Conceptualizing Race in the Leisure Studies Diversity Course

Abstract

Diversity courses are integral to higher leisure education curricula and united by the following assumptions: (a) recreation programs involve encounters with “different” groups of people and (b) future professionals require a specialized set of knowledge and skills in order to manage those interactions. Although several scholars have critiqued these assumptions, those insights have not been applied to rethinking how the diversity course is taught. This article addresses that gap through an examination of how race is conceptualized and taught within the diversity course. Race is the focal point of this article because diversity initiatives most often focus on racial identity. Academics have often framed race as a relatively homogenous individual identity in the leisure studies diversity course. The purpose of acquiring knowledge about racial identity is to facilitate the students’ diversification of staff and users. However, this framing of race obscures the ways that diversification can expose the racialized other to new forms of violence and exploitation. I offer racial capitalism as a different framework through which race can be conceptualized and taught within the leisure studies diversity course. Racial capitalism encourages viewing race through intersecting relations of power, as a status created to maintain power and profit, and as deeply rooted in the past.

Keywords:

• Critical
• diversity course
• leisure
• teaching
• oppression
• pedagogy
• recreation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I have been teaching race in leisure studies courses for a decade. For readers who are interested in my past approaches to teaching race, see (Theriault, 2022a, 2022b). I share these articles not to position myself as an expert , but to emphasize that I am engaged in the very struggle I ask readers to engage in: to teach race better. I also share these articles to not to position my current approach to teaching race as beyond reproach, but rather acknowledge that I am complicit in many of the problematic tendencies I identify below.

2 No direct quotes will be used to identify specific programs in this paper. The goal of the paper is to challenge all of us to understand and teach race better, not to call out specific programs as examples of what to do or what not to do. Citing specific programs in a negative fashion may prompt defensiveness whereas citing others in a positive fashion may prompt copying. Either outcome limits our capacity to understand and teach race better.