Leaning In: Diversity, Dialogue, and Whiteness at a Quaker Independent School

Diversity has emerged as a hallmark of institutional excellence in several fields. At the same time, it has been vilified and maligned by conservative pundits and politicians as Donald Trump has worked to frame diversity as un-American and unmeritocratic. This tension makes diversity worthy of sociological analysis. Though there is an emerging critical sociology of diversity, much of that work has been primarily concerned with the discursive, ideological, and symbolic dimensions of diversity. In contrast, this dissertation examines how diversity moves through and is contested and supported within the organization and cultural context of Friends Prep (FP), a progressive Quaker independent school in the United States. This project asks why it is that a progressive school, with so many hallmarks of diversity, equity, and inclusion excellence, continued to struggle with diversity in general and race in particular. In pursuit of this question the author collected two years of ethnographic data that included 37 semi-structured interviews, hundreds of hours of participant observation, and archival research. The findings identify three core points of friction. First, while FP was robustly committed to diversity, other organizational weaknesses hampered a more robust organizational structuring of diversity work. Second, while FP students were quite adept at talking about race in the abstract, their dialogical skills were far less developed. This meant that talking about race and diversity tended to generate tensions on campus. Finally, though FP community members had developed a critical consciousness around race and racism, White racial habitus continued to shape the terms and conditions of inclusion in the campus community. Ultimately, these findings suggest that diversity work is a process not a product or outcome. This is work that happens at multiple registers, scales, and temporalties, and synergizing these is hard work. Thus, leaning in emerged as both a personal disposition and organizational commitment to striving for a more equitable future.