The Who, Why, and How of Diversity: When Celebrating Diversity Enacts Covert Identity-Blindness

Despite recent attempts to dismantle diversity initiatives in the US, many people and organizations continue to advocate for diversity. However, people vary widely in who they mean when they discuss diversity and their beliefs about why and how to promote diversity. These diversity components have only been examined in separate literatures, lacking full integration. Therefore, diversity scholarship sometimes conflates these different components without acknowledging their conceptual distinctions and historical contexts. We integrate and distinguish the literatures on diversity definitions (who), cases (why), and ideologies (how), while also proposing a new typology for defining diversity that is sensitive to societal hierarchy. Finally, we highlight how these different belief systems about diversity may covertly promote identity-blindness, whereby people state a commitment to diversity despite holding beliefs that undermine it. In particular, we argue that broadened definitions of diversity, the business case for promoting diversity, and value-in-equality diversity ideologies can all covertly help maintain identity-blindness.