Disrupting neoliberal diversity discourse with critical race college transition stories

The college transition can challenge students’ sense-making of diversity, race, and oppression. Yet prevailing neoliberal discourses touting the market value of diversity can thwart this potential by promoting color-evasive messaging that avoids reckoning with racism. Guided by Critical Race Theory, we explored incoming students’ sense-making of diversity (n = 421) after being exposed to either color-evasive transition stories or more critical stories that discussed intersecting experiences with oppression. Using discourse analysis, we observed that Black, Latinx, and Native students and their Asian and white counterparts reproduced common neoliberal logics emphasizing the educational benefits of diversity. However, critical stories reminded Black, Latinx, and Native students of the limits of diversity to change structures. For Asian and white students, critical stories elicited more aversive reactions and more endorsements of how diversity broadens equal access. Understanding students’ diversity discourses can inform how universities engage conversations about difference to counteract neoliberal talk that undermines racial justice.