Kalwant Bhopal asks, who really benefits from diversity training?
Since the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, schools and universities have faced renewed pressure to address racial injustice. Against this backdrop, the term ‘diversity’ has become a new buzzword—one often used but rarely defined.
It tends to be the focus of training courses run by schools and universities for staff to tackle racial injustice under the broad general umbrella of ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’ (EDI)—concepts that are rarely differentiated in educational settings.
Too often the introduction of such training programmes is designed to signal institutional commitments to addressing inequality rather than to generate progressive change. Consequently, the positive attributes of diversity celebrated in the training packages are often unmatched by real actions or outcomes. Diversity policies are primarily demonstrations of how institutions perform their commitment to addressing racial inequality, and diversity becomes a performative tool used to maintain and reinforce hierarchical structures of white supremacy.
In researching my new book, Race and Education: reproducing white supremacy in Britain, I interviewed academics of colour who had attended diversity training programmes designed to support their promotion to senior academic roles. They suggested that such training programmes worked for the benefit of the organisations rather than addressing real issues and repeatedly described how the training failed to address structural, institutional and day-to-day realities of racism and microaggressions.
Deficit model
While training programmes under the umbrella of EDI should be designed to focus on systems and institutional change, participants in my research found they were being advised on how they should adapt and change to the white model of success. In effect, the training they received to support them in their career trajectories was premised on a deficit model. It assumed that it was people of colour who should change to navigate systemically racist institutions.
The diversity training they received therefore maintained rather than dismantled the status quo and reinforced the institutional racist practices it was supposedly redressing. It was another means by which white groups would continue to occupy positions of power, so perpetuating a system from which these white groups benefited.
In a marketised university, education is delivered within a capitalist framework rather than as a public good. Because institutional diversity is valued within this framework—albeit for the benefit of the organisation—it must be measurably demonstrated.
One of the ways in which universities can do this is by achieving social and economic value from people of colour by investing in EDI. This allows white senior managers to make claims about diversity that boost their own institutional value and status within the markets in which they compete. Delivery of EDI policy, and particularly measurement of its delivery, allows institutions to claim to value the contribution of people of colour while at the same time commodifying racism to benefit themselves.
This is because an institution’s emphasis on diversity means that people of colour have to engage with stereotypical views of racism and their position in society, and diverts employers away from addressing the real problems of racial injustice. In this sense, white groups benefit from the racism people of colour experience. Meanwhile, the commodification of racial identities does not actually include any meaningful work that focuses on anti-racism.
Superficial appearances
This purely symbolic version of diversity is an incentive for white managers to participate in developing diversity programmes and training because it focuses only on numbers and on improving the superficial appearance of diversity. In so doing, it benefits white groups.
The murder of George Floyd led to a global outpouring of support for the Black Lives Matter movement. But in retrospect the subsequent interest in the need for diversity training was a short-lived moment, followed by a long retreat from any meaningful action to engage with issues of race and racism. While diversity is recognised, oppression is ignored. Focusing on diversity emphasises inclusion but does not address racism. Instead, it allows universities to make bold assertions about the creation of inclusive spaces.
In this way, race has become a commodity—an asset that conceals unequal relations of power between white people and people of colour. In effect, it works to preserve higher education as a white space, reserved for white people only.
Kalwant Bhopal is professor of education and social justice at the University of Birmingham. Her book, Race and Education: reproducing white supremacy in Britain, is published by Pelican/Penguin Press.