Talking/Not Talking about Race: The Enregisterments of Culture in Higher Education Discourses

In higher education “diversity” discourses , culture routinely stands in for race, but its use is unevenly enregistered. Examination of three web pages at one college shows contrasting entextualizations of culture: in promotional discourse , culture is loosely associated with diversity; in describing student organizations , culture is variously associated with race, ethnicity, nationality, language, and gender; for multicultural programs , culture is most tightly associated with racial markedness . Culture is most complexly enregistered in spoken discourse among students of color, indexing racial markedness experienced as subjectivity, family, class, and location. Framing all these usages is a neoliberalization of racial markedness, as in the idea of “educating the community.” [enregisterment, indexicality, higher education, culture, diversity]