Difference and Diversity on Campus

By Mike Haskins

 

Because Global Outreach facilitates cultural immersion projects in foreign countries, student participants encounter different perspectives on race than those typically presented in the United States. To understand those differences, students dialogue and reflect upon their experiences. If those discussions become heated, it is partly due to the warped understanding of race in this country. While most people would agree that diversity and tolerance promote well-being, many fail to understand how that language functions to dissimulate race in the name of assimilation.

 

In the United States, race is discussed in the liberal context with the aim of creating a “colorblind” society. Diversity is said to provide alternate perspectives or to enrich cultural understanding—as if the presence of people of color somehow adds “flavor” to society. I think that any meaningful discussion of race needs to take the idea of difference as a starting point and acknowledge the function of race in society. I think that campus diversity provides grounds for exploration in this area.

 

From the perspective of difference, each person is constituted by multiple factors, such as gender, class, sexuality, etc. These factors inform each person in a variety of ways. For example, society expects women to attend to certain norms – like wearing make-up – that it does not expect of—or even disapproves of – in men. Race is one of these factors and it entails certain norms, although these norms can be and are contested.

 

To deny race, or to pretend that we live in a colorblind society, requires us to ignore the norms society expects of people based on their race; to ignore their differences. When we talk about diversity without talking about difference, we replicate in language a society that normalizes difference but refuses to recognize it. This failure to recognize difference can help us understand why racism persists despite putative equality in law, although this failure does not provide the whole story. Society should not expect certain, different norms from different racial groups and simultaneously treat those groups the same in its legal framework.

 

One of the results of the civil rights movement has been the establishment of affirmative action policies on college campuses. In a charitable light, affirmative action extends the right of higher education to racial minorities as groups. In a harsher light, the same policy actually facilitates assimilation by fracturing racial minorities along class lines—wealthy minorities (those who can afford to pay for college) earn the opportunity to advance, and thus to establish themselves within and on the terms of the dominant culture, while low-income minorities remain excluded.

 

The most complete understanding of affirmative action probably involves some of both of these cases. When we praise diversity on campus, we are lauding the results of these policies. One of the problems with this conversation is that it rarely moves beyond jejune praise or accounts for the role of affirmative action, which is of course hotly contested, challenged, and decried.

 

Diversity is meaningless, even insidious, if it perpetuates ignorance. By starting from the idea of difference, my hope is that the conversation around diversity will be more likely to move forward. An understanding of difference can reveal the contradictions and inconsistencies in the idea of a colorblind society. An understanding of difference can also give students the means to discuss race cogently, rather than ignore the issue for fear of offending others.

 

For further reading on difference and diversity in an academic context, see Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. For topical discussions, see the blog ColorLines.