Document Type
Article
Abstract
Campus racial unrest challenging the status quo of unwelcoming environments for students of color drew recent national attention. While achieving some short-term victories, the current protests prompted backlash that exposes the sinister and sobering foundations of racism on college campuses that connect to the seeming permanence of racism embedded in U.S. institutions and law. In this article, I suggest that despite the window dressing of diversity mission statements and policies that claim to open the campus doors to racial minorities, society fears an educated and activist minority population that sets out to change the status quo of systemic racism. As I posit, activist minority students, whether in law or other disciplines, have violated their covenant of admission and tolerance on the college campus. Should the students, as angry products of working-class families of color, learn the nature of their oppression and its sources and aim to change that world, starting with their own campus, they violate their tacit bargain, long enforced by a variety of policies and strategies detailed in the article. Faculty of color can be complicit in those strategies, and I suggest how to move from an enforcer to a risk-taker in the interest of exposing and challenging the diversity bargain.
Recommended Citation
Steven W. Bender, Campus Racial Unrest and the Diversity Bargain, 5 Ind. J.L. & Soc. Equality 47 (2016).