Abstract
For many, the Trump era has crystallized the crises of the twenty-first century in clear ways: deepening class inequality, bare-naked racism and xenophobia, persisting attacks on the rights of women and LGBTQIA+ communities, climate disaster, and persisting imperialism vis-à-vis the instigation of war in a variety of regions. All American institutions are embedded and implicated in this political environment, especially universities, where exclusion and inequality have been central features in the development of elite, selective institutions, and even in the democratizing origins of mass higher education. Contemporary conservative backlash against policies such as affirmative action, public mobilization over hate speech and white nationalism and demands to address the mounting student debt burden place universities at the center of the current crisis—do we radically change our approach to these institutions or do we make incremental reforms and hope that these changes buy us more time?
Rethinking Diversity Frameworks in Higher Education, by Edna B. Chun and Joe R. Feagin, argues that administrative approaches to addressing campus diversity and inequality are limited because they do not attend to systemic racism and sexism. By critiquing implicit and unconscious bias approaches, microaggressions, and the specific ways that campus diversity trainings and university policy incorporate these frameworks, Chun and Feagin demonstrate the failure of this programming to fundamentally challenge race, gender, and sexuality exclusion and the maintenance of white dominance on campus. Rethinking Diversity Frameworks in Higher Education draws from Feagin’s illustrious career as a scholar of white supremacy and applies widely cited concepts such as “white racial frame” and “two-faced racism” to the contemporary selective university context. Using interview studies and analyses of university programming and policies, the authors also provide recommendations for university administrators.
The core, and the most compelling part, of the book forces scholars and university professionals to reject implicit bias and microaggressions as a sufficient description of the operation of racism and sexism on campuses and instead embrace a different, more historical and systemic understanding of discrimination. In Chapter Three, “Questioning ‘Implicit Bias’ and ‘Microaggressions’: Toward Better Terminology and Concepts,” Chun and Feagin problematize the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which is widely used in developing diversity programs on campuses and in workplaces, by drawing attention to methodological and procedural concerns and highlighting perhaps even more disturbing efforts made to further quantify and biologize racism by pairing IAT with MRI and other neuroscientific testing. The authors argue that this approach “downplays the role of human consciousness in acts of racial framing and discrimination and neglects the deep historical and socially embedded nature of white-racist framing in the United States” (p. 87). The authors ultimately place into question the professed analytical and predictive import of implicit bias research and its failure to attend to human intentionality and racist socialization.
Chun and Feagin complicate the concept and vocabulary of microaggressions in Chapters Three and Four, troubling the post-civil rights description of “subtle” interpersonal discrimination. The authors indicate that the term de-emphasizes the impact of discrimination (which legally makes it more difficult to prove intentional, overt discrimination), centers on individual actors rather than dominant social structures, and again suggests a lack of intent by the aggressor. Instead, they suggest that the “systemic racism frame” and the “male sexist frame” better account for power, history, and socialization. The authors provide ample first-person accounts of faculty and administrators navigating hostile, discriminatory campus environments; these accounts illustrate the structural consequences of institutional discrimination, including lack of career advancement, minimal resource allocation, and personal trauma. Rather than microaggressions, they argue that a new framework should conceptualize this behavior as “covert racial and gender discrimination, whose intentionality is hidden within highly nuanced institutionalized processes and cleverly disguised in vague ‘meritocratic’ justifications” (p. 129, emphasis in original).
Their attention to identity politics in Chapter Five, “Imposed Racial Identities: Another Essential Concept,” is a bit clunky, focusing on what they term “imposed racial identities” that the white racial frame produces, without citing a robust literature on racialization, the white gaze, or, yes, identity politics. Chapter Six, “Resisting and Coping with Everyday Discrimination,” provides insight into career survival tactics among faculty, students, and administrators of color and will be useful for graduate students contemplating entrance into the academy, future diversity officers, and early career faculty.
The concluding chapter promises recommendations that will support university professionals in improving campus racial and gender environments, such as attending to the impact of discriminatory standardized testing, admissions criteria, and financial aid on underrepresented students; advocating for better funding of public institutions; implementing an institutional diversity audit; developing standards for diversity and inclusion progress in university strategic planning; increasing representation of nondominant faculty; investing resources in systematic (rather than piecemeal) diversity education; conducting research on university inclusion; and more. Importantly, at the opening of the chapter, Chun and Feagin relay a story about how a number of universities commissioned the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Study of Race and Equity in Education to study the racial climate on their respective campuses. Though the institutions paid “large sums of money” to initiate these studies, they chose to “remain in denial” about race-related issues, ignoring the research findings. This prescient point is lost in the chapter’s introduction, yet raises major questions of the text: what if administrators know and do not desire to improve these campus climates? What if administrators maintain diversity and inclusion efforts because they are integral to the progressive, selective university system, and not for purposes of access and social justice?
The authors are correct in arguing that the contemporary political moment highlights the limitations of campus diversity frameworks and policy development. But the same intentionality of the dominant and discriminatory actors missing from unconscious bias and microaggression frameworks is also missing from the authors’ implicit assumptions made about university administration and governance. The leadership and administration of many prominent universities likely lack the commitment and care to do more than maintain moderate diversity in the student body. Thus, attention to addressing the hostile work environment of underrepresented faculty or the contentious campus climate of students may be less important than building a public façade of racial progress. This should be considered in the context of rising tuition, reliance on alumni dollars, and the role of external political actors on campus—especially in the realm of university affiliated centers, think tanks, and board of trustees influence.
Diversity is treated as a given category in this text, rather than a social construction that emerges out of attacks on desegregation and racial compensatory programs as a result of the Regents of University of California v. Bakke Supreme Court decision. This specific historical development could have provided more context to the contemporary limitations of diversity rhetoric and practice on campuses. Additionally, while the authors apply their arguments to a wide range of institution types, the text implicitly focuses on selective public and private institutions. Attention to the ways that less selective institutions as well as Historically Black Colleges, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges are also engaging with diversity frameworks would have been illuminating. These are the institutions that educate the most minority students, and thus inclusion of these educational institutions would likely have provided more insight into these larger questions about inclusion, access, and policy development.
Rethinking Diversity Frameworks in Higher Education provides what the authors consider to be practical, reasonable solutions that perhaps administrators would be willing to consider. However, in the wake of this political moment, one wonders what more could be possible.