The Diversity Bargain

Elite universities are institutional sites for cultivating elite identities, and for shaping elite understandings of merit, inequality, and race. What happens to privileged children’s understandings of deservingness when they have "won” the most competitive game they’ve entered so far, the college admissions process? How do they make sense of those who fail to gain admission? Natasha Warikoo explores what merit means to students at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford Universities. What she found surprised her. While American students largely internalized the diversity rhetoric around them, most white students also held on to a colorblind frame of race in society--that is, they did not recognize racial inequality or racism as significant in the lives of people of color. The comparison with students at Oxford helps underscore how much US students’ perspectives are not universal--the British students understood the role of race in society in a very different way. Ultimately, however, most students in both national contexts employ meanings of merit that support their status as elites, and they emphasize their own individual needs rather than social change.