We've heard plenty from politicians and experts on affirmative action
and higher education, about how universities should intervene--if at
all--to ensure a diverse but deserving student population. But what
about those for whom these issues matter the most? In this book, Natasha
K. Warikoo deeply explores how students themselves think about merit and
race at a uniquely pivotal moment: after they have just won the most
competitive game of their lives and gained admittance to one of the
world's top universities.
What Warikoo uncovers--talking with both white students and students of
color at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford--is absolutely illuminating; and
some of it is positively shocking. As she shows, many elite white
students understand the value of diversity abstractly, but they ignore
the real problems that racial inequality causes and that diversity
programs are meant to solve. They stand in fear of being labeled a
racist, but they are quick to call foul should a diversity program
appear at all to hamper their own chances for advancement. The most
troubling result of this ambivalence is what she calls the "diversity
bargain," in which white students reluctantly agree with affirmative
action as long as it benefits them by providing a diverse learning
environment--racial diversity, in this way, is a commodity, a selling
point on a brochure. And as Warikoo shows, universities play a big part
in creating these situations. The way they talk about race on campus and
the kinds of diversity programs they offer have a huge impact on student
attitudes, shaping them either toward ambivalence or, in better cases,
toward more productive and considerate understandings of racial
difference.
Ultimately, this book demonstrates just how slippery the notions of
race, merit, and privilege can be. In doing so, it asks important
questions not just about college admissions but what the elite students
who have succeeded at it--who will be the world's future leaders--will
do with the social inequalities of the wider world.
