Hello blog world…this is my first post on my first blog. My toe is in the water…the hot tub feels fabulous. Alright, here it goes…
“Hello student leaders and welcome to diversity training! Today we are going to be working on your multicultural awareness, knowledge and skills because it’s important that each of you serve as social justice advocates on campus.”
If you’ve been working in student affairs for more than a few months, you’ve probably either heard something like this, or even delivered a message like this. As a social justice educator, I know I’ve heard and used this pitch more times than I can count. And while I’m pretty sure that I’ll continue to use this pitch in the future, I know that the words at the top of this post represent a serious problem in the field.
Diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice are not synonyms.
On most of the campuses I’ve visited, I find the language of diversity training, multicultural education, and social justice education being used interchangeably. Unconsciously, we’re probably all doing this because using synonyms allows us to not say the exact same words over and over again. Synonyms are our friends! Unfortunately, by doing this, we are all collapsing different, and possibly contradictory, agendas into the same set of words.
So, let me take a stab at getting this cleared up and, if I’m lucky, maybe I can get a conversation started. The rest of this blog post, and the next few posts, will be my own slapdash attempt at sorting through these terms, establishing some historical context for their relevance to the field of education, and establishing what I see as pros and cons to each of these approaches. My perspective, to make my bias clear, is heavily informed by critical theory (DuBois, Friere, Giroux, hooks, etc) and my own lived experience as a second generation Asian American, heterosexual, male, able-bodied, middle class, atheist. (I could keep listing identities here, but you get the picture…)
Diversity: Diversity is a numbers strategy – how many different types of people are on this committee/staff/e-board/etc? Do we have representation across gender, race, sexual orientation, class, faith, and ability identities? To put it bluntly…who’s in the room?
Pros: This was an important strategy for activists in the 60s and 70s. America was emerging from an explicitly exclusionist period when marginalized group members were overtly blocked from participating in power-vested processes and organizations. Today, representation continues to be a salient issue and working to open doors for marginalized group members to participate in all sectors of society is still vital struggle.
Cons: A numbers/representation strategy is problematic on two fronts. First and foremost, representation tactics can be easily co-opted by conservative and neo-conservative groups. For example, right after George W. Bush was elected President, he appointed many men and women of color to highly visible spots in his cabinet. The Bush administration was, therefore, able to achieve “success” from a diversity perspective, without attending to any of the crucial equity and justice issues that the diversity strategy is supposed to address. On a more local level, we have all probably worked for institutions of higher education that have employed this diversity strategy to manage perception. By putting an ineffective, highly accommodating, or conservative woman or person of color in a visible leadership role, colleges and universities can check the diversity box and move forward without tackling fundamental access, equity, and/or justice issues that plague American higher education today.
Secondly, the politics of representation play into the liberal fallacy that a few good individuals can change systems and structures designed to oppress and exclude. So, even when used for its intended purpose, the diversity strategy results in select marginalized group members gaining representation in organizations that they were historically excluded from. Unfortunately, this does not generally result in systematic or structural change, again leaving the core equity and justice issues unmet. A great (and tragic) example of this is the marked diversity gains since 1967. Today, in 2011, we have many marginalized group members in positions of “power” in the government, in Fortune 500 companies, in the judicial system, etc. At the same time, we now have overwhelming empirical evidence that poor Americans are worse off than they were 40 years ago, people of color are less healthy and less employed than they were 40 years ago, and the prison system is bursting at the seams (to select a few random examples).
Okay, that wraps up my overview of the diversity strategy…stay tuned for my next blog post: multiculturalism!
Vijay Pendakur 