When Diversity Drops: Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education by Julie J. Park (review)

Julie J. Park’s new book When Diversity Drops: Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education follows an evangelical Christian student group at one of California’s public universities through its successes and struggles with building and maintaining racial diversity. It provides background on the successful growth of the group’s diversity and then the decline of that diversity with the passage of California’s Proposition 209, which effectively banned affirmative action in the state’s colleges and universities.

Park’s introduction prefaces the book as a case study of “how macrolevel shifts in campus demography [like that experienced with Prop 209] affect the microlevel patterns of social relationships that students have, or do not have, across race” (p. 4). Her case study focuses on an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) at California University (CU). IVCF is a national, evangelic, Christian organization with student groups at colleges across the United States.

Park begins by outlining the book’s intended contributions as shedding light on how different organizational processes promote or inhibit cross-racial relationships. Also, the book seeks to show how changing institutional racial demographics contribute to change, both in the demographics and culture of a student subgroup. Park’s methods include observation and informal interviews of IVCF students and staff over select periods of time during 2006–2008, although the study frames CU’s IVCF starting in the early 1990s.

In Chapter 1, Park offers a background and framework for her study, focusing primarily on the extreme racial segregation seen in American Christian religious organizations and groups. She provides the historical context of how Whites used Christianity as justification to enslave and discriminate against Blacks and also highlights how enslaved Blacks drew on Christianity in their resistance against slavery and then Jim Crow laws. However, Park attributes the Christian racial segregation in the United States today as largely due to “homophily”—the social phenomenon in which “likes attract likes” (p. 18).

Although Park acknowledged the U.S. history of racism and Christianity’s role in racism and resistance, her suggestion of “homophily” as the predominant cause of the extreme racial segregation seen in the Christian church is problematic in that it aligns with what Bonilla-Silva (2013) describes as “naturalization.” Naturalization is the denial of racism in a social context that casts the phenomenon of racial segregation as a choice or as a natural human tendency. In this case, showing homophily as a key reason for racial segregation ignores racist structures and attitudes as contributors and instead positions segregation as a natural social choice for people in all racial groups.

In the same chapter, Park acknowledges that many Christian groups, including many IVCF groups have not focused on enhancing their racial diversity. Yet those that have use two non-secular approaches: recategorization and ethnic reinforcement. “Recategorization” (p. 25) occurs when a new group identity is created to transcend racial identity, one in which racial identity is no longer acknowledged. Park suggests that “recategorization” relies on the concept of colorblindness, “an approach to race relations that basically disregards or downplays the significance of race” (p. 24, citing Emerson & Smith, 2000).

Although Park critiques “recategorization” because it dismisses racial and cultural identities, she neglects to recognize how a colorblind philosophy benefits White people by denying racial power and privilege structures, thus perpetuating White supremacism and marginalizing people of color (Bonilla-Silva, 2013; Leonardo, 2009).

“Ethnic reinforcement,” instead of transcending race, promotes the acknowledgement and valuing of individual racial and ethnic identities yet still emphasizes shared identity (in this case, Christian identity). It is within this second perspective that CU’s IVCF developed its approach to what evangelical Christians have termed “racial reconciliation.” Park defines racial reconciliation using Tomikawa and Schaupp’s definition: “People of different races forging relationships based on repentance, forgiveness, justice and love in order to address, heal and redeem the effects of personal and systemic race-based...