A01=Ellen Berrey
admissions
affirmative action
Author_Ellen Berrey
belonging
Category=JBFA
Category=JBFA1
Category=JBSL
chicago
civil rights
college
color blindness
competition
cultural difference
discrimination
displacement
diversity
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fortune 500
gentrification
gratz
grutter
hate
hearts and minds
higher education
housing redevelopment
human resources
inclusion
inequality
justice
meritocracy
multiculturalism
neoliberalism
pluralism
politics
prejudice
privilege
progress
race
rogers park
social change
starr corporation
subsidized
tolerance
university of michigan
Product details
- ISBN 9780226246239
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 May 2015
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Ellen Berrey is assistant professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and an affiliated scholar of the American Bar Foundation.
