The enigma of diversity is the puzzle of what, exactly, political and organizational decision-makers intend to accomplish with an objective of diversity. There has been a monumental cultural shift since the Civil Rights Act was passed 60 years ago to end discrimination. Has the civil rights movement been hijacked, or has it gone mainstream? Berrey uncovers the power dynamics, paradoxes, promises, and pitfalls of treating race as diversity. She does with three excellent case studies: housing redevelopment in Chicago s Rogers ...
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The enigma of diversity is the puzzle of what, exactly, political and organizational decision-makers intend to accomplish with an objective of diversity. There has been a monumental cultural shift since the Civil Rights Act was passed 60 years ago to end discrimination. Has the civil rights movement been hijacked, or has it gone mainstream? Berrey uncovers the power dynamics, paradoxes, promises, and pitfalls of treating race as diversity. She does with three excellent case studies: housing redevelopment in Chicago s Rogers Park, affirmative action in admissions at the University of Michigan, and human resource management in a Fortune 500 company (she calls It Starr, a multinational public company that produces consumer goods, with 100,000 employees). She deftly explores the legal arguments and relentless messaging at Michigan, showing how the university s drive for diversity successfully defended affirmative action while concealing the reality of racial inequality. She charts key moments in Rogers Park s drive for diversity, discussing how political officials, developers, and activists constructed racial and ethnic differences as a common group interest, and how diversity was appropriated by the officials and developers to drive out long-term, low-income residents from prime real estate. At Starr, finally, we learn how the diversity personnel drew on symbolic politics of diversity to support people of color and womenbut only those at the top of the class hierarchy. But at the same time, Starr emerges as complicit in neoliberal market forces that degrade low-level workers and demean the moral significance of substantive equality. Overall, Berrey discovers that diversity proponents have re-imagined racial progress, from a legal fight for equal rights to a celebration of cultural differences as a competitive advantage. Yet it resists fundamental change in day-to-day interactions and the way we determine merit and value. This, she concludes, is the taming of the civil rights movement s provocative demands for racial justice."
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