| Abstrakt: |
AbstractIn this article, we argue that discourses of “diversity” and “intersectionality” can undermine efforts to address racism, protect white privilege, and marginalize people of color. To illustrate how, we present an ethnographic account of student, staff, and faculty efforts to infuse campus culture at a small liberal arts college with an anti-racist pedagogy in response to a string of racist events on campus. Despite intentions, some community members put forward intersectional arguments and calls for “diversity” in ways that re-centered whiteness and situated discussions about race as exclusionary dialogues that victimized white subjects. These discourses also subsumed the experience of racism into a generalized and ostensibly universal experience of marginalization. We argue that this reflects the growing dominance of understanding racism as something that white subjects experience as much as people of color, which has emerged alongside a discourse of “diversity” that compels a focus on individualized difference rather than structural inequity. |
