeting, was the only African American in the room. The members of the committee are all white – and not by accident.“We understand here at UMBC that the burden of inclusiveness should not rest on minority faculty,” King-Meadows said later in his office.Too often, it does. That sometimes “invisible service” — sitting on committees and mentoring students of color — can come at the expense of research and ultimately delay a minority professor’s promotion and tenure.But there’s another important reason for white faculty to advocate for diversity and call out bias, said medievalist Susan McDonough.“The burden has to be more on the majority culture to do it more than we do it,” she said. “I've seen it in my classrooms that, when students of color point out bias, there's often a willingness to dismiss it that would not have been there if it had been a majority person who had shared that thought.”UMBC...