Diversity Regimes

Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities

James M. Thomas

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781978800410, 9781978800427
• eBook ISBN: 9781978800434
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

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.

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, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 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