Why Diversity is an Inherent Good

It is a typical trait of human beings to find their opinions obvious. If you close a bubble around yourself with like-minded thinkers, you'll have very little reason to think that there are people that disagree with you. You'll be incredulous to some external perspective just because they're so far from your own thinking.

Michael Che brings this up in his recent standup special “Matters." He thinks it's incredible that “Black Lives Matter” is a controversial statement. “Not 'matters more,'” he says. “Just 'matters.' What's less than 'matters?' 'Black Lives Exist'?” He also joked about the zaininess that 'equal rights' is a concept you can be for or against. You can want everyone to be treated equally, or you can think that's a bridge too far. I agree, but I'll probably detail that at another time.

I just bring it up to say that I think diversity is an inherent positive, and it blows my mind that some people disagree, and I'm going to try to lay out a compelling case here for my perspective.

We live in a white-dominated society, so white-dominant perspectives are the norm. It is specifically white cis-hetero patriarchal perspective. “White” referring to the classification of the vast and diverse peoples of Europe which have been conceived for some time as one ethnic “race” which is normative and standard. “Cis-hetero” meaning of, related to, or ascribing to the idea that psychological/sociocultural ideas of gender are and ought to be based directly and only on biological sexuality. I.e., genitals and hormones are the only determination for sexually-expressive behavior and identity and are binary. “Patriarchal” meaning, as in the classical sense, that men – despite being numerically inferior to women – ought to be in charge of society.

There are hundreds of millions of white people in this country. There are Americans that immigrated recently from Europe, and Americans whose ancestors long ago immigrated from Europe. According to demographic questionnaires on college applications, if you're from the intercontinental grouping of countries we call “Latin America,” you can also claim “White (Hispanic)” but most blancos or light-skinned mestizos I know are pretty content claiming their nation of origin. Even so, there are millions of different white perspectives. The unifying factor in their observation, representation, and critique is that they are all considered, to a large degree, to be normative. Your television entertainment is mostly white, your news is mostly white, and even as rap has become mainstream, the rap on the radio is largely pop-rap designed to engage white audiences.

Music is a good pivot point. At music festivals, white youths don dashikis and Indigenous American-inspired headdresses as costume party garb. I once posted a Vice.com article on Facebook about how offensive that is. It's cultural appropriation – taking something of cultural significance, typically from a minority group, and donning it as a costume. I personally find dashiki less offensive, but I think that's partially out of numbness. And anyway, the population of people to whom it is customary – while ravaged by disease and other consequences of European imperialism – is not quite as decimated as that of American imperialism – is not quite as decimated as that of American Indigenous Peoples. Wearing a headdress, a traditional garb of ritualistic significance, to Bonnaroo or Coachella like face paint is offensive. I posted the article to this effect and a white man I know from high school – admittedly a gay dude and so not uniformly normative – thought I was making a fuss over nothing. That is White Privilege – the ability to have concerns or questions raised by minority groups and to simply dismiss them because most people look more like you than them.

Diversity is important because, if he had enough friends of mixed ethnic backgrounds telling him the aesthetic exploitation of our cultures is offensive, he might not think it was much ado about nothing. As I recall, he said that it would be as if he were offended every time he saw someone wearing a rainbow T-shirt. I thought that was dumb because the LGBTQ community did not invent the rainbow, but rather adopted it. It is an allegorical physical representation for the entire visual spectrum of light. Be that as it may, we as a society have accepted that the rainbow flag is iconography symbolic of the LGBTQ communities. Therefore, they would be in their right to question its usage by outsiders, especially if said usage was for a costume based on parody to look cool for a music festival.

I will admit that I am not without my own blind spots. The recent dustup regarding Margaret Cho and Tilda Swinton is a perfect example. Tilda Swinton is a white woman who was cast in the movie Doctor Strange in the role of a character originally written as a Tibetan man. Prolific Asian American comedian Margaret Cho took issue with that, as did many other people across social media. Having read the email thread that Tilda Swinton released to The Guardian UK, I felt she was pretty sensitive and I empathized with her attempt to do the right thing. I felt that Cho might have misrepresented Swinton's tone and intent based on outside comments I had seen. Furthermore, Swinton's most empathy-worthy contention, in my mind, was that they took a character that was an Asian parody and reconfigured it as a white woman while filling other roles with Asian men. Well-meaning though this may have been, they might have just sapped the satire and caricature from the portrayal and kept it as an Asian dude. Come to think of it, Marvel pulled this same dumb shit when they turned The Mandarin – one of Iron Man's archnemeses – into a shell of his importance in Iron Man 3, and then cast Ben Kingsley.

I might try to see both perspectives but, honestly, in cases of oppression, it matters much more what the oppressed think than the oppressor, even if the oppressor is acting on accident. Farbeit from me to tell a victim if they're being victimized.

In my childhood, there were – and today still are – lots of shows without major black characters. As such, I would typically attach myself to whatever minorities were around – Latinos, East Asians, West Asians, South Asians, Central Asians. I found my identity attached to these groups because they were also others; non-normative, often-exoticized people. Hadji was my favorite character on Johnny Quest by virtue of being the only brown protagonist. It was lost on me that his mysticism played on archaic stereotypes, but Aziz Ansari's Netflix show Masters of None had an entire episode based on identifying the ways that other non-black people (specifically Indians) have been marginalized in the media. I very typically see this as a black/Latino problem, but the Asian “model minorities” have to deal with the same dearth of media and political representation.

Now switching to politics, one issue I have consistently taken with Libertarian dogma is the idea that the free market can suppress prejudice. I do not believe that racism or sexism can be eradicated on the basis of seeking finance and creating commerce because people are not completely rational. People also do not all have the same starting point. To contend that diversity is not an end unto itself because it can come at the expense of creating the best art or finding the most qualified candidate is to contend that the gatekeepers of society are bereft prejudice. For instance, there has long been a social meme that Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity programs allow less-qualified minority candidates to take jobs from more-qualified white male candidates. This is simply not the case.

The intent is to ensure that qualified minority candidates for jobs and schools are given an equal opportunity in these positions. It is a secondary benefit that if you find that there is a significant dearth of qualified minority candidates you can begin to uncover why that is the case. Thereafter, you can work to create more qualified minority candidates. Some people think that this is an unnecessary goal. These people are typically white males, but some are not – your Tomi Lahren's, your Clarence Thomas's. Some people have deluded themselves into thinking that our economic and political systems are purely meritocratic. As a student of history, I know this is not the case. Before Brown v. Board of Education, “separate but equal” was the law of the land, except that in practice it was separate and unequal. Before Dwight Eisenhower overturned Orval Faubus's orders to the National Guard in Little Rock, Arkansas; Central High School was segregated.

For a less dramatic example, let's consider the NFL's Rooney Rule – named after the family that owns the Pittsburgh Steelers, it requires that teams seeking a new head coach interview a minority candidate. In 2007, the Steelers interviewed at least two minority candidates for their head coaching vacancy – I don't know who the first was, but the latter was Mike Tomlin, who led them to a Super Bowl victory after the 2008 season and another appearance two years later.

Biodiversity is important because it ensures that an ecological community cannot be wiped out because of a variety of strengths and weaknesses in a given ecosystem. This applies to humans in a literal sense as seen in the defects that come from interbreeding. This applies to humans figuratively because diversity keeps society strong. It benefits us all to have a variety of perspectives presented to us. Knowledge is power, and more variety in perspective means more sources of knowledge. This is why Modern Family and Blackish and Insecure are such cools, as were Everybody Hates Chris and The George Lopez Show and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire. Liberals try to convince ourselves that this is a one-way street, but we owe it to ourselves to surround ourselves with people with different perspectives as well, so that we can grow and empathize with those of different political viewpoints. Seek out people that are different than you in obvious ways so that you can find common ground that might not be so obvious. It's good for the organism that is society to be aware of all of its people and all of our problems so that we can better serve the needs of the people and create a more prosperous and fair future for all. Diversity and equality are means to the end of a better, more ideal America.