Beginning in the 1970s, law and educational policy became the dominant domains for […] discussions on how to manage human differences in the name of progress and reform, with affirmative action law being most prominent. Beginning with Supreme Court Justice William Powell’s watershed decision, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (438 U.S. 265 (1978)), affirmative action discourse has conditioned the meaning of diversity and, in the process, redefined how the state can recognize and act on racial inequality. In his decision, Justice Powell deployed the keyword “diversity” no less than thirty times. His point was to invalidate all but one of the reasons offered by the University of California-Davis School of Medicine for reserving a few admission slots for students identified as “economically and/or educationally disadvantaged” or members of “minority groups” (Regents, 438 U.S. at 274). He found it unconstitutional to use race in admissions to counter discrimination, to break up white monopolies on medical training, or to increase the well-being of communities of color (by training more physicians of color). The only admissible ground for taking race into consideration was “obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body” (Regents, 438 U.S. at 306). By ruling that “educational diversity” is protected under the free speech clause of the First Amendment, Powell negated material social change as a racial justice goal, replacing it with consideration for higher education’s mission to provide all students with opportunities for self-cultivation through the exposure to diversity. The decision rests on the capacity of diversity to abstract and generalize human difference in a way that forestalls more precise and relational analysis. It positions “racial justice” as anathema to “genuine diversity,” defined only vaguely as “a far broader array of qualifications and characteristics” (Regents, 438 U.S. at 315).

Twenty-five years later, the next wave of Supreme Court affirmative action cases (Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), and Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S> 244 (2003)) were decided in a context where universities, corporations, and government agencies had all adapted to this definition of diversity by hiring an array of diversity managers, diversity consultants, and diversity directors, many of whom were assigned the task of finding the most efficient and profitable way to manage human differences of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, and national origin. Sandra Day O’Connor makes this logic apparent in her findings for Grutter v. Bollinger: “Diversity [in education] promotes learning outcomes and better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce” since “major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse peoples, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints (Grutter, 539 U.S. at 330). O’Connor’s reasoning reflects a new common sense developed within multinational corporate capitalism. Bestsellers such as The Diversity Toolkit: How You Can Build and Benefit from a Diverse Workforce (Sonnenschein 1999) and Managing Diversity: People Skills for a Multicultural Workplace (Carr-Ruffino 1996) promised to teach corporate managers, in the words of the World Bank’s Human Resources website, “to value [human] differences and use them as strategic business assets” (Office of Diversity and Inclusion 2013). One might argue that more is at stake than hiring multiracial, female, and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) employees to rainbow-wash corporate agendas. Corporate diversity’s deeper violence is to claim that all difference – material, cultural, communal, and epistemological – fro capital management, that is, to recognize no difference that makes a difference, no knowledges, values, social forms, or associations that defer or displace capitalist globalization.