Despite record investment in diversity infrastructure, racial inequality persists in higher education. This article examines, through a case study of diversity’s articulation process, how diversity is defined, organized, and implemented within an American public flagship university. My findings reveal what I characterize as a diversity regime: a set of meanings and practices thatinstitutionalizes a benign commitment to diversity, and in doing so obscures, entrenches, and even intensifies existing racial inequality by failing to make fundamental changes in how power, resources, and opportunities are distributed. My concept of a diversity regime helps explain how and why organizational commitments to multiculturalism and diversity often fall short in practice. The concept of a diversity regime also helps us better understand the underlying processes that perpetuate racial inequality.

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Through a case study of an ongoing diversity initiative at Diversity University (DU), a public, flagship university in the US South, this research advances our understanding of the discursive relationship between neoliberalism and contemporary racial ideology. As part of a larger ethnographic project, I draw upon over ten years worth of diversity discourse at DU to illuminate diversity’s economization: the process whereby specific formations of economic values, practices, and metrics are extended toward diversity as justification for DU’s efforts. My analysis responds to three questions: (1) how is diversity economized by the organization; (2) how is this economization articulated through organizational discourse on diversity; and (3) how does the economization of diversity potentially reconfigure race and racial subjectivities? My findings reveal three interrelated processes that facilitate diversity’s: diversity-as-investment, diversity metrics, and diversity-as-affective labor. Together these processes congeal and convert multicultural principles and practices into economic ones. Consequently diversity’s economization recasts nonwhite racial subjectivity as human capital for DU and its white publics, minimizing and entrenching existing racial inequality in the process.