Current dismantling of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” efforts, in our national government and elsewhere, lead me to wonder whether any of us would be willing to be subject to their opposites: uniformity, inequity, and exclusion.
We too often can seem to be playing a cynical game of zero-sum, short-term “yo-yo” with efforts that have ebbed and flowed for generations, if not millennia. We need to remember that diversity is broader than a label–it includes all our many efforts to understand our differences. Let’s be careful lest, in a push to reform any excesses of DEI, we prematurely abandon valuable progress because of the discomfort that diversity, equity and inclusion work inevitably creates. Be we mainstream or marginalized (most of us can be either, depending on the situation), changing the habits we’ve developed in the ways we treat each other rarely comes naturally. Also, American impatience with the pace of change sometimes redounds to our detriment. For example, among lessons yet to be learned from the covid-19 pandemic is that recovery from a serious societal trauma takes both effort and time.
An advocate of inclusion I recently came across is author Ty Tashiro, whose 2017 book Awkward, includes a discussion of an increasingly diverse American social landscape and the nearly universal awkwardness this can engender:
“[I’m] one of those who strongly believes … [that] more inclusionary attitudes toward traditionally marginalized groups have been positive and long overdue. I think it’s important to make clear that I hold a supportive view of these changes because I would also suggest that these societal shifts have come with some societal growing pains. These significant shifts … have created a post-institutional social world where traditional expectations have faded away and new expectations have yet to be clearly defined. It’s all right to admit that social progress comes with a little confusion about what to do next.
Many people are also discovering how much work it takes to truly embrace diversity. It’s one thing for people to say that they support racial diversity, gender equality, or gay marriage, but being fully open to negotiating different attitudes and expectations takes a tremendous amount of social awareness and effort.”
I believe that some of the current vitriol of our politics and social lives comes from an intersection of burgeoning social media with correspondingly increased diversity in our population. We can too easily get “siloed” in our media diets and either not be exposed to differing views at all or start to view people with differing views as somehow less than human. Over the longer term, we cannot maintain whatever fragile status quo we imagine we’re protecting by building a wall, out-shouting our opponents, or using intimidation. The sooner we resume the slow, important work of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, the more likely we are to succeed in our ongoing experiments in democratic governance and civil society.
Jinny's Occasional Poems 