Diversity Regimes: Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities

By James M. Thomas

2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

As a major, public flagship university in the American South, so-called “Diversity University” has struggled to define its commitments to diversity and inclusion, and to put those commitments into practice. In Diversity Regimes, sociologist James M. Thomas draws on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork at DU to illustrate the conflicts and contingencies between a core set of actors at DU over what diversity is and how it should be accomplished. Thomas’s analysis of this dynamic process uncovers what he calls “diversity regimes”: a complex combination of meanings, practices, and actions that work to institutionalize commitments to diversity, but in doing so obscure, entrench, and even magnify existing racial inequalities. Thomas’s concept of diversity regimes, and his focus on how they are organized and unfold in real time, provides new insights into the social organization of multicultural principles and practices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781978800434

James M. Thomas

JAMES M. THOMAS is associate professor of sociology at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Working to Laugh: Assembling Difference in American Stand-Up Comedy Venues and Diversity Regimes: Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities. He is also the coauthor of Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity and Affective Labor: (Dis)Assembling Difference and Distance.

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DIVERSITY REGIMES

The American Campus

FOUNDED BY HAROLD S. WECHSLER

The books in the American Campus series explore recent developments and public policy issues in higher education in the United States. Topics of interest include access to college, and college affordability; college retention, tenure and academic freedom; campus labor; the expansion and evolution of administrative posts and salaries; the crisis in the humanities and the arts; the corporate university and for-profit colleges; online education; controversy in sport programs; and gender, ethnic, racial, religious, and class dynamics and diversity. Books feature scholarship from a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Vicki L. Baker, Laura Gail Lunsford, and Meghan J. Pifer, Developing Faculty in Liberal Arts Colleges: Aligning Individual Needs and Organizational Goals

Derrick R. Brooms, Jelisa Clark, and Matthew Smith, Empowering Men of Color on Campus: Building Student Community in Higher Education

W. Carson Byrd, Poison in the Ivy: Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses

Nolan L. Cabrera, White Guys on Campus: Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of Post-Racial Higher Education

Jillian M. Duquaine-Watson, Mothering by Degrees: Single Mothers and the Pursuit of Postsecondary Education

Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, and Barbara Prainsack, eds., Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Theory and Practice across Disciplines

Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed, eds., A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education

Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey, eds., Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century: Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Model

Ryan King-White, ed., Sport and the Neoliberal University: Profit, Politics, and Pedagogy

Dana M. Malone, From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses

A. Fiona Pearson, Back in School: How Student Parents Are Transforming College and Family

Barrett J. Taylor and Brendan Cantwell, Unequal Higher Education: Wealth, Status, and Student Opportunity

James M. Thomas, Diversity Regimes: Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities

DIVERSITY REGIMES

Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities

JAMES M. THOMAS

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Thomas, James M., 1982– author.

Title: Diversity regimes : why talk is not enough to fix racial inequality at universities / James M. Thomas.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Series: The American campus | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019034244 | ISBN 9781978800410 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978800427 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978800434 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Discrimination in higher education—United States. | Educational equalization—United States.

Classification: LCC LC212.42 .T46 2020 | DDC 378.1/982—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034244

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by James M. Thomas

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For those who seek justice, in love and struggle

Contents

1 Introduction

2 Under the Live, Old Oak Trees

3 Condensation and the Alchemy of Diversity

4 Go Your Own Way: The Organizational Structure of Diversity

5 Staging Difference, Performing Diversity

6 Diversity Regimes and the Reproduction of Racial Inequality

Appendix: Studying Inequality, in Situ

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

DIVERSITY REGIMES

1 Introduction

Election Night, 2012

My wife and I stayed up late November 6, 2012, to watch the election results live on television. As it became more certain Barack Obama would be elected to a second term, we reflected on Obama’s first four years as our nation’s president—the nation’s first African American president. We discussed the social significance, if there was any, to Obama’s reelection.

Obama’s first four years had not delivered the hope he had campaigned on—the hope we thought we were promised. The year Barack Obama took office—2008—the unemployment rate for African Americans steadily increased from less than 9 percent to over 12 percent. The night of his reelection in 2012, it was just over 13 percent.¹ In both instances, the rate of unemployment for African Americans remained double that of white Americans, a trend that preceded Obama’s presidency but would not be corrected during either of his terms. Despite little, if any, change in the socioeconomic conditions for people of color, Obama’s election and reelection did offer a symbolic representation of the potential for shifting racial power. That symbolism is fraught with contradictions, of course,² yet, the image remains compelling for many African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities, as well as centrist and liberal-leaning whites. This is so not for what it suggests America is, but for what it suggests America could be.

That night, I lay awake in bed thinking about Oxford, Mississippi, where I live and work. I imagined what must be going through the minds of other residents of this small, Southern town. I had a feeling, later confirmed, that most of those in my community had voted for Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee.³ I imagined their disappointment but thought it similar to the disappointment they feel when their university’s football team loses to a conference rival. I could not have been more wrong.

I awoke around five o’clock the next morning and put on my sweatshirt and sweatpants. I walked downstairs, poured a glass of chocolate milk, grabbed my car keys, and headed out the front door. I turned my car radio to MSNBC, where the pundits for Morning Joe were rehashing the results from the night before.

Following my workout, I arrived in my office to find an email the chancellor had sent just a few hours prior. My eyes grew wide as I learned what had transpired while I slept. Around the same time the Associated Press called the election for Obama, several white students at the University of Mississippi had posted a series of racist tweets:

Black girls crying on TV because they’re so happy they STILL don’t have to get jobs and government get to be their baby daddy.

History will repeat itself. The Confederacy will be back, bitch.

If the South had won 147 years ago, then we wouldn’t have this problem.

The South will rise again!

Around 11:15 p.m., some students at the university reported loud noises coming from a dormitory on the northwest side of campus.⁴ Some students used social media to report gunfire, though it was later determined that they heard firecrackers. By about 11:30 p.m., between forty and fifty students had gathered in the Grove, the large green space in the heart of campus. In less than thirty minutes, the crowd had swelled to approximately four hundred students, mostly white. Sometime after midnight, this crowd became hostile. They began shouting racial epithets and taunting African American bystanders. Cars and trucks parked on the surrounding driveway of the Grove blasted Dixie, while cries of The South shall rise again rang through the night. Reporters with the campus news station captured video of a truck driving past black students, its white driver yelling, Niggers! It was not until just past one o’clock in the morning that campus police were able to disperse the crowd.

One particular sentence in the chancellor’s email held my attention: Parents are being notified that it’s a normal day on campus and that one of America’s safest campuses is safe again this morning.⁵ Safe again? What does that even mean in this context, I remember thinking. As a sociologist, I am drawn to questions about social structure: the external conditions that shape and direct collective behavior. I could not help but wonder what underlying conditions might have shaped and directed the election night fiasco, and later, the university’s responses to it.

In the weeks that followed, the University of Mississippi’s public relations engine worked overtime to minimize the events of election night, portraying them as an anomaly and nothing more. Despite the massive gathering, the eyewitness accounts of objects being thrown at African American bystanders, the video recording of white protestors shouting racial slurs, and the infamous photograph of students lighting an Obama/Biden campaign sign on fire, the university rejected any suggestion that what took place was a riot. Indeed, a report by the university’s Incident Review Committee, an ad hoc group of faculty, staff, and administrators, declared such claims a myth.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines a riot as

A: public violence, tumult, or disorder

B: a violent public disorder; specifically: a tumultuous disturbance of the public peace by three or more persons assembled together and acting with a common intent

Meanwhile, the sociologist Gary Marx defines a riot as an expression of relatively spontaneous illegitimate group violence contrary to traditional norms.⁶ The unrest on the University of Mississippi’s campus on election night was unquestionably a riot. It is not surprising that the university rejects that label. The year of the election night riot also marked the fiftieth anniversary of The Battle of Oxford, a violent encounter between U.S. marshals and a mob of white students and local residents who sought to prevent James Meredith, an African American and U.S. Army veteran, from enrolling in (and thus integrating) the university.⁷ The university had planned a full academic year’s worth of programming to commemorate its integration. This programming framed the fifty years since as a period in which the university shifted from a closed society to one that embraced diversity and inclusion in all of its forms. To label the event from election night a riot would undermine this grand narrative. Yet less than ten weeks into the fall term, the University of Mississippi was again the staging ground for a major drama on American racism.

New to Oxford, to Mississippi, and the American South, I wondered how a college campus with such a public commitment to diversity and inclusion could be the scene of such public racial conflict. I learned from colleagues and students that a similar event occurred in 2008 following Obama’s victory over Senator John McCain. Indeed, the day of the 2012 election, the campus police chief instructed officers to remain diligent, acknowledging that the night’s events were a possibility, even if just a remote one. Many of my colleagues used the election night riot as a bridge to voice their frustrations with other issues they saw rooted in the same soil: a lack of institutional support for minority faculty and staff, failed efforts to recruit and retain minority faculty and students, and poor institutional oversight and responsiveness to a hostile racial climate. These colleagues had grown weary from fighting the same battles with little acknowledgment from campus leadership that a problem even existed.

The election night riot and its aftermath serve as the initial context for writing this book. The University of Mississippi is not unique, and in fact, other college campuses experienced similar unrest that night.⁸ Like many American colleges and universities, the University of Mississippi has embraced a wide-reaching diversity initiative yet struggles to reconcile this public commitment with the realities of everyday racism on its campus. To date, how it and other campuses negotiate this struggle has received little scholarly attention. I intend to shed light upon this struggle between public commitments to racial harmony and the lived realities of racial inequality, so that we can better understand how and why racial inequality persists in an era otherwise saturated with public affirmations of multiculturalism. This book begins with election night of 2012 at the University of Mississippi, but this is not a book about election night or the University of Mississippi. This is a book about any number of American colleges and universities where the race toward diversity and inclusion is a race run in circles, with far too little to show for the efforts.

The Problem Defined

This book analyzes the creation, organization, and implementation of diversity initiatives on college campuses, centering what sociologist Everett Hughes calls the going concerns of diversity in American higher education: the dynamic and often contested set of interactions between an active core of people and the social definition of how and when they act.⁹ Research on diversity overwhelmingly measures its intended and unintended consequences: increases or decreases in representation, hiring and promotion, or other agreed-upon metrics. I find that by focusing on diversity’s outcomes, we take for granted diversity’s processes: the discursive, structural, and interactive mechanisms that shape those outcomes. Finally, this book challenges assumptions about diversity’s role in creating a more just and equal campus. I argue that how diversity is organized and practiced on most college campuses maintains and reproduces, rather than contests, racial inequality.¹⁰ The title of my book, Diversity Regimes, captures how this maintenance and reproduction occurs.

Despite significant changes in their funding, curriculum, and staffing, colleges and universities remain important agents of socialization and social mobility. Higher education proponents recognize the university as a site that promotes core values including democracy, equality, independence, and civic responsibility.¹¹ Pundits and scholars alike stress how important a college degree was for creating a more level playing field for women, racial and ethnic minorities, and the working class in the latter half of the twentieth century.¹² In his speech to the Inter-American Development Bank in December 2012, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared that a college education is the surest path out of poverty, arguing that the American system of higher education is the great equalizer, the one force that empowers people to overcome differences in power and privilege.¹³

There are, of course, serious criticisms of American colleges and universities. Since the 1980s, austerity measures at the federal and state levels have resulted in significant disinvestment in public higher education. Tuition and associated fees have skyrocketed, making college unaffordable for all but the most affluent and greatly reducing opportunities for poor and near-poor students.¹⁴ Despite sweeping legislation during the civil rights era, research finds that opportunities for higher education remain greater for white students than for nonwhite students, and as a result maintain rather than reduce or eliminate intergenerational racial inequality.¹⁵ For many working class students and students of color, a university education remains a pipe dream, as does the promise of social mobility said to come from a college degree.¹⁶

Nevertheless, Americans consistently perceive higher education as a social equalizer. Indeed, racial and ethnic minorities hold this belief most strongly. A recent nationally representative survey finds, for example, that while just 47 percent of whites view college education as necessary for success; this attitude prevails among 70 percent of Hispanics, 61 percent of Asian Americans, and 55 percent of African Americans.¹⁷ A separate survey finds that 76 percent of African Americans and 84 percent of Hispanics agree that a college degree is essential for living the good life, compared to just 64 percent of whites.¹⁸

What accounts for racial and ethnic minorities’ greater faith in American higher education, especially since their access to colleges and universities remains unequal? Civil rights legislation in the 1960s and 1970s made discrimination based on gender, race, or ethnicity in American institutions, including higher education, unlawful. This helped open the door to college admissions for women, African Americans, Hispanics, and other minority groups. Yet it was a 1978 Supreme Court case that fundamentally altered the landscape of higher education. In Regents of California v. Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell authored an opinion that college admissions ought to consider diversity, so long as race or ethnicity is not the only element considered. Diversity, wrote Powell, could include

exceptional personal talents, unique work or service experience, leadership potential, maturity, demonstrated compassion, a history of overcoming disadvantage, ability to communicate with the poor, or other qualifications deemed important. In short, an admissions program operated in this way is flexible enough to consider all pertinent elements of diversity in light of the particular qualifications of each applicant, and to place them on the same footing for consideration, although not necessarily according them the same weight [emphasis mine].¹⁹

Powell’s opinion that diversity improves the educational experience for everyone provided legal justification for colleges and universities to consider race and ethnicity in their admissions processes. Powell’s opinion also provided some legal cover for colleges and universities to create new policies for the recruitment of minority students. As a consequence, American colleges and universities have seen enormous gains in minority student enrollment. Between 1976 and 2015, the number African American college enrollments increased by nearly 160 percent, Hispanic enrollments by more than 750 percent, and Asian/Pacific Islander enrollments by almost 550 percent. In 1976, white students accounted for nearly 83 percent of all college enrollments in degree-granting postsecondary institutions. By 2015, that figure was less than 55 percent.²⁰ These shifts are accompanied by significant investment in what we might call diversity’s infrastructure: campus multicultural centers and missions; new academic and student-focused divisions centered on multicultural awareness; and curriculum, degree programs, and even entire departments centered on race and ethnicity in contemporary society.²¹ These demographic and institutional shifts affect Americans’ attitudes toward higher education, even as colleges and universities remain transmitters of inequality and privilege.²²

The demographic and institutional changes within American colleges and universities lead some to conclude that the post-Bakke race to diversity has been successful.²³ Research, however, shows a more complex outcome. Racially diverse campuses may produce long-term psychological and social gains for their students, but research suggests these gains are greatest for white students and weakest for racial and ethnic minorities.²⁴ Meanwhile, university commitments to diversity have not proven effective in reducing minority students’ experiences of isolation, alienation, and daily microaggressions—part of what we might call everyday racism.²⁵ Minority faculty’s experiences with everyday racism mirror those of students. Minority faculty report encounters with students who challenge their competence, knowledge, and authority.²⁶ As a whole, minority faculty remain woefully underrepresented at every faculty rank.²⁷

In addition to everyday racism, minority students and faculty confront increasingly explicit and violent forms of racism on their college campuses. A 2001 report from the Department of Justice, Hate Crimes on Campus, noted more than 220 self-reported hate crime incidents in that year alone; 57 percent were racially motivated, with another 18 percent motivated by antisemitism.²⁸ In 2013, the FBI reported more than 780 hate crimes on college campuses, and in 2014 college campuses were the third most common site for hate crimes, accounting for 9 percent of all reported incidents.²⁹ When taken into consideration with the recent wave of campus protests against racism, these findings suggest that diversity’s success is incomplete or deficient at best.³⁰ More numerically diverse than ever, and with nearly ubiquitous commitments to diversity and inclusion, colleges and universities remain sites where racial conflict and inequality persist. This book provides insight into why.

Scholars who study diversity find that among ordinary actors, it has multiple and contested meanings. For many, diversity is enriching. The idea of people from different backgrounds coming together through shared values and working toward shared goals fits well with the ethos of America as a melting pot.³¹ Sociologists Douglas Hartmann and Joyce Bell aptly coined the term happy talk to describe this particular set of meanings.³² Yet happy talk—even among those considered both well-informed and articulate about diversity—often fails to capture the continued problems of race and inequality.³³ Instead, happy talk treats diversity as something to be tolerated, or even celebrated, without considering whether and how power shapes people’s interactions with others different from themselves. As a result, happy talk obfuscates social problems associated with race and ethnicity and dismisses the continued significance of race in maintaining social inequalities.³⁴

Scholars studying organizations and management find that happy talk is central to diversity policies and outcomes. Sociologist Lauren Edelman and her colleagues, for example, examined professional management literature to better understand how for-profit companies position diversity as a positive social value.³⁵ Their research demonstrates that happy talk within managerial discourse disassociates diversity from civil rights law and collapses legally protected categories of difference—race, ethnicity, sex, and religion—with elements of diversity not protected by civil rights law. Managerial discourse on diversity often assigns equal, positive social value to all elements of difference, effectively ignoring how certain kinds of difference matter for reproducing the power structure of the organization. In a complementary analysis of diversity discourse at the University of Michigan, sociologist Ellen Berrey found that diversity policies emphasized occupational and cultural competencies alongside racial and ethnic differences. This effectively collapsed socially and politically meaningful differences between race, attitudes, and work styles, resulting in a diversity-is-everyone/everyone-is-diversity mantra that did little to challenge the status quo.³⁶ Elsewhere, sociologist David Embrick has found that in the most egregious cases, organizational diversity policy excludes race and gender equality altogether.³⁷

Finally, sociologist Frank Dobbin examines what effects, if any, diversity policies have on organizational outcomes. He and his colleagues find that organizations with token minority representation are less likely to adopt diversity programs than organizations that lack even token representation. For organizations that create and implement diversity programs, it does not appear to matter whether those programs actually increase minority representation. Instead, what matters is that organizations can point to these programs as reflecting positively on their organizational image. Perhaps most tellingly of organizations’ intentions behind diversity policies and programs, Dobbin and his colleagues find that the programs most successful in recruiting, retaining, and advancing women and racial and ethnic minorities in the professional ranks are the least commonly adopted. Meanwhile, programs that are least successful in recruiting, retaining, and advancing women and racial and ethnic minorities are the most prevalent.³⁸ These findings suggest that what matters most for organizations is that they show a commitment to diversity in the abstract, not that they produce meaningful change in how power, resources, opportunities, and decision-making are distributed.

Most of this organizational research on diversity centers on for-profit companies; however, some studies look at educational institutions, including higher education. Observing diversity’s architecture at a major public university, legal scholar Susan Sturm shows that how and where diversity initiatives are housed on campus marginalizes those efforts. For example, Sturm finds that diversity management is typically segregated from the executive office and therefore kept out of key decision-making processes. Meanwhile, the professionalizing and compartmentalizing of organizational goals relegates diversity management as a special division within human resources. Consequently, departments and divisions across campus have little awareness of what kinds of diversity efforts are taking place elsewhere. Relatedly, Sturm finds that the individuals most typically responsible for doing diversity work—select professors and staff in student affairs—frequently have little contact or coordination with the campus chief diversity officer.³⁹

Ellen Berrey’s aforementioned research at the University of Michigan reveals how diversity rhetoric there redefines race from a matter of legal redress for previous exclusion to one of cultural identity. This leads to the promotion of racial tolerance and difference but comes at the expense of addressing structural barriers to opportunity and resources.⁴⁰ Elsewhere, sociologists Amir Marvasti and Karyn McKinney surveyed students, faculty, and staff at a small liberal arts college to reveal the pervasiveness of happy talk and diversity’s lack of universal meaning. Their survey results indicate that diversity and the organizational policies and programs associated with it are disassociated with existing inequalities on campus.⁴¹ Finally, in interviews and classroom observations with elementary school teachers, sociologist Antonia Randolph finds that as a matter of practice, diversity eschews the harder conversations on race, power, and inequality in favor of benign celebrations of difference.⁴²

Much of the aforementioned research on diversity reveals a great deal of scholarly attention toward the material and symbolic consequences of happy talk. Yet relatively little attention is paid toward the processes through which happy talk, or what we might think of as hollow diversity, is produced, organized, and deployed. To date, we have a limited sociological understanding of the process through which diversity’s hollow meaning arises, what conflicts and contingencies are involved in this process, and how the