Not Diverse, Just Black: Changing Diversity Frames and the Significance of Black Ethnicity in Racialized Educational Organizations Open Access
Jenkins, Michaela (Spring 2025)
Abstract
Black ethnic students, or Black immigrants, refugees, and their children, are overrepresented in elite higher education when compared to Black American students, or Black descendants of U.S. chattel slavery. Many scholars focus on culture as the primary mechanism responsible for the pattern. Instead, I focus on how organizations selectively incorporate ethnoracial groups to seem diverse. I ask two questions: How do the racial histories, demographics, and other racialized organizational characteristics, shape universities’ diversity frames? How do these diversity frames incorporate and align with different Black ethnicities?
Through multi-method analysis of institutional influences, organizational characteristics, and the construction of Black ethnicity in the United States, I examined how Black ethnic overrepresentation in elite education is shaped by structural factors. I conducted a content analysis of Supreme Court cases deciding the legality of considering race in college admissions and found the presence of two frames of diversity, one cultural and one reparative. I then looked for these frames at two universities with different racializations, one predominantly and historically white, and one majority-minority with a significant Black population. I conducted participant observation of Black cultural organizations, ethnographic observation of university events related to race, interviews with multicultural affairs staff, and content analysis of the websites of each university. I found that the universities in my sample used the reparative and cultural frames, despite the cultural frame having more institutional support in the Supreme Court documents. University usage of these frames at times aligned with, and at times could not incorporate, both Black ethnics and Black Americans, depending on which frame they used and how they altered them to align with their organizational characteristics.
My findings suggest that ethnoracial hierarchies connect Black ethnic identities to cultural frames of diversity, focused on preparing majority actors for a globalizing world, rather than reparative frames of diversity, focused on including those historically excluded from these spaces like Black Americans. This work asserts the importance of structural explanations for even infracategorical differences.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Encountering Black Ethnicity in Educational Organizations 1
Chapter 2: From Cultural Comparison to Critical Black Ethnic Studies 38
Chapter 3: Cultural and Reparative Frames and Diversity Rhetoric in U.S Law 68
Chapter 4: History, Demographics, and Belonging 126
Chapter 5: Ethnicity, Infracategorical Inequality, and Organizations 178
Works Cited 188
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