Foreword to The Drama of Diversity and Democracy - Second Edition (2011)
The Promise of Our Democracy

Twenty years have passed since the American Commitments Project of the Association of American Colleges & Universities was first launched to explore ways of enriching our democratic traditions as Americans while simultaneously honoring both the great diversity of communities that constitute the United States and the fact that not all of them have been treated fairly and equitably. Indeed, I remember that at one of our early listening forums on “Diversity and Democracy,” our convener, Frank Wong, misheard a comment made from a distant corner of the room. Frank heard the person utter, “Democracy is alive,” while the man had really said, “Democracy is a lie.”

Is democracy alive or is it a lie? The answer to this question really depends on one’s position and privilege in American society. Whether one enjoys the fruits of our democracy or suffers its pains has everything to do with one’s social location. Slavery, a series of wars of territorial expansion, and hostile responses to successive groups of immigrants collectively gave rise to differential notions of personhood in the United States, notions that in time produced sharp inequalities. These inequalities are with us still and have resulted in extreme forms of segregation based on class, race, and immigrant status.

Debates about diversity, democracy, equity, and inclusion continue to roil American society nearly three years into the term of America’s first African American president. After President Obama’s election, some popular rhetoric on television, talk radio, and in print suggested that we were now becoming a truly post-racial America. Indeed, the election of Obama was taken by these commentators as proof perfect that we now live in a colorblind society where those invidious distinctions of the past, based as they were on color and class, gender and sexuality, region and religion, have all but disappeared. So let’s move on, pundits said. That conversation is over.1

We have not, of course, entered a period of racial harmony or one in which Americans come together across various cultural boundaries to solve significant problems. In fact, one 2010 survey revealed that from 2009 to 2010, there was “a significant increase in the percentage of Americans who think the country is too divided along racial and ethnic and political lines, as well as an increase in those who see the existing amount of intolerance, prejudice, and discrimination as a serious problem.” Contrary to what the pundits might have wished, another survey revealed that 41 percent of Americans say that race relations have not changed as a result of Obama’s presidency and 22 percent say that they have gotten worse.2 Being aware that we are still divided along racial/ethnic and cultural lines, however, is not the same thing as embracing the task of truly confronting our racial legacies and working to remedy continuing inequities and injustices.

Americans are quick to insist that other societies—Germany, for example, or South Africa—ought to own and face their own legacies of bigotry and state-sanctioned violence against whole communities. Yet, there is, in fact, small appetite in our  country for probing—or even teaching—about the struggles for full inclusion that fueled the massive Civil Rights and Voting Revolutions of the 1960s and 70s, struggles that still continue in our society. There are movements—largely unremarked in the popular media—to undo many of the protections and opportunities that were hard won in that era.

The Drama of Diversity and Democracy makes plain that the debate about the meaning and application of democratic principles in US society never ends. The inequalities rooted in our history are with us still, and daily growing ever more stark. The debate over the meaning of “equality” continues, and by necessity it is contentious.

The debate is contentious because for a huge fraction of the population the struggles for recognition, dignity, and full inclusion in US democracy are ongoing. From the trenches occupied by the poor, by the marginalized, by the stigmatized, and by a legion of despised immigrant workers who nurse our children, cook our meals, make our beds, construct our homes, and tend to our rose gardens, the cries of desperation are there to be heard. The Great Recession of 2008 only intensified them. As New York University economist Edward N. Wolff explains, our republic now has one of the most skewed distributions of financial wealth it has ever seen, much of it experienced in thoroughly racialized ways.

The top 1 percent of America’s population currently owns 43 percent of the country’s wealth. If one adds professionals, managers, and small business owners to this class fraction, who collectively control 50 percent of our country’s wealth, we are left with a startling fact: a mere 20 percent of the population of the United States control 93 percent of its wealth. The other 80 percent of this country’s population, its vast majority, hold only 7 percent. And if we disaggregate these numbers even further, the bottom 40 percent of Americans collectively possess only 0.3 percent of the country’s wealth.3

Distributions of wealth and worth by race and ethnicity show even more distorted results. Until 2008 Latino and African American households held as their major financial asset the equity in their homes. Before the crash, in 2007, the median household net worth of whites, including the value of their home, was $143,600. For African Americans it was $9,300. For Latinos it was $9,100. By these measures the average white household in the United States has fifteen times more wealth than the average Latino or African American household. If one subtracts the potential wealth African Americans and Latinos had as a result of home ownership, the median household wealth of African Americans is reduced to a mere $500. For Latinos it is $400. For whites it is $43,600.

The Great Recession of 2008 saw the value of home equity evaporate for many. Hinojosa, Jacquez, and Cruz recently estimated that between 2007 and 2009 home foreclosures cost African Americans between $71 billion and $92 billion. Latinos lost between $75 billion and $98 billion. This was due largely to the fact that African Americans and Latinos were offered expensive subprime mortgage loans by lenders at rates 2.5 to 3 times higher than whites. With mortgages they could scarcely afford and higher rates of unemployment during the downturn of recent years, many African Americans and Latinos were left homeless.4

At the very moment accumulated wealth and income inequalities have become most pronounced in America, so too has its diversity. According to the US Census Bureau 2010 count, the country’s total population now stands at roughly 310.2 million. Since the original publication of The Drama of Diversity and Democracy, the most striking transformation of the United States has been the enormous expansion of the Latino population, fueled by immigration since 1965, and by high rates of natural reproduction. Latinos now number 49.6 million individuals, representing 16 percent of the country’s total population. The growth of the African American population has not kept pace and in 2010 represented only 12.2 percent of the total, or roughly 37.8 million persons. Asian Americans number 13.9 million, or 4.5 percent of the country’s total population, while Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders number 3.1 million or 0.1 percent, and Native Americans hover at 2.4 million individuals or 0.8 percent of America’s population.

Demographers predict that over the next forty years the major transformation of the United States will be a sharp proportional decline of those who claim white identities and a doubling of the Latino population. In 2010 whites numbered 200.6 million or 64.7 percent of the total; by 2050 they will represent less than half of the American populace, only 46.3 percent. Latinos, who now represent 16 percent of the total population, by 2050 will represent 30.2 percent for a very simple reason: the reproduction rate for Latinos now is 8.9 births for every death, while for whites the rate is 1.2.

One can already see these transformations in the major cities of the United States—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Albuquerque, Boston, Washington, New York—where what we used to call the “minorities,” when added together are now the majority or “emerging” majorities. As early as 1995, the majority of children in California public schools were of Latino origin, a trend that can also be found in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, and New York. As these students advance through the educational pipeline into colleges and universities, attempts to integrate our campuses and educate the next generation of this country’s leaders have surely advanced, but ever so slowly and certainly not at a pace that might educate even a talented tenth, much less a majority. The University of California recently released admissions statistics from 1997 to 2007, specifically tracking race and ethnicity. In 1997, 39,616 freshmen were granted admission. Of these, 3.8 percent were African American, 14.1 percent were Chicano/Latino, and 0.8 percent were American Indians, with these underrepresented groups totaling 18.6 percent of all admits. Asian Americans constituted 33.0 percent of the total and whites accounted for 40.8 percent. Persons who were “other” or did not self-identify by race made up the rest.

Ten years later, in 2007, 57,318 freshmen were granted admission. Of these, 3.6 percent were African American, 18.7 percent were Chicano/Latino, and 0.6 percent were American Indian. The percentage of these underrepresented students had increased to 22.9 percent of total admits. Asian Americans represented 35.3 percent of this total and whites accounted for 35.5 percent. While the statistics show that over the course of these ten years the proportion of American Indians and African Americans admitted as freshmen into the University of California had fallen, numerically they increased. American Indians went from 312 in 1997 to 343 in 2007; African Americans went from 1,503 to 2,071.5 The progress to date, if we can call it that, has been glacial.

What university admission statistics in one of this country’s most diverse states fail to show are the racially based achievement gaps that start much earlier in the educational pipeline. As UCLA education professors Armida Ornelas and Daniel Solórzano tell us, of every one hundred Latinos who enroll in elementary school in California, fifty-three will drop out at some point during K-12. Only forty-seven will graduate from high school and out of these only twenty-six will pursue some form of postsecondary education; seventeen will continue in community college and nine to a four-year institution. Of the seventeen who choose community college, only one will ever transfer to a four-year institution. Of the twenty-six who pursue postsecondary education, only eight will graduate with baccalaureate degrees. Only three of these college graduates will enroll in a graduate degree-granting program or professional school. And finally, less than one is ever likely to receive a doctoral degree.6 If one examines similar statistics for African Americans the results are strikingly alike. Students from both of these groups are segregated in poor schools, with inadequate resources, few advanced placement courses, and with teachers, administrators, and parents who appear not to care. Recent national statistics compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center indicate that our country’s current recession has led more Latino students in the 18 to 24 age group to enter community colleges because of their poor job prospects. In 2009, 39 percent of Latino high school graduates enrolled in two-year colleges; in 2010, 44 percent enrolled. This one-year spike is largely due to temporary federal stimulus money earmarked to fund greater college enrollments and student aid.7

Over the last hundred years the population of the United States has been radically transformed through the process of immigration. And in this same period our economy has been equally reshaped—from an agrarian, to an industrial, and to the knowledge economy we are quickly becoming. The hallmarks of success in the knowledge economy are telecommunication networks that allow information, people, money, and products to move rapidly and seamlessly; an integrated system of innovation that links universities, research laboratories, and governments; and educational institutions that prepare individuals with the skills, values, and creativity to succeed in civic-minded ways. The challenge at hand is that at the very moment that our knowledge economy demands far more highly educated workers than are currently being produced, our institutions of higher education are letting the fastest growing part of the population fall dramatically behind.

Starting in the mid-1960s, a number of programs were put in place to integrate colleges and universities. Started as government-mandated Affirmative Action, these programs focused primarily on increasing admissions numbers, hoping that as the composition of the student body changed, institutions would eventually reflect more equitably the country’s racial, gender, and ethnic makeup. While admitting more women and minority students did slowly change the makeup of institutions, such recruitment and admissions policies by themselves proved no panacea. College admission did not guarantee retention, much less graduation, because a large portion of these students were coming from segregated and underprivileged home environments, from underperforming schools where college-preparatory curricula did not exist, and were entering environments in which they were often stigmatized by the very schemes that accounted for their presence. Indeed, these problems were frequently falsely dichotomized by antagonists as a choice between inclusion or achievement: the academy had to choose one or the other because they were imputed to be incompatible.

A more profound set of tools was needed. A much more complex way of thinking about the education of our multicultural society had to emerge. Such theory and practice emerged in the 1990s among educators and business leaders concerned about America’s democratic promise and its competitiveness in a globalized world economy. An important shift came in the work of Daryl G. Smith, of the Claremont Graduate School, in her book published by AAC&U, Diversity Works: The Emerging Picture of How Students Benefit (1997). Employing the language of diversity, Smith moved the debate beyond viewing simple numeric representation of women and minorities as the transformational element that would lead to their retention and graduation. As Smith explained, yes, most certainly numeric representation, which had been the focus of so much previous government intervention and higher education administration, was necessary and important, but one could not stop there. One also needed curricular transformation, a campus culture that affirmed diversity, and a capacious institutional vision that defined what diversity meant to a particular school. Colleges and universities should continue not only to recruit students, faculty, and staff based on an institution’s history, on its mission, on its relationship to the surrounding community and world, but also to expand its representation of women, religious and sexual minorities, immigrants, and international students.

As the race, gender, class, and sexual representation of the students changed, and in turn the faculty and staff changed, one had to gradually transform the curriculum. Drawing on Smith’s theorizing, many options for curricular transformation were easy to imagine. Classes on the history of the United States, for example, could not simply have one session on slavery, one on the urban plight of African Americans in contemporary times and then hastily conclude that the African American experience had been adequately woven into the fabric of American history. One needed instead history courses that put slavery, its transformations, abolition, and its racial and class legacies at the very core of the course, so structuring all of its readings, assignments, and grand conclusions. Campuses needed to see their programs and departments of Native American Studies, Chicano/Latino Studies, and African and African American Studies as important sites in the university’s curriculum where counter-narratives of minority experience could be validated and seen as offering alternative epistemologies for living and learning. Some schools responded to the need for curricular transformation by totally supplanting or by augmenting Western Civilization courses to include civilizational texts from India, China, and Mexico, as well as from various vantage points, be it from the centers of power or its margins, from women and men, from poor and rich. The movement for the creation of Ethnic Studies at many campuses reflected a desire to shatter the disciplinary boundaries inherited from the late nineteenth-century German university and to organize knowledge and practice in ways that were more attuned to actual community problems in need of solutions. Curricular transformation also meant expanding course offerings to include classes on sexual identities, on women, on disabilities, on Maya mathematics, on community ethnography, on the history of our democratic institutions, on our constitution and how our Bill of Rights had been fought over and forged.

Daryl G. Smith urged the creation of a campus culture that was not only welcoming of difference but was made more vibrant and catalytic by the presence of faculty, students, and staff who embodied a host of minority and majority identities. For some campuses it meant creating multicultural resource centers that were active in convening intercultural and interfaith dialogues, that rapidly engaged a campus when acts of racial and sexual violence occurred, that explored the meanings of identity in personal and public life, that offered havens for deliberative and conscientious discussions and action about the most fractious issues in our contemporary world, and through such processes, preparing students to exercise their civic rights and responsibilities as citizens in our democracy. Theme houses, ethnically based sororities and fraternities, language centers, crisis hot lines, world cuisines in the cafeteria, education abroad programs, and personally designed programs of study were but some of the ways campuses tried to make themselves more welcoming to their diverse students and faculty. For other schools this process entailed attempts to erase the sharp line that divides town and gown, engaging the surrounding communities from which they mostly drew their students and workforce, to collectively address issues of mutual concern. Thus, instead of sending students out into the community only in one direction, the university invited the community in as well, making available its resources and personnel, opening its laboratories for Saturday high school projects, offering its arts, science, social science, and humanities faculty to school districts to ensure alignment between the high school and college curricula, creating model schools to serve as direct pipelines into higher education, and staging forums on the pressing issues before the electorate at any moment in time. Such attempts had a deliberate purpose: to naturalize college and university campuses as welcoming community places in which to imagine and create, to learn and risk, and to explore the full range of knowledge a liberal arts education offers.

When Smith proposed that colleges and universities needed an institutional vision about what diversity means to them, she probably would have agreed with the adage, “If you don’t have a map to your destination, you will never know when you have arrived.” Accordingly, it is imperative for schools to convene their complex constituencies to craft an aspirational document that expounds a particular school’s vision of diversity. The process by which such a statement is drafted must be deliberative—it must engage the president and provost, the deans and department chairs, working in unison with students, faculty, and staff to articulate what specifically diversity means at a particular place and time, how it will be measured, how it would be nurtured and infused into the entire institutional culture. Log onto the websites of colleges and universities across the land and what you will find at some places are robust statements of what diversity means to a particular campus. The best of these statements move beyond vaunted platitudes to particulars, linking the campus to our citizenship in the republic and to our place in a complex multicultural world.

The language of multiculturalism and diversity in American higher education has been with us since the 1980s. It gained renewed vigor in the 1990s primarily because of the demographic changes wrought by immigration described above. Business leaders want workers who are comfortable with difference and who understand their own culture and the many others that dot the globe. They want multilingual not monolingual employees who are attuned to global markets, to the massive movement of people and ideas, to the rapid circulation of money, products, and bodies, and who are sensitive to cultural tastes and distinctions.

The peril of such an understanding of diversity, one that mainly imagines the place of a campus as a site for the preparation of workers to better operate within a vast multicultural world of commerce and commodities, is that the specificities of American history evaporate. The problems are no longer here. They are over there. The past is forgotten. America’s historical dilemma, riven as it has been by its democratic aspirations of equality and its persistent inequality born of racism, xenophobia, and religious hatreds, is all too easily dismissed as something we have moved beyond. This is the intention of the post-racial rhetoric of our time. The hard won victories enacted into law as the result of the Civil Rights movement, which at the moment are being vigorously contested and peeled back, cutting off opportunity for those that will become the largest groups in our republic, require us to heed the message we first articulated in The Drama of Diversity and Democracy. For once a society forgets its history and participates in willful acts of collective amnesia, it becomes much, much harder for institutions of higher education to be active participants in preparing our future leaders to address and ameliorate our social ills.

In the original edition of The Drama of Diversity and Democracy: Higher Education and American Commitments, we called upon members of the Association of American Colleges and Universities to commit ourselves to the aspirations and ideals of the American creed, to a vision of democracy that is deliberative, inclusive and fair, and that seeks to address the problems of our day—poverty, racism, hypersegregation, gender inequalities, homophobia, and religious hatreds. Conversations and actions about these topics are difficult but necessary. At this moment in our national history, colleges and universities remain one of the few forums for such conversations. Let us engage this task with wisdom and patience, seeking justice and, by so doing, rejuvenating the promises of our democracy.

RAMÓN A. GUTIÉRREZ,
University of Chicago

NOTES
1. Tesler, Michael and David O. Sears. 2010. Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Wise, Tim J. 2010. Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equality. San Francisco: City Lights Books. For examples of the popular rhetoric see Auster, Lawrence. 2008. “What is Post-Racial America?” A View from the Right,http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/010000.html (accessed September 9, 2011); Schorr, Daniel. 2008. “A New, ‘Post-Racial’ Political Era in America,” NPR, January 8, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18489466 (accessed September 9, 2011).

2. USA Network. 2010. “USA Network’s New ‘United or Divided’ Poll Shows Americans Believe Racial, Ethnic, Political Divisions are Worse than Just a Year Ago” (press release); USA Today/Gallup. 2011. “One-Third in U.S. See Improved Race Relations Under Obama” (press release).

3. Wolff, Edward N. 2010. “Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze—an Update to 2007.” New York: The Levy Economics Institute. http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/?docid=1235. The paper can also be accessed from Edward Wolff's home page at New York University: http://www.econ.nyu.edu/user/wolffe/.

4. Ojeda, Raul Hinojosa, Albert Jacquez, and Paule Cruz Takash. 2009. “The End of the American Dream for Blacks and Latinos: How the Home Mortgage Crisis is Destroying Black and Latino Wealth, Jeopardizing America’s Future Prosperity and How to Fix It.” San Antonio: William C. Velasquez Institute. Accessed on June 12, 2011: http://www.wcvi.org/data/pub/wcvi_whitepaper_housing_june2009.pdf.

5. University of California. 2007. University of California Admissions Statistics. Statistics accessed on June 1, 2011: http://www.discriminations.us/2007/06/university-of-california-admissions-statistics/.

6. Ornelas, Armida, and Daniel G. Solórzano. 2009. “Reaffirming Affirmative Action: An Equal Opportunity Analysis of Advanced Placement Courses and University Admissions,” in Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Patricia Zavella, eds., Mexicans in California: Transformations and Challenges. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

7. Fry, Richard. 2011. “Hispanic College Enrollment Spikes, Narrowing Gaps with Other Groups: 24% Growth from 2009 to 2010.” Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center. http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=146.