Diversity Day!
posted by Angela Harris
“Mom,” said my fourteen-year-old daughter. “What can I be for Diversity Day without being racist?”
As a good, progressive private school, my daughter’s school prides itself on its commitment to “diversity.” And like schools everywhere, it has a Spirit Week during which students and staff are instructed to do wacky things together in the service of building school spirit. Pajama Day! Crazy Hair Day! Superhero Day! This year, for some reason, the two mandates collided. Thus we got Diversity Day.
Someone, fortunately, had made a stab at thinking things through. We parents got an email from a school administrator warning us, “This is NOT a day to try to be someone else.” At least no one is going to show up in blackface, I thought with relief.
But what is Diversity Day supposed to be about? According to the email, “It is a day to celebrate a core aspect of the School’s mission by giving students the opportunity to celebrate their own cultural and/or family traditions. . . a day to express a certain amount of pride and respect for their families and backgrounds.”
Great, but there is complexity on top of complexity here. Begin with the fact that among the children of the Northern California professional-managerial class, there are hardly any who would claim a single “cultural and/or family tradition” for “their own.” These are kids with hyphenated last names and hyphenated backgrounds. The email to parents says, “They need to express themselves in a way that would make their grandparents proud of who they are.” Yes, but which grandparents? And who “are” these kids? Do they – or we – yet know? Yes, they have studied slavery and the Holocaust at school. My daughter and I have had lively discussions about President Andrew Jackson and his role in the Trail of Tears. But these children are fourteen and privileged and they live in the Bay Area; they are only now beginning to come into personal contact with the sharp edges of racism. I’m sure the parents of the eighth-grade black boys have already had several painful talks about being deferential and making no sudden movements when around strange white people or police officers. But I’m lucky; as mother of a girl, I only (!) have to worry about sex.
As in: “None of my friends think Asian boys are hot,” says my daughter. Some boy in her class has declared, “Black girls aren’t hot unless they look white.” To which my (black, curvy) daughter said sorrowfully, “I would have thought black girls would be attractive because they’re curvy.” We talk about the politics of personal ads; it seems grown-ups are also not quite post-racial in this area. And we try to unpack what “hotness” is supposed to mean, anyway.
Yet even these hard conversations are only tiny forays into the maelstrom of identity. High school and college, these days, are where the racial decisions really begin to bite for privileged kids. That accords, anyway, with the accounts of my “of color” students in their Critical Race Theory journals, who report being shocked when college classmates suddenly insisted on knowing “What are you?” or “Where are you from? No, really?” College is when those with complex identities and backgrounds are pressured by others to choose, to align, to make a stand.
Add to this confusion our national culture’s own vexed commitment to “diversity,” that peppy, All-American solution to the tragedy of racial subordination. Diversity is great because everyone has it already! Also, it’s good for everybody, since the corporate world, the military, and advertising can’t be wrong! But as Sheila Foster pointed out long ago, the downside of diversity is its emptiness; it can mean all things to all people and therefore nothing at all. And since everybody is different from everybody else, diversity is kinda automatic, no? “Should I just go as myself?” wonders my daughter. I respond, “If it’s their mission, then why isn’t every day Diversity Day?”
The truth, of course, is that race is the elephant in the diversity room. What we really care about when we talk about “diversity” is race and ethnicity, with perhaps a nod to gender, sexuality, and disability. But within the diversity framework, this commitment becomes fraught. When corrective justice was the paradigm, it made sense to put race and ethnicity at the center; flute players and yoga practitioners have not been targets for society-wide discrimination. If diversity for its own sake is the new goal, however, what do race and ethnicity become but skin color, eye shape, and quaint native costumes? Thus does Diversity Day pull us, ironically, toward the post-racial fantasy in which Martin Luther King, Jr. Day really is no different from St. Patrick’s Day in the United States: just another chance to be sold fun foods and drinks, and to feel good about how we are all the same beneath our superficial differences.
And I would be fine with that, were my daughter actually growing up in a world where no one would make her hotness depend on how “white” she looks.
Well, by the time she’s ready to go to college, of course, no doubt the Supreme Court will have ruled that diversity is not a compelling state interest after all and that higher education admissions in public schools must be race-blind. The question will be what these well-meaning private schools should do with their Diversity Days. New awkward rituals await, I’m sure.
But perhaps an awkward commitment to justice is better than no commitment at all.
P.S. I know: All these race problems are supposed to disappear in twenty-five years or less. Our innocent, colorblind children are going to lead us into the promised land. OK, I’ll wait.
P.P.S. Oh, and for those who want to know — She’s going to wear a pink triangle.
April 2, 2012 at 3:36 pm
Tags: children, diversity, Education, Race
Posted in: Civil Rights, Culture, Education, Race
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Responses (11)
Miriam Cherry - April 2, 2012 at 5:16 pm
Your first blog post was one of the best blog posts I’ve read in a long time. Very thought-provoking.
JoeJP - April 2, 2012 at 6:18 pm
When I think “diversity,” I sometimes think of the NYC subway during rush hour. You have various races, creeds, classes etc. there. Race is but part of this whole dynamic and though it might stand out among the crowd, other matters of sex, sexual orientation, class etc. matter too. A true diverse education community has that and repeatedly does.
Brett Bellmore - April 3, 2012 at 6:43 am
Let’s face it, diversity isn’t about “diversity”; It is, and from the start was, a way to get out from under O’Connor’s 25 year deadline, by cutting racially discriminatory programs loose from their reliance on compensatory justice as a justification. Replacing it with an excuse to maintain a system of racial quotas which could never expire, because meeting the quota, (Achieving “diversity”) was it’s own justification.
It was a scam from the start.
JoeJP - April 3, 2012 at 10:35 am
Diversity didn’t suddenly become important a decade ago, so that doesn’t really work Brett.
Diversity was promoted in various contexts for quite some time. For instance, regional diversity was a concern for George Washington when he picked his Supreme Court And, some promoted a national university early in our history to bring together the regions. Various churches promote diversity and have for years too. Many clubs do. For years. etc.
Reagan, of course, selected O’Connor in part to promote diversity on the Court. He specifically said he would pick a woman. 25 years before her opinion there.
Ron Miller - April 3, 2012 at 1:15 pm
I don’t know what it all means. But I think celebrating diversity is a good thing, regardless of the nuances of what that actually means. Because, generally, it mean accepting everyone regardless of race, religion, etc. This is a good thing no matter how you slice it.
Ken Rhodes - April 3, 2012 at 4:53 pm
I have mixed feelings on the conflicting objectives of “opportunity for the most qualified” vs. “positive action to increase opportunities for those who are systematically disadvantaged.” Life is complicated, and neither the left nor the libertarians can convince me the other are wrong.
But I LOVE the choice your daughter made.
Ken Rhodes - April 3, 2012 at 4:59 pm
@Ron: I should hope we all would celebrate diversity. A separate, and very complex issue, is whether we should actively promote it at the potential cost of opportunity for the most qualified.
My fiercely libertarian friends celebrated just as loudly as I when Jeremy Lin burst on the scene a couple of months ago. And they delighted in pointing out that his admission to Harvard was not an affirmative action, but simply an example of the cream rising to the top.
Ken Arromdee - April 4, 2012 at 2:55 pm
If her daughter wears a pink triangle, wouldn’t that fall under “This is NOT a day to try to be someone else”, unless she is actually gay?
JoeJP - April 4, 2012 at 7:45 pm
“his admission to Harvard was not an affirmative action, but simply an example of the cream rising to the top”
I’m not sure how many know his whole life story and can be assured that some sort of extra assistance, some affirmative action, wasn’t made on his part. Cream often is missed. Luck and other factors often influence who is selected.
Ken Rhodes - April 4, 2012 at 10:39 pm
@JoeJP: Unlike your average minority admission, whose background and college admission process is generally not well known, Jeremy Lin’s has become VERY public knowledge. Yes, “some sort of extra assistance” was in play, but it had NOTHING to do with affirmative action. The assistance was a basketball assistant coach who wanted him.
Harvard gives no athletic scholarships, but they recruited Lin to attend there on the basis of his basketball abilities plus his 4.2 high school academic average. Just the sorts of things one expects of “color blind” recruiting. And having nothing to do with “diversity.” Which was simply my point.
JoeJP - April 5, 2012 at 12:38 am
My point is that we don’t know everything that was involved in his education and putting aside the very public aspects, some other aspect very well might be closer to what one might deem “affirmative action,” whatever that means.
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