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Intro -- Contents -- Introduction -- One / The Symbolic Politics of Racial Progress -- Part I: Undergraduate Admissions at the University of Michigan -- Two / "Academically Excellent and Diverse" -- Three / Gratz, Grutter, and the Public Relations of Defending Affirmative Action -- Part II: Housing Politics in Rogers Park -- Four / "The Most Diverse Neighborhood in Chicago" -- Five / Gentrification, Displacement, and Color-Blind Opposition to Subsidized Housing -- Part III: Human Resource Management in Starr Corporation -- Six / "Diversity Is a Strength of Starr Corporation" -- Seven / Diversity Management, Shareholder Capitalism, and the Biases of Meritocracy -- Conclusion / Neoliberalism, Color Blindness, and Inequality in the Age of Diversity -- Acknowledgments -- Methodological Appendix -- Notes -- References -- Index.

AbstractThe politics of affirmative action are currently structured as a litigious conflict among elites taking polarized stances. Opponents call for colorblindness, and defenders champion diversity. How can marginalized activists subvert the dominant terms of legal debate? To what extent can they establish their legitimacy? This paper advances legal mobilization theory by analytically foregrounding the field of contention and the relational production of meaning among social movement organizations. The case for study is two landmark United States Supreme Court cases that contested the University of Michigan's race-conscious admissions policies. Using ethnographic data, the paper analyzes BAMN, an activist organization, and its reception by other affirmative action supporters. BAMN had a marginalized allied-outsider status in the legal cases, as it made a radical civil rights claim for a moderate, elite-supported policy: that affirmative action corrects systemic racial discrimination. BAMN activists pursued their agenda by passionately defending and, at once, critiquing the university's policies. However, the organization's militancy remained a liability among university leaders, who prioritized the consistency of their diversity claims. The analysis forwards a scholarly understanding of the legacy of race-conscious policies.

Research on workplace inequality focuses largely on gender and racial disparities at work and contributing factors, while those who study diversity interventions tend to ask how these might be remedied. This article takes a different tack, asking the following: What ideals and cultural assumptions about social progress undergird workplace diversity programs, and with what consequences? Drawing from neoinstitutionalism and workplace ethnography, I examine diversity management in a multinational company based on a year of field research. At this company, diversity programs are for high-status women and people of color. Findings advance the study of workplace inequality and, more generally, the relational study of meaning making in real-life institutional contexts. They show that diversity management programs attempt to minimize gender and racial boundaries by codifying egalitarian ideals in organizational structures, and those definitions can reify class-based hierarchies. The findings also push social scientists to conceptualize inequality and equality as cultural constructs and to consider the biases of scientific measurements of inequality.

In 1988, Chris Burns, an African Americanman who builtmachinery for the military, injured his back on the job while carrying a heavy metal plate. He requested different work responsibilities and was fired soon after.

Using qualitative data about University of Michigan between 1965 and 2005, this article shows how administrators' diversity discourse and programs have defined race as a cultural identity, expressed through interaction, which provides instrumental benefits. It also explains three major reasons why, starting in the mid-1980s, university administrators adopted this racial orthodoxy of "diversity": to signal compliance with—and also to redefine—law and institutional norms while still practicing race-based affirmative admissions; to frame inclusion in more complex terms than a racial binary or numerical representation amidst growing campus multiculturalism; and to market the university, especially to white students. The article advances racial formation theory by developing the concept of a racial orthodoxy. It shows that diversity discourse and programs have sometimes advanced the goal of racial minority inclusion, but at the cost of downplaying problems of racial inequality and misrepresenting racial minorities' campus experiences.

Diversity policies and programs have become commonplace across the United States, from multinational companies to colleges and universities. Some scholars are beginning to question who benefits from these policies. Among them is Walter Benn Michaels, professor and chair of the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. An iconoclast in his field, Michaels published The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Metropolitan Books) last year. He met me at his UIC office, his throat sore from speaking engagements.

In a Chicago neighborhood made up of different racial and economic groups, nearly everyone claims to value diversity. Yet, this powerful and plastic symbol can influence political activity in opposite directions. An ethnographic study of the neighborhood shows how three different groups—white real estate professionals and politicians, white progressive organizers, and black low‐income housing advocates—deploy diversity. It presents three key findings: (1) mixed‐income housing often becomes a proxy for diversity; (2) the diversity concept can support progressive politics while downplaying certain racial and class disparities; and (3) a focus on neighborhood diversity can obscure issues that poor people care about, including tenants rights. By providing a microlevel perspective on diversity discourse, these findings demonstrate how a shared symbol can both illuminate and veil fundamental disagreements over race, class, inequality, and gentrification in cities today.

Many large-scale, ongoing welfare research projects will release interim or final reports in 1999. In addition, the federal government is funding studies about different populations and programs that, in general, have not been the subject of welfare research. This article describes: © Recent findings from some of the large-scale welfare waiver experiments and major national research efforts; © Relatively new federally-funded research projects; and © The evaluations that expect to release final reports in 1999. This research is contributing to an extensive body of knowledge about the effects of the welfare waiver programs initiated in the early 1990's, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), and related social policies. The Research Forum is currently keeping track of these and other research projects. Of the 43 large-scale research projects in the Research Forum's on-line database, 27 have impact studies (20 of which are controlled experiments). Also included are implementation studies (some of which relate to the impact research), child outcomes studies embedded in larger impact studies, and policy analyses. Many smaller projects are also underway. Summaries of the 43 large-scale projects and 60 small-scale projects, names of individuals to contact for additional project information, and existing and forthcoming publications are all accessible at the Forum's web site: www.researchforum.org.

Discussions of U.S. affirmative action policy assume that considering race in undergraduate admissions increases Black and Latinx student enrollments. We show that this assumption that affirmative action is linked to Black and Latinx student enrollments holds true for higher-status colleges and universities, but not institutions across the field of higher education. We use fixed effects modeling to analyze the association between a stated affirmative action admissions policy and enrollment trends for first-year students of different racialized backgrounds between 1990 and 2016 at 1,127 selective institutions. We find that, at the most selective institutions, stated policy usage was associated with increased Black student enrollments. However, at less selective institutions, policy usage was associated with decreased Black student enrollments and increased Non-U.S. resident enrollments. We also identify close-to-zero estimates of this relationship for enrollment trends of additional demographic backgrounds. We use these findings to elaborate the role of field-level status dynamics in racialized organizations theory. Paradoxically, U.S. American higher education's contemporary racialized status order roughly consists of higher-status institutions that consider race in admissions but do not enroll racially heterogeneous cohorts, middle-status institutions that do not consider race but enroll racially heterogeneous cohorts, and lower-status non-selective institutions that enroll disproportionately high numbers of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students.