Manipulating diversity: How diversity regimes at US universities can reinforce whiteness

Abstract

As US universities attempt to accommodate a growing multicultural society, the task of racially diversifying entering cohorts and retaining a racially diverse student demographic has taken on a leading role in recruitment, college admissions, and campus programming. But, we ask, what definitions of racial diversity are fueling these changes and how have existing racial diversity regimes impacted racial/ethnic hierarchies? We analyze two widespread applications of racial diversity-racial diversity as benefit for all and racial diversity as status marker-to illustrate how racial diversity regimes can be manipulated in ways that undermine the contributions of racially/ethnically minoritized groups and reinforce a racial order that privileges Whiteness-particularly when framed around interest convergence. We conclude by discussing the importance of articulating more concrete racial diversity objectives, addressing structural contributors to racial inequity, and measuring diversity outcomes.

How Diversity Fails: An Empirical Investigation of Organizational Status and Policy Implementation on Three Public Campuses

“…Further, the absence of power as a conceptual intervention in investigations of [63] organizational diversity initiatives helps explain higher education's inability to reckon with its exclusionary past and to make progress toward transformative and equitable practices [64]. Rather than challenging racist foundations and orientations, diversity initiatives can be manipulated in ways that decenter race and serve to reinforce and privilege whiteness in higher education [18,104,130]. Instead, diversity must engage race beyond rhetoric and discourse to interrupt the inequity it might otherwise reproduce.…”

“…It also offered little guidance for how campuses should achieve this customization. Thus, rather than the happenstance unintentionality documented in the literature [3,104], EFA's lack of intentionality was quite intentional. Some welcomed this flexibility like this respondent who, analogizing state diversity plans as fences that provide structure to campus diversity efforts, described EFA as: a fence but it's a loose fence and it goes for miles and miles and miles.…”

Don’t just call me Latinx: A Call for Data Disaggregation to Disrupt Monolith Views

“…Data disaggregation has a body of literature within studies on healthcare (Weinick et al, 2004), and research shows that White people also benefit from sharing a classroom with diverse groups (Petts & Garza, 2021). However, work must be done to understand how White people can genuinely benefit from non-disaggregated data.…”