The Economization of Diversity

Abstract

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.