Abstracting and De-Racializing Diversity
Abstracting and De-Racializing Diversity
The Articulation of Diversity in the Post-Race Era
This concluding chapter argues that regional newspaper stories in Silicon Valley, California, create the appearance of a raceless society, strengthening legislative efforts in California to eliminate affirmative action, multiculturalism, and other racialized policies. The newspapers do this by constantly featuring “empirical” surveys predicting a majority minority in northern California cities and by reporting personal testimonies about the positive effects of “diversity,” such as interacting with people from all over the world. These media texts articulate a specific ideological representation of diversity in the post-race era in two ways. First, diversity signifies an abstract, idealized, and/or raceless representation and reality, in which cultural communities are collocated, while simultaneously emptied of any particular histories, social structures, or structural inequalities. Second, diversity and difference are depicted as universal; each cultural group is deemed to be the same and equal precisely because they are all equally different.
Keywords: Silicon Valley newspapers, raceless society, multiculturalism, racialized policies, diversity, post-race era
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