Diversity rhetoric intensifies precisely when discrimination is at its worst

Evidence

It is not unusual for the rhetoric of diversity to be mobilized during an era in which the United States is least multicultural, or rather most discriminatory. The shiny veneer of diversity can be a deceptive palliative, an optimistic balm to soothe the harsh reality of racist policies and practices. The War on Terror, because it is so explicitly anti-Arab and anti-Muslim requires the rhetorical production of diversity. Some civil rights groups and nonprofit organizations responded to material realities (i.e., hate crimes) by promoting the ideology of diversity to encourage racial harmony among the public. The U.S. government, by contrast, sells the ideology of diversity to conceal the blatant discriminatory practices it enacts daily. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1356

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, paradigm-shifting insight: diversity talk is not evidence of progress but a function of discrimination’s intensity — worth sitting with and connecting across case studies.
• XREF: Connects to scholarship on colorblindness as racial ideology (Bonilla-Silva) and to the aestheticization of racial harmony in corporate multiculturalism.
• SEED: Potential essay: when does diversity rhetoric function as palliative instead of progress — tracing the correlation between anti-Muslim state actions and pro-diversity advertising.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 1356