The Enigma of Diversity

The Enigma of Diversity
Author: Ellen Berrey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2015-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022624637X

Diversity these days is a hallowed American value, widely shared and honored. That’s a remarkable change from the Civil Rights era—but does this public commitment to diversity constitute a civil rights victory? What does diversity mean in contemporary America, and what are the effects of efforts to support it? Ellen Berrey digs deep into those questions in The Enigma of Diversity. Drawing on six years of fieldwork and historical sources dating back to the 1950s and making extensive use of three case studies from widely varying arenas—housing redevelopment in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, affirmative action in the University of Michigan’s admissions program, and the workings of the human resources department at a Fortune 500 company—Berrey explores the complicated, contradictory, and even troubling meanings and uses of diversity as it is invoked by different groups for different, often symbolic ends. In each case, diversity affirms inclusiveness, especially in the most coveted jobs and colleges, yet it resists fundamental change in the practices and cultures that are the foundation of social inequality. Berrey shows how this has led racial progress itself to be reimagined, transformed from a legal fight for fundamental rights to a celebration of the competitive advantages afforded by cultural differences. Powerfully argued and surprising in its conclusions, The Enigma of Diversity reveals the true cost of the public embrace of diversity: the taming of demands for racial justice.

Racial Justice and the Limits of Law

Racial Justice and the Limits of Law
Author: Bharat Malkani
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2024-04-23
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1529230764

Racial justice is never far from the headlines. The Windrush scandal, the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, and racism within the police have all recently captured the public’s attention and generated legal action. But, although the ideals of the legal system such as fairness and equality seem allied to the struggle for racial justice, all too often campaigners have been let down by the system. This book examines law’s troubled relationship with racial justice. It explains that law’s historical role in creating and perpetuating racial injustices continues to stifle its ability to advance the cause of racial justice today. Both a lawyer’s guide to antiracism, and an antiracist’s guide to legal action, it unites these perspectives to help both groups understand how to use the law to tackle racial injustices.

Racism, Governance, and Public Policy

Racism, Governance, and Public Policy
Author: Katy Sian
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2013-06-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135083673

This book presents a new framing of policy debates on the question of racism through a discursive critique of contemporary issues and contexts, drawing on a program of new European research carried out between 2010 and 2013, with a central focus on the UK. This includes analysis of the discursive construction of Muslims in three contexts: the workplace, education and the media. Informed by a fundamental critique of both the "post-racial" and the limitations of human rights strategies, it identifies the ongoing significance of contemporary raciality in governance strategies and develops a new radical agenda for addressing these processes, advocating strategies of "racism reduction."

Challenging the Status Quo

Challenging the Status Quo
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2018-11-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004291229

In Challenging the Status Quo: Diversity, Democracy, and Equality in the 21st Century, David G. Embrick, Sharon M. Collins, and Michelle Dodson have compiled the latest ideas and scholarship in the area of diversity and inclusion. The contributors in this edited book offer critical analyses on many aspects of diversity as it pertains to institutional policies, practices, discourse, and beliefs. The book is broken down into 19 chapters over 7 sections that cover: policies and politics; pedagogy and higher education; STEM; religion; communities; complex organizations; and discourse and identity. Collectively, these chapters contribute to answering three main questions: 1) what, ultimately, does diversity mean; 2) what are the various mechanisms by which institutions understand and use diversity; and 3) and why is it important for us to rethink diversity? Contributors: Sharla Alegria, Joyce M. Bell, Sharon M. Collins, Ellen Berrey, Enobong Hannah Branch, Meghan A. Burke, Tiffany Davis, Michele C. Deramo, Michelle Dodson, David G. Embrick, Edward Orozco Flores, Emma González-Lesser, Bianca Gonzalez-Sobrino, Matthew W. Hughey, Paul R. Ketchum, Megan Klein, Michael Kreiter, Marie des Neiges Léonard, Wendy Leo Moore, Shan Mukhtar, Antonia Randolph, Victor Erik Ray, Arthur Scarritt, Laurie Cooper Stoll.

The Limits of Blame

The Limits of Blame
Author: Erin I. Kelly
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2018-11-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0674980778

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration. The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.

Law and Social Justice in Higher Education

Law and Social Justice in Higher Education
Author: Crystal Renée Chambers
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2016-11-25
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317694961

The latest volume in the Core Concepts in Higher Education series explores the complexity of law in higher education and both the limits and opportunities of how law can promote inclusivity and access on campus. Through a historical and legal framework, this volume discusses undergraduate students' histories of inclusion and struggles for social justice in higher education by race, sex, social class, dis/ability, and sexual orientation. Bridging research, theory, and practice, Law and Social Justice in Higher Education encourages future and current higher education and student affairs practitioners to consider how they can collaborate to further a just society. Special features: Discussion of case law illustrates the reach and limits of law and where higher education professionals can continue to push for social justice. Accessible to non-lawyers, chapters highlight key legal terms and key concepts to guide readers at the beginning of each chapter. End-of-chapter questions provide prompts for discussion and encourage student interactivity.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Author: Richard Rothstein
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1631492861

New York Times Bestseller • Notable Book of the Year • Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates’ “Amazing Books” of the Year One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction Gold Winner • California Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist • Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Finalist • Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.

Normal Life

Normal Life
Author: Dean Spade
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2015-07-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 082237479X

Revised and Expanded Edition Wait—what's wrong with rights? It is usually assumed that trans and gender nonconforming people should follow the civil rights and "equality" strategies of lesbian and gay rights organizations by agitating for legal reforms that would ostensibly guarantee nondiscrimination and equal protection under the law. This approach assumes that the best way to address the poverty and criminalization that plague trans populations is to gain legal recognition and inclusion in the state's institutions. But is this strategy effective? In Normal Life Dean Spade presents revelatory critiques of the legal equality framework for social change, and points to examples of transformative grassroots trans activism that is raising demands that go beyond traditional civil rights reforms. Spade explodes assumptions about what legal rights can do for marginalized populations, and describes transformative resistance processes and formations that address the root causes of harm and violence. In the new afterword to this revised and expanded edition, Spade notes the rapid mainstreaming of trans politics and finds that his predictions that gaining legal recognition will fail to benefit trans populations are coming to fruition. Spade examines recent efforts by the Obama administration and trans equality advocates to "pinkwash" state violence by articulating the US military and prison systems as sites for trans inclusion reforms. In the context of recent increased mainstream visibility of trans people and trans politics, Spade continues to advocate for the dismantling of systems of state violence that shorten the lives of trans people. Now more than ever, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require.

Race on the Brain

Race on the Brain
Author: Jonathan Kahn
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2017-11-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 023154538X

Of the many obstacles to racial justice in America, none has received more recent attention than the one that lurks in our subconscious. As social movements and policing scandals have shown how far from being “postracial” we are, the concept of implicit bias has taken center stage in the national conversation about race. Millions of Americans have taken online tests purporting to show the deep, invisible roots of their own prejudice. A recent Oxford study that claims to have found a drug that reduces implicit bias is only the starkest example of a pervasive trend. But what do we risk when we seek the simplicity of a technological diagnosis—and solution—for racism? What do we miss when we locate racism in our biology and our brains rather than in our history and our social practices? In Race on the Brain, Jonathan Kahn argues that implicit bias has grown into a master narrative of race relations—one with profound, if unintended, negative consequences for law, science, and society. He emphasizes its limitations, arguing that while useful as a tool to understand particular types of behavior, it is only one among several tools available to policy makers. An uncritical embrace of implicit bias, to the exclusion of power relations and structural racism, undermines wider civic responsibility for addressing the problem by turning it over to experts. Technological interventions, including many tests for implicit bias, are premised on a color-blind ideal and run the risk of erasing history, denying present reality, and obscuring accountability. Kahn recognizes the significance of implicit social cognition but cautions against seeing it as a panacea for addressing America’s longstanding racial problems. A bracing corrective to what has become a common-sense understanding of the power of prejudice, Race on the Brain challenges us all to engage more thoughtfully and more democratically in the difficult task of promoting racial justice.

Justice Deferred

Justice Deferred
Author: Orville Vernon Burton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2021-05-04
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674975642

In the first comprehensive accounting of the U.S. Supreme CourtÕs race-related jurisprudence, a distinguished historian and renowned civil rights lawyer scrutinize a legacy too often blighted by racial injustice. The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the fifty years since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice. From the Cherokee Trail of Tears to Brown v. Board of Education to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, historian Orville Vernon Burton and civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the CourtÕs race recordÑa legacy at times uplifting, but more often distressing and sometimes disgraceful. For nearly a century, the Court ensured that the nineteenth-century Reconstruction amendments would not truly free and enfranchise African Americans. And the twenty-first century has seen a steady erosion of commitments to enforcing hard-won rights. Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the CourtÕs race jurisprudence. Addressing nearly two hundred cases involving AmericaÕs racial minorities, the authors probe the parties involved, the justicesÕ reasoning, and the impact of individual rulings. We learn of heroes such as Thurgood Marshall; villains, including Roger Taney; and enigmas like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hugo Black. Much of the fragility of civil rights in America is due to the Supreme Court, but as this sweeping history also reminds us, the justices still have the power to make good on the countryÕs promise of equal rights for all.