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Allthewordspeoplethrowaround.pdf

All the Words People Throw Around

One important step toward being an effective racial justice advocate is recognizing that many people bump heads over racial terminology. While it is the case that one person may fundamentally disagree with the argument another person is trying to make, it is also possible for people to simply talk past one another because they are uninformed of the meanings behind the words being used. Becoming conversant in racial terminology can empower you in either scenario. Here, we provide an entry point to the racial lexicon of the contemporary United States in hopes of better equipping you with the means to grapple with not only the semantics of a number of concepts but also why it is important. Given that language, like race, is ever evolving and responds to changing contexts, we do not claim to be exhaustive in our commentary, and we humbly advance that we are not the final word on the matter. There may even be places where you find yourself wanting to contest our analysis—this is your cue to step into the circle and be part of the conversation. We selected words that showcase the contestation and emotional charge of racial politics.

We chose concepts that represent phenomena that we think need addressing. We picked terms that many people have probably never heard of but nevertheless represent phenomena that you may have either seen, experienced, or thought about. Lastly, we discuss some words that get debated even among people who are politically allied with one another. We order the terms alphabetically for two reasons: (1) to help make it more referential for

you, the reader, and (2) because we believe it is more important for people to know that these concepts are connected and at times co-constitutive than to think about them as ranked in importance. We do, however, provide some organizational logic with the following categories:

* Foundational concepts: In order to best grasp what the Black Lives Matter movement and the Movement for Black Lives is all about, you would be well served to understand the weight of these words.

* American mythology: There are a few dominant narratives explaining why the United States is so special. We critically examine them.

* Common sense revisited: Some words get used so frequently in everyday language that we seldom stop to ask whether we are even using the same definition. Let’s take some time to reflect.

* Tools of liberation: We spotlight ideas and instruments with which we can free ourselves and

Stay Woke : A People's Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:55:38.

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enhance the lives of others.

* Tools of oppression: We bring attention to ideas and instruments that are used to (a) control, exclude, exploit, ignore, and/or shame human beings on the basis of race, (b) excuse oneself from accountability or intervention, or (c) hinder the uplift of those who are working to get free.

* Wisdom of popular culture: We include some of the innovative concepts presented in various forms of media, including the genius of Black Twitter, that help us make sense of the world.

* Extra credit: The more you know, the more you grow.

You will find that some words fall under multiple categories. We also set in boldface words that are examined throughout the chapter to facilitate your consideration of their connection to one another. Interspersed in the chapter you will find activities and reflection pieces to complete alone or with others.

affirmative action

common sense revisited

1. Policies that aim to ameliorate disparities between structurally—and historically—contingent identity groups, such as marginalized racial groups and women, in the case of the United States

2. Predecessor to diversity programs and initiatives

see also: diversity, reverse discrimination

In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot—we dare not—let the Equal Protection Clause perpetuate racial supremacy.

—US Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978)

Historically, affirmative action programs were rooted in racial justice.1 In a 1965 speech to the graduates of Howard University, President Lyndon B. Johnson explained that there was a need for programs aimed to dissolve racial inequality. Noting that the social, political, and economic differences seen historically between whites and Blacks “are not racial differences” but “are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice,” Johnson was well aware that real policy change had to be made in order to close these gaps. He famously explained,

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now Stay Woke : A People's Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:55:38.

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you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.2

Assuming that talent is equally distributed across racial groups, we should expect equal outcomes, if indeed equal opportunity is a reality. Affirmative action policies seek to “level the playing field,” or at least to loosen the purse strings of those who allocate jobs, college admissions, and other opportunities to a broader pool of applicants. There is a lot that people get wrong about affirmative action. There are two things that we

will address here. First is the idea that affirmative action is synonymous with racial quotas. This is false. Though there was a time when quotas were used, racial quotas were deemed unconstitutional in the 1978 Bakke Supreme Court decision. Second is the notion that affirmative action is a form of reverse discrimination, whereby

the merits of whites are discounted in efforts to attain a more diverse institution of higher education, corporation, or government workplace. There is actually a great deal of data that show that whites with mediocre qualifications have not had any major problems in accessing opportunities in any of these realms of life in the United States. But beyond that, we follow the sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, who argue that a policy, program, idea, interaction, or the like is racist if “it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on racial significations and identities.”3 Policies like affirmative action are antiracist in that they have been used to change the structure of the racial hierarchy, aiming only to flatten it rather than to turn it upside down. We should mention, though, there has been a shift in the rationale of affirmative action

policies over time. We have gone from considering race as a means of rectifying historical injustices to pursuing a more neoliberal and profit-driven enterprise: diversity. This shift largely came out of the Supreme Court cases like Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), whereby the majority opinion rationalized that it is important to consider race and ethnicity not because of historical and present-day structural racism but because diversity is a compelling state interest (though it has been argued elsewhere that diversity’s greatest benefit is actually for white people).4 This shift is an important one because these policies, as they exist today, can be helpful, but they can also be implemented in a pernicious way. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggested in Grutter that in twenty-five years’ time, the

necessity of considering structurally contingent identities should completely dissipate given the alleged progress we’ve seen thus far.5 Whether former Justice O’Connor was naïve or not, someone on the current Supreme Court is surely watching the clock . . . tick tock.

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American dream

American mythology, common sense revisited

1. A spouse, house with a white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a dog

2. The mythological notion that through sheer hard work and perseverance alone, one will attain economic upward mobility in US society

see also: American dream

There are different kinds of capitalist systems, but it’s probably more useful here to point out the ways in which capitalism, generally speaking, has served to develop and perpetuate racial inequality. Let’s take a walk down memory lane: “Where would the original accumulation of capital

used in industry (in the West) have come from if not the extraction of wealth from colonies, piracy, and the slave trade?”11 Manning Marable plainly explains, “The U.S. state apparatus was created to facilitate the expansion and entrenchment of institutional racism in both slave and nonslaveholding states.”12 If you read the US Constitution closely, you’ll see that not only is it a political document that outlines the distribution of power among the three branches of

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government and between the federal and state governments, but it is also laced with matters of economics and property rights.13 For instance, there is no mention of slavery in the Bill of Rights, but there are several references to using enslaved people for political and economic benefit: counting enslaved people as three-fifths a person for the purposes of taxation and representation (Article 1, Section 2); prevention of interference in the slave trade for two decades (Article 1, Section 9); and the demand to return people who sought to self- emancipate to those who enslaved them (Article 4, Section 2).14

Anti-Black racism and capitalism have worked together over time to shift Blacks from chattel slavery to sharecropping and peonage, from low-wage industrial jobs to attaining lower rates on return on education, from excluding Blacks from a legitimate housing market to exposing a disproportionate number of Blacks to the subprime-mortgage crisis; from convict-leased chain gangs to “factories with fences.”15 Companies can make larger and larger profits by paying people less and less—or nothing if they can. But wait! There’s more! Intersectionality helps us to understand the ways in which Black

women, and poor Black women in particular, make up an especially vulnerable group. The tripartite combination of anti-Black racism, sexism, and classism serves to place Black women at the crosshairs of three systems of oppression. With that in consideration, the ultimate emancipation of Black people cannot be complete without a critique of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.

citizenship

foundational concept, common sense revisited

1. Formal or legal membership in society that entitles you to rights and privileges outlined by the laws of the land

2. A mutual recognition of full membership in society or treatment as a person of equal dignity and humanity

We emphasize two aspects of citizenship—one formal, the other substantive—and three kinds of citizenship rights: civil, political, and social. Formal citizenship—that is, legal membership in society—affords you an array of rights. In the United States, one is granted citizenship by birthright (outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment) or through the process of naturalization. The sociologist Thomas Marshall explains that civil rights are “composed of the rights necessary for individual freedom—liberty of the person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to justice”; political rights concern the “right to participate in the exercise of power, as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of the membership of such a body.” Finally, the social element of citizenship rights deals with “the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share in the full social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in

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society.” This slate of rights implies that citizenship is not just about relishing in the privilege of membership but also that there are “reciprocal obligations toward the community.”16 These rights are largely understood to be imbued in formal US citizenship, but they are not sufficient for people to experience what Marshall and fellow sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn call “substantive citizenship.” Substantive citizenship moves beyond having rights in theory and emphasizes whether people can exercise those rights in practice.17

Though all citizens are ostensibly guaranteed the full rights and privileges of all other citizens, the fact of the matter is that this has not and does not describe the reality of US citizenship. The rally cry #BlackLivesMatter serves to illuminate the fact that though most Black people in the United States are citizens by law, they are not treated as such and thus do not enjoy substantive citizenship. One can easily think of the ways in which Black people are disenfranchised, but there is also the interpersonal aspect of persistent social exclusion from “mainstream” society; this exclusion is well marked by the daily aggregation of microaggressions, the state of being in constant mourning,18 and recognizing that one’s life is, in fact, more vulnerable than one’s average white peers. The history of rights in the United States is neither linear nor necessarily progressive.

Many of the rights that people of color and other marginalized communities gained over the years were granted only after the arduous process of demanding them. And still, some rights may be taken away or a full sweep of rights may not be fully granted even after long, arduous fights. For example, the US Supreme Court’s majority decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) requires marriage equality. However, while Americans can marry across or within genders, there are twenty-eight states that still allow for employers to fire lesbian, gay, or transgender people because they are lesbian, gay, or transgender!19 Today, we have to keep a close watch on rights concerning abortion and access to reproductive health, voting, and even the right to protest because, while guaranteed, these are constantly being attacked and, at times, circumvented or even curtailed.

co-optation

tool of oppression, tool of liberation

1. Taking an idea, disassembling it, reassembling it with original pieces as well as retrofitted ones; giving the modified thing a different name than the original and then claiming originality

2. Appropriation; falsely claiming rights to or innovation of something as one’s own

Co-optation can be used for good or for evil. For instance, it is well known that Martin Luther King Jr. famously stated (among many, many, many things), “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Conservatives have suggested that Dr. King, whose legacy we all (partially) know and love, desired a colorblind United States. Agreed.

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We would take Dr. King’s aspiration of colorblindness to mean that one’s life chances are not influenced by one’s racial group membership. But for racial conservatives, being colorblind means that you should pay attention to neither race nor racism. By co-opting Dr. King’s dream, conservatives are able to suggest that people who talk about race are, themselves, racist. Though foolish, this logic often successfully serves to shut down claims of and constructive conversations around race and racism. Indeed, the dominant racial ideology in contemporary US society is colorblind racism. Generally speaking, co-optation usually ends with dominant groups taking,

commandeering, or appropriating an idea, concept, aspect of culture, or resistance and then using it against marginalized groups (for the nearly exclusive benefit of the dominant group). But it could also be the case that marginalized people take something from the dominant group and call it their own. In 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney, on behalf of the Supreme Court of the United States, wrote that Black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In the majority decision of Scott v. Sanford, Taney meticulously explained that “We the People” did not mean “all y’all.” But for centuries, Black freedom fighters have co-opted this language of “we,” of “citizenship,” of “equality,” and of “democracy” to broaden the imaginations of their contemporaries and that of future Americans, connecting calls for inclusion to the fulfillment of justice. And in real time, we see today how young, undocumented people who have lived their entire lives in the United States are similarly co- opting the language of the American dream and forcing the nation to dream bigger, more imaginative visions of what it could be.

colorblind racism

foundational concept, tool of oppression

1. The worldview that suggests that since race should not matter, it does not matter

2. An ideology that insists that “everyone be treated without regard to race, accompanied by a denial of the causes and consequences of racism”20

The consensus among scholars who study racism is that today’s dominant racial ideology is best understood as colorblind.21 Put simply, “colorblind racial ideology creates a façade of racial inclusion by suggesting that in a post–civil rights era, everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed, and if differences in outcomes across racial groups continue to exist, these differences are best explained through culture, natural occurrences, or ‘a little bit’ of residual racism that may still exist due to a few prejudiced individuals.”22

Colorblind racism fuels a racialized social system because it allows, or even requires, people to ignore structural racism and instead focus on individual behavior, while also assuming that society can be likened to a level playing field. The historian Ibram Kendi explains, “If the purpose of racist ideas had always been to silence the antiracist resisters to

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racial discrimination, then the postracial line of attack may have been the most sophisticated silencer to date.”23 Injustice thrives when the illusion of justice is perfected.24

Have you ever said, thought, or heard a friend say the following?

* The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.25

* Sure, most people in my neighborhood are of my race, but that’s because birds of a feather flock together. People are just naturally more comfortable with people who look like them.

* Racism exists, but it’s mostly just grandmas in Mississippi and Klansmen.

* It’s a coincidence that all of my friends are white.

* I believe in equal opportunity. That’s why it’s unfair to consider race in admissions or hiring.

* All of the Mexican kids sit together. That’s self-segregation.

* If Black people worked harder, they would be much better off. Pulling up your bootstraps is key to success in this country.

* It’s not that I have white privilege; it’s just that my parents, through their hard work, ingenuity, and a little financial help from my grandparents who benefited from the GI Bill, were able to put me in the best schools and extracurricular activities.

* There are major disparities between Blacks and whites, but this is best understood as a matter of class rather than race.

These are classic examples of colorblind racial ideology frames.26 They are tied together by an insistence that the playing field is level and the assertion that racism is not a key mechanism in the way the United States works. These very common utterances suggest that racial phenomena like residential segregation, racially homogeneous social networks, and the resegregation of public schools are best explained by nonracial explanations such as culture and class. We will be very clear on this matter: there is no high-quality, empirical data that support these ideas!

colorism

tool of oppression

A practice whereby privileges and disadvantages are systematically doled out on the basis of skin color, with a disproportionate amount of advantages provided to lighter-skinned people

synonym: light-skin privilege

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While white Americans have a range of privileges afforded to them due to their race, it is also the case that even within various racial groups, people who are of a lighter hue are provided more benefits than their darker-skinned counterparts are, on average. Research shows that among African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinxs, lighter-skinned individuals earn more money, are more likely to live in racially integrated neighborhoods and own their home, gain more education, have lower poverty rates, and marry people with higher socioeconomic status than do those who are darker skinned.27 Darker-skinned people are less likely to get married, receive longer prison sentences, and have higher rates of unemployment than their lighter-skinned counterparts do.28 We tend to see lighter-skinned individuals in advertisements, movies, and modeling agencies because light skin is viewed as more aesthetically and culturally normative (and superior). Taken together, we see that the United States is not just a racialized social system, whereby racial groups are hierarchically ordered, but also a pigmentocracy, or a society that privileges lighter skin.29

We cannot separate colorism, or the “process that privileges light-skinned people over dark in areas such as income, education, housing, and the marriage market,”30 from a wider system of white supremacy because it is by no means a coincidence that people who more closely mimic whiteness are rewarded for doing so. In recognizing the rewards that come with European physical features, such as light skin and straight hair, people across the world— reflecting the global nature of white supremacy—go through dire straits to attain those features. Skin-bleaching creams are common in countries that range from Saudi Arabia to India to Nigeria. It is common to get “double eyelid” surgery among Asian and Asian American women, and similarly, it is a normal graduation gift to get a nose job in parts of Mexico.

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Photo by Mariah Warner

Scholars like Yaba Blay turn the notion of pigmentocracy on its head, pointing out the ways in which light-skinned individuals are, at times, disadvantaged, particularly when they are faced with microaggressions about their group identity, challenges to racial authenticity, or even exclusion by members of their own racial group.31 Intersectionality helps us think through the idea that what may be an advantage in one space may lead to oppression in another. Though psychological discomfort that light-skinned individuals may face cannot and should not be compared to the material disadvantages faced by dark-skinned people, we should remain cognizant that Black people and other people of color are marginalized due to their race, and the effects of racism can be “mitigated” or intensified by colorism.

cross-cutting issue

extra credit

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1. An issue that is salient and relevant to members of seemingly opposed groups in a similar way

2. An issue that could potentially lead to coalition across groups

There are a number of issues that are in the interest of some members of different groups. Poverty is an excellent example. There are poor and working-class people of various racial and ethnic groups and of various partisan identities. One might intuit that low-income Blacks, whites, Latinxs, Asian Americans, and indigenous people ought to work together around issues related to raising the minimum wage, universal health care, or at least a strong social safety net for low- and no-income individuals and families. To be sure, history is peppered with instances of interracial coalition building around cross-cutting issues, but race has often been used by white political elites as a wedge to prevent these alliances from forging and taking hold (take the 1898 Wilmington Coup d’État as just one overlooked example).32

Toward the end of Dr. King’s life, a lesser-known, economic-minded King worked toward developing a Poor People’s Campaign that would loosen that wedge of racial division and seek economic justice for people across racial groups. Today, folks like the Reverend William Barber endeavor to revive that multiracial campaign by organizing around the cross-cutting issues of universal health care, quality jobs and employment, affordable housing, mass incarceration, and the fortification of voting rights.33 These issues are cross-cutting because they affect all sorts of people across political, ideological, and racial groups. When we reflect on why there aren’t more coalitions built around cross-cutting issues, we

realize that too many people believe themselves to be playing a zero-sum game, one premised on the notion that if someone gains, someone else must automatically be losing. If I immigrate to the United States, a native-born American automatically loses a job. If your child is getting ESL lessons in school, my child is losing already-tight resources in public education. This way of thinking has also extended to other realms of US society, such that “if the country is asked to mourn and show sympathy for a slain black woman or man, it must necessarily mean that [white people] will, at least, lose favor in their own society, or worse, be the categorical target of retribution and disdain.”34 The philosopher Christopher Lebron asserts, “No one who looks at the world in this way can be prepared to sacrifice. And here, by sacrifice, I do not mean to lose. Rather, I mean, to make oneself vulnerable to new political possibilities and personal relations.”35

culture of poverty

tool of oppression

1. The notion that poor and working-class people are poor because they do not know how to work, do not have the motivation to work, or are too dependent on public assistance

2. An idea that poverty is intergenerational because poverty is (psychologically) pathological and cyclical

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I think that if we are going to have a change in this whole cycle of failure, we’ve got to get at the heart of it, that’s at the elementary school level. I suggest that we simply take young people out of the environment where they have no motivation because their parents don’t understand it, they never had any motivation when they were youngsters, they had their children when they were 16 and they never have gotten into this success cycle that many of us think of.

—Mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley, 198536

The ideological stance called “culture of poverty” is rooted in the idea that poor people are poor because they do not know how to work toward the American dream. Though this idea has been used to explain poverty generally speaking, it is most often used to explain persistent racial disparities. One of the best-known historical references to such an idea comes from the now very (in)famous Moynihan Report, which essentially argued that while white supremacy was a barrier for Black people, Black culture—marked by female-headed households—was the greatest barrier preventing Black folks from living up to their full potential. Since then, others have mimicked this notion, combining structural factors with “cultural” ones to explain why Blacks fall behind whites on important socioeconomic indicators.

Commentary from the Twittersphere.

Racial differences in “employment and earnings, educational attainment, and family structure” cannot be explained by “culture” or values. Research shows that Blacks are systematically discriminated against in employment, get lower returns on their investment in education, value education more than whites do, and are actually more “family oriented” than whites are in conventional terms. What we ought to be cognizant of is that being poor and Black looks much different than being poor and white, in large part, due to the racial wealth

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gap. The prominent economist William Darity explains, “When wealth is taken into account virtually every group-based disparity in behavior customarily attributed to racial differences in cultural orientation disappears.”37 Culture matters, just not as an explanation for racial disparities.

dehumanization

foundational concept, tool of oppression

1. The notion that some people are less than human

2. The routine association of Blacks with demons and animals, such as apes

because white men can’t police their imagination black men are dying

—Claudia Rankine, Citizen38

Anti-Black racism is undergirded by dehumanization, or the idea that Blacks are less than human. Indeed, the advent of race is fundamentally rooted in dehumanization. We know now that whites were able to rationalize the enslavement of Black people using the logic of dehumanization. On the same plantation, enslaved Black women were used as tools of labor, for sexual gratification, as breeding factories to produce more people who could be enslaved, and as live subjects of scientific and medical experimentation. Enslaved people, like houses, were taxed and insured as property.39

Research shows that many whites still routinely dehumanize Blacks, implicitly associating them with apes. When provided with an image depicting the “Ascent of Man,” some whites rated their racial group as being more evolved than Blacks.40

There are other ways this dynamic plays out. For example, in Officer Darren Wilson’s testimony about how and why he fatally shot eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, he said that Brown reached into the police SUV and punched him. Then he explained, “When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.” Michael Brown was six foot four and 292 pounds at the time of his death. Wilson, six foot four and 210 pounds, went on to testify, “And then after he did that [attempted to grab his gun], he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.” He went on to say that Brown began to flee but then turned around. At that point, Wilson explained, “it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”41 Michael Brown was dehumanized and believed to be superhuman all at the same time!

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“Ascent of Man”

The poet and essayist Claudia Rankine asserts, “Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with Black people.”42 Antiracism requires us to keep in mind that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Black people. Racial inequality and injustice are not produced by race, but instead they are “products of socio-historical processes of racialization and white supremacy.”43

diversity

common sense revisited

1. The presence of an array of different things or attributes

2. Diverse (adjective)

a. Multicultural, multiethnic, or multiracial

b. Sometimes used with grammatical abandonment to describe the presence of a single person of color, as in “Candis is diverse.”

3. Happy talk44 about multiculturalism

Everybody loves diversity. Indeed, most people view racially homogeneous spaces, such as classrooms or boardrooms, as morally suspect. In turn, we are seeing an increasing number of people of color in institutions of higher education, in the government, and in the corporate world; there are even some signs of increasing integration in US neighborhoods. Yet, if we look more deeply, we find that neither the value of diversity nor the increased presence of underrepresented racial groups has led to a major reshaping of the US racial hierarchy. How could this be? Diversity initiatives largely evolved from affirmative action policies, but an increasing

number of critical diversity scholars, like the sociologist Sarah Mayorga-Gallo,45 suggest that diversity, as it is understood and constructed in contemporary US society, is mostly hamstrung from producing a more equitable society. First, researchers like Mayorga-Gallo show that diversity is understood to mean anything from having a multiracial group to a

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group of people with different personalities or tastes. By equating structurally contingent identities (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender) with idiosyncratic ones (e.g., preference for flip-flops or horror movies), it becomes easy to see how one can walk into a board of trustees meeting with all white men and believe that space to be diverse. Second, diversity is very much commodified. Diversity is viewed as a marketable commodity, and people of color are viewed and used as things to help whites accomplish their goals rather than as people who have value separate from their experiences shaped by their racial identity.46 That is to say, today’s construction of diversity is neoliberal, placing profits over people. Third, research shows that while people value diversity and intend for their spaces to be

more representative of the population, they do not necessarily follow up on the full incorporation and inclusion of people of color; only intentions matter, not necessarily results. Finally, there is an increased awareness that though whites value diversity in the abstract, when it comes down to it, many are able to undermine diversity initiatives by suggesting that diversity is mutually exclusive from quality, merit, and comfort, while some suggest that it may require additional policing of bodies of color. “Diversity” has been co-opted by racial conservatives. In this iteration, “people can

simultaneously recognize diversity, but not oppression; deny difference and appreciate diversity; be conscious of racial differences, but nonconscious of continuing race injustice.”47 This rendition of the concept hinders diversity from being used to realize its full potential to eradicate disparities faced by historically marginalized groups. We should note, however, that there are people who call for increased diversity for the purposes of social justice, including us. We file this under “common sense revisited” because we believe it is important for students of antiracism to recognize that just because people are using the same words, it is not safe to assume that we are using those words to mean the same thing.

dog whistle politics

tool of oppression

Coded racial appeals