-or- A lie for the politically correct
Diversity is a popular buzz word these days. But I wonder if people truly know what it means. Perhaps we know, but just choose to ignore. It certainly wouldn't be the first time society has known the truth and willingly turned away.
So just what is diversity? Dictionary.com defines it as
1. 1. The fact or quality of being diverse; difference.
2. A point or respect in which things differ.
2. Variety or multiformity: “Charles Darwin saw in the diversity of species the principles of evolution that operated to generate the species: variation, competition and selection” (Scientific American).
So it would seem that variety is the key and truly the spice of life. And celebrating diversity should entail embracing and celebrating diversity in all its varied faces, right?
What a load of crap.
Diversity has nothing to do with real variety. Neither does its cousin "multicultural". You see, both of these can, at least here in America, be distilled down to one simple thing: skin color. It would be great if it were different, but I just don't see that happening, at least for a while. We are so embroiled in race and skin color that we seem to forget that culture and diversity can have just as little to do with skin color as they have to do with eye color. And when was the last time you heard someone talking about increasing diversity by hiring a red head? I didn't think so.
And so we continue to champion diversity by working to increase homogeneity. Take my institution for example. Out of 100 medical students in my class there are only 3 who were 25 or older when we started. I was one of them (being older because I took 2 years off to serve a religious mission and another year off to work and be with my family), one had taken 4 years off after he graduated to be an artist (how cool is that?), and another had worked for a couple of years. The rest of the class fell into the group of incredibly bright, rushed through undergraduate work, had well-to-do families who supported them the whole way tank of homogeneity. But when you talk about diversity in our class us three 'old men' are entirely ignored for one simple reason.
We are white.
See, I don't add to the diversity of my medical school because I am the only one with a family, the only one who was married for more than a month or two (back when we started), the only member of my religion, the only one from my state and culture. I am white, and so I simply cannot be diverse. Yet the Middle Eastern, African, Asian (not born or raised there of course, just some point of their genealogy reaches back there) who are all from the same socio-economic background, many who are of the same religion, and similar ivy-league cultures add to that diversity. It is for this group of cultural clones, whose skin just happens to be different colors, that the Multicultural Students office is created.
I am not welcome in there because I am not diverse. I am white and so my addition to the class is less than others. Just ask the administration or the financial aid office.
You see, I have two adopted sisters. One is Hispanic (from Colombia), the other is black (she was born in Tennessee so I sure don't see the sense in calling her African-American). They were both adopted as infants and so have been raised in the same culture as me and my oh-so-white brother. Yet at their respective schools they are used as examples of cultural diversity. Does this make sense to others? Cause it sure doesn't to me.
And while I am truly not bitter about this (at least not until the time of year to apply for financial aid rolls around), I am saddened by it. I can't help but feel that we are devaluing true cultural and thought diversity in favor of the amount of pigment our melanocytes produces.