Abstract
Book reviews are the checks and balances for publication. We pick books up and put them down daily, captured by some, dismissive of others. Challenging the Status Quo: Diversity, Democracy, and Equality in the 21 st Century might have become a volume dismissed—its cover in paper and cloth is forgettable; its title is indistinct; and the introductory chapter, a lost opportunity. The writing is uneven and the variety of topics too wide. While the majority of essays focus on the effects of neoliberal ideologies on the honorable pursuit of diversity and the racial transformation of higher education, additional essays on diversity and racism in juvenile justice, Netflix programming, the military, and church congregations reveal how genuinely the collection lacks coherence. Suffice it to say, the book has an identity crisis.
But keep reading. Despite these complaints, Challenging the Status Quo deserves to be on the shelves of every one of us in higher education. It is no hyperbole to note that each chapter is better than the one that precedes it. The essays are a breath of fresh air at “a moment,” some of its contributors write, “of increasing racial inequality coupled with an increasing commitment to” post-racialism and political colorblindness (p. 323).
A more fully developed introduction by David Embrick, one of the volume’s editors, might have contextualized the shoulders on which contemporary, hollowed-out diversity stands—the human liberation struggles of the 1960s. What does become clear in his essay, however, is that dominant groups have deployed their power hegemonically, usurping the most influential concepts of racial liberation, like diversity and inclusion, in the service of maintaining the status quo. Genuine diversity has transformed lives marked by homogeneity and “the danger of a single story” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), has increased knowledge about historical and contemporary inequality, and has exposed so many of us to authentic cosmopolitanism.
It’s also true that Sharon Collins, a co-editor, might have penned a more contemporary and compelling take on affirmative action for the second chapter. A dramatically updated look from the Clinton presidency to the present, offering a fuller context of the difficulties of even naming the need for targeted policies in this “post-racial” moment, would have offered the other chapters on higher education a sounder foundation. But for those unfamiliar with the history of affirmative action, her chapter offers a solid background.
This said, we have Embrick and Collins primarily to thank for gathering this volume together, and Michelle Dodson, the third editor, for bringing it to fruition. Within its covers are some remarkable, eloquent, disturbing, and useful essays.
Neoliberal ideologies focus on the individual in ways that reward those who are privileged, punish those who are oppressed, deny the usefulness of government, conflate the state with the goals of the politically, economically, and militarily privileged, undermine democratic tendencies, and normalize the consolidation of capital, social and otherwise, interpreting the processes that make such consolidation possible as neutral or just, as long as that capital is occasionally deployed with good intentions.
Certainly, higher education is caught in the crosshairs of these competing impulses: dependent on the state, increasingly dependent on capital, and yet often striving to prepare students for the challenges of true democratic participation and the ally-ship and mutuality that are required of global citizenship.
Readers will find excellent summaries of research and first-rate theorizing on a number of topics that expose the vulnerability of genuine diversity in higher education and the unwelcome guest of neoliberalism. There are several chapters that offer readers concepts that elucidate our current situation. To name a few:
Joyce M. Bell and Wendy Leo Moore’s “Disfavored Subjects: How Liberalist Diversity Fails Racial Equity in Higher Education” observes how “the dominant post-civil rights ideological and discursive frame” both refers to civil rights concepts of equality, colorblindness, and democracy while protecting “white privilege, power, and wealth by rhetorically divorcing these concepts from the structural realities of racial inequality (Bell 1992)” (p. 74). For any of us who see no relationship between privilege and oppression, Bell and Moore call us to attention.
Victor Erik Ray’s chapter “Critical Diversity in the U.S. Military: From Diversity to Racialized Organizations” introduces the concept of “punitive empathy: an organizational mechanism through which apparently helpful programs such as equal opportunity reporting procedures exacerbate problems for soldiers by marking them as trouble-makers, unfit for service or work” (p. 291). For any of us that have heard that in the military there is not black or white, only khaki green, Ray’s work is an important intervention.
Laurie Cooper Stoll and Megan Klein expose how whites who participate in progressive multiracial causes without living in multiracial neighborhoods are able to recognize difference and benefit from its proximity without “having to confront and address racial inequalities” in their essay “‘Not in My Backyard’: How Abstract Liberalism and Colorblind Diversity Undermine Racial Justice.” They equate “diversity discourse” with what Bell and Hartmann (2007) call “happy talk” and what Andersen (1999) refers to as “diversity without oppression” (p. 220). For any of us who have now drunk the Diversity Kool-Aid without changing anything in our lives, they hold up a mirror that is unbecoming.
In her chapter “Sympathetic Racism: Color-Blind Discourse’s Liberal Flair in Three Diverse Communities,” Meghan A. Burke describes sympathetic racism as “characterized by an explicit disavowal of racism and racial inequality” while simultaneously using “familiar racist tropes.” It is, she writes, “liberal in its politics, benevolent in its affect, and often racist in its reliance on cultural assumptions and racial codes” (pp. 243–44). This essay is for any of us who have put up a sign in our front yard that “Hatred has no home here” without figuring out how to put it into action.
Based on careful research, Michelle Dodson cautions her readers not to assume that multiracial churches are truly multiracial (p. 199); and Bianca Gonzalez-Sobrino, Emma González-Lesser, and Matthew W. Hughey offer the same advice about television shows with multiracial casts—they don’t give speaking parts to non-white characters, and they default to racialized stereotypes (p. 323). Paul Ketchum reveals disturbing evidence of how steeped in racist cultural assumptions juvenile justice professionals continue to be and how that affects the advice and treatment they give to young people (p. 263); and Tiffany Davis, Wendy Leo Moore, and Joyce M. Bell offer thoughtful autoethnographic insights on the social construction of race from their experiences teaching about it (p. 119).
In short, this volume will prove enlightening and welcome to anyone teaching courses on social inequality, the sociology of education, political sociology, or the sociology of policy and ideology. And for those of you trying to make sense for yourselves or your students of this moment when outrage about mass incarceration, gun violence, and institutionalized racism is rhetorically emphatic while the country seems otherwise politically paralyzed and ever more manic about the fantasy of economic security and the protection of racial privilege, Challenging the Status Quo offers important essays to read and reread.