The Instability of Diversity: Narratives of Undergraduates of Color and the Challenges to Race-Based Recruitment Policies

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Curriculum Explorations Across Place(s) and Power

Abstract

This paper uses interviews with 18 undergraduate students of color at one public university in New York City to examine how young people account for their unfolding relationship to the idea of school. In challenging diversity policies that quantitatively mark the body as desirable or strange to the institution, the authors argue for a diversity approach that is based on narrative encounters rather than a politics of perception. This does not mean dismantling efforts to diversify, but to acknowledge how inclusion operates through the simultaneity of exclusion and to imagine frameworks that refuse variable-centered filters to determine who belongs on the inside. The study presents four selected vignettes that demonstrate the rich instability of being a racialized human.

Authors

• Debbie Sonu, City University of New York (CUNY)

• Marissa E Bellino, The College of New Jersey