Monday, October 11, 2010

Diversity Allows The Greatest Number of People 'A Place At The Table'

Last week, one of the members of the Human Rights Campaign LinkedIn group posted a video on which Cynthia Nixon [of Sex in the City fame] was expounding on the issue of marriage equity for gay couples. She was noting that gay people were not asking for special privileges concerning their right to marriage -- they were simply asking for a 'place at the table'. She stressed that their participation wasn't an attempt to change the rules of marriage, anymore than the 1960's Freedom Riders, who engaged in sit-ins at lunch counters in the South, were trying to change the rules for eating out. They simply wanted to have a 'place at the table' that others had had all along.

That strikes me as one of the essential elements for having diversity in a society: that all the members of the society want a 'place at the table', to engage in the feast of life, to participate freely and equally in the fruits of the culture, of which they are also a part and which they add to. Gays and lesbians, transgender and transsexual people, all ethnic and racial groups, members of various economic classes, disabled persons, etc. all want the opportunity to take an active role in their own economic, political, and social advancement and a chance to live an enjoyable and economically adequate life. And the question is: Why should they not have that chance? Why should anyone be barred from having such an opportunity?

This past week, I attended a speech by CNN's Fareed Zakaria [who is also a columnist at Newsweek and The Washington Post]. In addition to a wide range of incisive observations (the fellow is a brilliant social and political commentator), he was talking about the objections to the proposed Islamic Center in New York City near the 'Ground Zero' of the 9/11 tragedy. What he emphasized was that, while many people felt negatively about the location of the Islamic Center, that 'majority opinion' was not and should not be the deciding factor in where the Center is located. He was giving the audience a historical perspective: that 70% or more of the population had, at one time, opposed miscegenation, Catholic churches in Boston, and suffrage for women -- but their opposition 'didn't make it right'. Sometimes the larger perspective of ethics had to have a place in our national consciousness and sometimes we need to allow that our Founding Fathers had some real intelligence in writing the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

And sometimes we, as a majority (in a democracy that honors majority opinions, but also guards minority rights) need to step back from our prejudices and realize that it isn't 'just us' who have a right to the fruits of the culture, but that true 'justice' involves honoring and promoting diversity, where everyone can have equal access to a 'place at the table'.

Critical to that diversity, though, are two additional elements: tolerance and respect. It does an individual or organization little good to be willing to engage in diversity without concurrently having the emotional and cultural openness to feel and display tolerance toward people who are different, sometimes profoundly different, from themselves.

Due to the neighborhoods they chose to live in and can afford to purchase a home in, many people in our society tend to live in monocultural communities. They don't avail themselves of the opportunity to interact, on a regular basis, with people who are racially, ethnically, sexually, or in terms of life choices, different. What often results is a kind of intolerant 'in-group thinking' -- an 'us versus them' mentality. Indeed, all of us tend to spend our time with people who are 'similar to us' and often the result is that we gain the illusion that 'the whole world has values and perspectives just like mine', when it is rather that the people whom we've chosen to spend time or collaborate with are those persons whom we have chosen precisely because they are 'just like us'.

Which is why it is important to avail oneself, as often as possible, either in work, school, or social environments, with diverse populations of people, if for no other reason than to remind oneself that there are a multitude of different kinds of people in this world, who have similar hopes and dreams as ourselves, but who choose [or alternately, have no choice] to live out their lives in quite different patterns. Being open to spending time with or working with people who are quite different from ourselves so that we can allow new worldviews to enter our consciousness is critical to the process of diversity.

However, being tolerant of other kinds of people is itself only the first step. It is also necessary to be respectful of and toward those persons. My brother advised me years ago that it wasn't as important to be liked as to be respected. We don't have to be in agreement with the implementation of other people's lifestyles or cultures -- and often, indeed, we aren't -- but it is critical to respect the value that that perspective has for the other person, and to be willing to view it as equally valid as ones own life and perspective.

There is a third important element, though, that plays into the implementation of diversity: the issue of allowing other people to participate, to have a 'place at the table'. One needs to create, with a conscious approach, systems that allow other people, who are different from the 'previously ordained in-group' [who often have been exercising cultural and sexual entitlements that have negatively affected other groups], to actively participate in the feast of life. It is not enough to simply say that one is willing to engage in diversity or that one is tolerant of other kinds of people or even is respectful of others, if there aren't systems in place that allow people quite different from ourselves to actively sit at the same economic, cultural, and sexual advantage table that we've been sitting at all along. It is also necessary, through education and training, to help others, who have not previously had this experience, to learn how to make use of the new opportunities that a multi-cultural environment thereby affords.

Lack of diversity, which many individuals and organizations have engaged in in the past [or continue to engage in presently] has limited the ability of the society to have access to the wealth of new perspectives that can, in turn, add to the wealth of the nation and our culture. Diversity isn't simply a good policy, nor is it simply the right thing to do (though both of those are true); it is also a means by which individuals, organizations, and the general society can grow, develop and foster empowering approaches to life that allow for the maximum number of people to take part in and enjoy the bounty of the world.

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