Diversity professionals include business scholars, management consultants, diversity officers, and human resource professionals, who claim that the business case is about economics, not about morality or social justice. Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic research, this paper finds that diversity professionals sell diversity to white men—literally to obtain new clients and, metaphorically, to gain supporters for their practices—by performing economic rationality. In examining the intersection of economics and morality through the business case, this article argues that economic rationality itself is a racial and gendered performance. Moreover, insofar as diversity is a managerial discourse that employs ideas and models of the economy to design organizational techniques that improve business, it claims that through the business case, diversity professionals perform the economy itself. Thus, this research unsettles pervasive scholarly and popular assumptions that capitalism is intrinsically amoral. Finally, it characterizes organizational practices wherein diversity professionals perform economics as amoral and unracial as white economics. White economics, in other words, reproduces the everyday operation of neoliberal organizations as purportedly amoral, and hence, unracial and ungendered.

In this article, I argue that the economization of social differences in the workplace is a political practice. I examine how, after the dismantling of corporate bureaucracies and affirmative action policies, diversity professionals create economic justifications for practices they regard as creating racial equity. Insofar as they do this to conveniently create markets for their expertise, diversity professionals work with, through, and around neoliberal logics, principles, and norms of the for‐profit firm. In asking why their strategies “work” in the era of the socially dispersed corporate form, I reflect on what it means for an American society to place more social value on the pursuit of profit than on racial justice.

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