Thread by @tressiemcphd

This is very good & very important new research on radicalized orgs and diversity canards.
Diversity Displays and Organizational Messaging: The Case of Historically Black Colleges and Universities - Oneya Okuwobi, Deborwah Faulk, Vincent J. Roscigno, 2021 journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

Because "diversity" unilaterally and practically means introducing non-white people into majority white institutions/spaces, I have long been puzzled by HBCUs attempts at branding diversity.

As the authors point out, the issue is that HBCUs *are* the diversity and therefore do not fit into white logics of needing to be diversified. But a lot of resources and capital are attached to "Diversity" programming. How can a Black college procure those resources?

HBCUs are then forced into a situation of commodifying diversity from a position of negative institutional capacity. It cannot BE the diversity AND commodify it.

But because they are organizations, they can pretend. Orgs love to pretend. Enter diversity displays and visual branding.

They pull the demographic statistics from student representation on university websites. A former student did this for disabled students, by the way. A good project.

This tracks with my experience of HBCU branding over the last ten years. A lot of white people on the website. Sometimes a few Latino/as. But mostly white. I've asked my alma mater about this many times, which is probably why they don't call me anymore.

Okay y'all got this one from my tweets! LOL I remember having this discussion. HBCUs rarely have "Black" in their branding anymore. They are only historically Black during homecoming. This is probably more true for publics, for obvious reasons but still.

The Black ivies are most explicit in framing diversity as racial justice. Makes sense as an economic base affords racialized orgs a legitimacy shield. Morehouse *can* be race-forward because it is relatively well-resourced & also not part of a public HE system

Bingo.

The alma mater. They have more white people on that website than a damn etsy mood board, I swear.

Diversity as an institutional characteristic is an important theme, esp. for public HBCUs. They serve the white institutions by providing system "diversity" and a release valve of sorts for the pressures of white racialized orgs.

That is an important org strategy in a complex, racialized *institutional field*, which is how I would describe HigherEd systems. It is a way to be legible to protectionist political actors and bodies who view their job as defending the white character of flagship universities

Public HBCUs are all hand-maidens to white flagships in a way that is true for all regional institutions in a Higher Ed system but with the additional pressure of being the diversity, producing diversity, & being careful to never actually diversify the white flagships.

This paper is a good addition to the growing body of work on #racializedorgs and a necessary correction to the lack of critical sociology in higher education research.

crap. *racialized orgs. although I'm sure that makes them radicalized of a sort...