“Managing Diversity” in U.S. Popular Culture, Politics, and Education in the 1990s

Abstract

This dissertation examines how multinational corporations influenced U.S. popular culture, politics, and education in the 1990s. In contrast to the Reagan years--in which white women and people of color were frequently positioned as the cause of both a historically high unemployment rate and an erosion of U.S. public education--the 1990s were marked by a discursive shift as corporations sought to profit in an increasingly globalized and diversified marketplace. This shift is evidenced in popular culture through films such as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) in which the Medieval folk legend heroized for robbing from the rich to give to the poor is re-imagined as a multicultural manager who regains his own lands by harnessing the talents of a white woman and a Black Muslim. It is evidenced by President Clinton’s 1992 pledge "to bring our people together as never before so that our diversity can be a source of strength in a world that is ever smaller." And it is evidenced in education, both in K-12 education, pressured into producing flexibly specialized entrepreneurs who could market their “differences” to corporations looking to hire people with the best “differences” for the job, and academia, where white women and people of color finally gained cultural capital only to position it as the rarefied possession of the few. This new strategy of managing diversity, however, also meant managing adversity, not only as a growing number of white women and people of color asserted themselves in civic, corporate, and political life but because it relied on exploiting the full diversity of people in the US and across the globe, including poorly paid service and production workers and a previously more empowered group, white working class men. Finally, as an introduction to this dissertation, I explain why it took me 26 years to come back to finish it, originally slated to be completed in 1994, as I myself was part of the diversity managed in the 1990s as the result of my original PhD supervisor’s sexual harassment and the University’s then response.