Opportunity Hoarding, Shallow Diversity Talk, and the Limits of Liberalism

• In Event: 30.066 - Educational Research and the (Re)Construction of Black Educational Opportunity in Public Discourse and Civic Action

Abstract

In recent decades survey researchers studying racial attitudes have identified a paradox in white American’s responses to survey items. Often referred to as the “principles vs. policy paradox” (Krysan 2012) it refers to the fact that while most white people surveyed respond affirmatively to questions about principles of racial equity, when asked about specific policies that might enact such principles their support drops precipitously. In this paper we explore another form of this seeming paradox in racial thinking that illustrates how many in the US today “make sense of” black inequality within schools and beyond. Herein we are talking not just about popular discussions of black educational equity but how we come to “explain” inequality and to justify our own participation in it.
Drawing on data from a multi-year study of Riverview High School (RHS), a highly resourced and desegregated suburban school, we focus on how white parents “explain” racial gaps in achievement and particularly, how they understand their own role in racialized achievement patterns. We found that while most white parents expressed strong support for the idea of racial diversity in their children’s schools, they regularly undermined efforts by the school to make such diversity substantive and real. Labeling such behavior opportunity hoarding, we argue that while their appear to be deep contradictions between their expressed values and their embodied behavior as racial subjects, these “contradictions” are actually quite “productive” allowing them to embrace self-identities as liberal while actively participating in maintaining their own advantage.
White parents’ understandings and commitments may feel contradictory but, as Bell and Hartmann (2007) argue in writing about the limits of diversity discourse, such seeming inconsistencies are functional. They state, the “tensions and ambiguities” between people’s optimistic discussion of their ideal selves and their limited actual commitments to practicing diversity should be understood less as “cracks and fissures” and more as the source of the discourse’s real power. In this way, diversity discourse is a kind of “happy talk” that “allows Americans to engage race on the surface but disavow and disguise its deeper structural roots and consequences” (Bell & Hartmann 2007: 910).
In this way, Riverview white families’ diversity discourse helps reassure them that they are living up to their liberal commitments. Combined with larger ideologies of meritocracy, these discourses help them to understand that while there might be uncomfortable patterns of inequality in their children’s schools (and beyond), these are not patterns for which they have any responsibility. Similar to the kind of racial apathy described in previous research (Forman & Lewis 2006:190), this includes a sense that racial disparities are “other people’s problems.”

Authors

• Amanda E. Lewis, University of Illinois at Chicago

• John B. Diamond, University of Wisconsin - Madison