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Fake Diversity and Racial

Capitalism
Nancy Leong · Follow
5 min read · Nov 23, 2014

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For decades now, it’s been fashionable for

institutions of all kinds to showcase their
racially diverse constituencies. This is true
even when the institution in question has
been sued for discrimination on the basis of
race, gender, or other protected categories:

From Walmart’s website.

But behind the smiling, diverse faces, many

institutions also share a dirty little secret. A
lot of the diversity is the result not of the
institution’s inclusive practices when it comes
to recruiting, hiring, admitting or whatever
other word is appropriate. Rather, it’s the
result of Photoshop.

One of the first Photoshop incidents that

gained public traction was this gaffe by the
University of Wisconsin:

On the left, we have the photo as originally taken. On the

right, the photo as it appeared on the cover of the 2001–
2002 Undergraduate Application for Admission.

Perhaps if you just glanced at this image, you

wouldn’t notice anything amiss. But once
you’re looking for it, it’s fairly obvious that
there’s been an addition. Diallo Shabazz, the
young black man photoshopped into the
image on the right, actually had quite a career
of being photoshopped into various images by
the University of Wisconsin, as Lisa Wade
documents in this thoughtful post.

It’s easy to mock the University of Wisconsin

for this crude attempt at faking diversity. But
the impulse is far from unique even among
educational institutions. Consider this image
from a brochure for the University of Texas at
Arlington:

At first glance, this looks like a photo of four happy diverse

friends. But look more closely, and you realize that the
black woman isn’t standing in the same sunlight as the
other three, and the bricks along the right side of her head
don’t line up, leaving unexplained white space. (Or, rather,
white space explained by badly executed Photoshop.)

Even when schools don’t actually use

Photoshop, they often find other ways to
boost the appearance of diversity. For
example, a recent study of 371 college and
university viewbooks found that black and
Asian students were overrepresented by 50%
in photographs relative to their actual
presence in the student body.

How can we explain this impulse to overstate

diversity, either through Photoshop or
through aggressive presentation of diversity?
I examined this phenomenon in a 2013 article
in the Harvard Law Review called “Racial
Capitalism.” What I call racial capitalism is
the process of an individual or group deriving
value from the racial identity of another
person. While in theory any group might
derive value from the racial identity of
another, in practice, since white people are
historically and presently a majority in
America, racial capitalism most often
involves a white person or a predominantly
white institution extracting value from non-
white racial identity.

Racial capitalism explains why white people

are so keen to tell you about their black
friends. It explains why white people are so
anxious to tell you about the diverse
neighborhood they live in. And, more
generally, it explains why people have a
powerful incentive to display their affiliation
with non-white people.

Moreover, it’s not only schools. Lately racial

capitalism has gone political. Consider the
Republican Party, which has recently urged
people to identify themselves as “Frederick
Douglass Republicans”:

From an image used to advertise the Frederick Douglass

Republican “Methodology” (their word). The movement
seems either ignorant or uninterested in changes to the
Republican Party that have taken place in the 120 years
since Mr. Douglass passed away.

At least in theory, affiliating themselves with

an early hero of the civil rights movement
allows conservatives both to avoid charges of
racism and to align themselves with a
demographic that historically and today has
rarely voted for Republican candidates.

Or consider the “Asian Republican Coalition”

(ARC), which, as Vice Chairman Thomas Britt
explains, has “a very broad definition of what
constitutes the Asian American community.
The Asian Republican Coalition is open to all
Americans, including Asian Americans and
those of us like me who are not ethnically
Asian but have spent twenty years living in
Hong Kong.”

The leadership and membership of the Asian Republican

Coalition.

So per this and other comments to the media,

apparently ARC is meant to include people
who have lived in Asian countries, people
who like Asian culture, people who are
married to or dating Asian people, people
who are studying an Asian language, people
who have a son or daughter serving in the
military in an Asian country, and people who
are doing business in Asian countries. In
other words, pretty much everyone.

And to bring the discussion full circle,

consider the Republican Party’s new black
friend:

The image itself isn’t

particularly
noteworthy, but
reporters quickly
discovered that the
woman in the photograph isn’t actually a
black Republican—or rather, she might be,
but no one really knows because the
photograph is a stock photograph. As one
journalist observed, the woman’s image has
been used in a wide array of contexts, ranging
from the Georgia Association of Black
Women Attorneys to a “Virtual Office
Assistant” advertisement to a sale on
eyeglasses to a payday loan service to an
advertisement for a Christian counseling
center.

So in the end, what’s

Stock image used for
Georgia Association of
Black Women Attorneys.
Stock image used for
“Virtual Clone,” a virtual
office assistant.
sustainable version of racial diversity. If we
think that diversity is important, we should
value the real thing.
the problem with
using photographs—
whether altered
through Photoshop, or
through real images
presented in a certain
light—to communicate
the impression of
diversity? One is that
manipulating
photographs is a
shortcut, an end-run
around more difficult
and painful efforts to
cultivate a lasting,

Another reason that

faked diversity should
trouble us is that
manipulating
Stock image used for photographs is
QuickPaydayNow, a deceptive—a way of
payday lender.
communicating to the
viewer that the
institution has done the difficult work of
establishing diversity when in fact it hasn’t.
Anyone can Photoshop a photograph, but
truly diverse institutions are much more
difficult to find. In this day and age most
organizations have internalized, at least at a
crude level, that diversity is desirable, but far
fewer have actually done the work to acquire
meaningful diversity.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of fake

diversity—whether a manipulated photograph
or a political organization that presents a glib
version of non-white inclusion—is that it’s
deeply cynical. Organizations such as the
Frederick Douglass Republicans and the
Asian Republican Coalition, and manipulated
photographs such as the ones I’ve included
here, count on us to be easily satisfied by fake
diversity, count on us not to care what’s
behind the superficial images with which
we’re presented. They think they can engage
in racial capitalism and get away with it—that
they can extract value from non-white
identity without anyone even examining the
legitimacy of that non-white identity.

Let’s hope that most of us are smart enough

not to be satisfied with this kind of fake
diversity.
295

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Written by Nancy Leong

841 Followers

Professor at U of Denver Law School. Teach & research

constitutional rights & discrimination. Published in NY
Times, Slate, Salon, HuffPo, SCOTUSblog.

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