Embracing true diversity

When football player Reggie White died a year or so ago, I remember someone talking about how he was such a humanitarian guy but he put his foot in his mouth sometimes. The specific reference was to some speech he gave once where he talked about how blacks are athletic, and Asians are good mathematicians and business people, and Hispanics have great family values, or something along those lines.

The point was that he lumped groups of people into stereotypes. The implication is that doing so is racist. I agree.

So what's up with the celebration of "diversity"?

I heard a guy the other day talking about how we need to embrace our area's diversity and how every race, culture, sex, sexual orientation, age, etc., has something to offer. And then he was talking about making sure we encourage that diversity, making sure every public body and business has measured success in embracing diversity, and so on and so forth und so wieder.

I think it's cool how some folks celebrate different holidays and how their ancestors dressed and all of the other cultural trappings - but let's see if I can make something clear: Lumping people into groups is racist whether you do it for positive reasons or negative reasons. Not all blacks are athletes, not all Asians are sharp business people, and not all Hispanics take good care of their families.

Damn right I embrace diversity, but not in the narrow-minded way that the diversity crowd means that phrase: not by pigeon-holing human beings into categories.

Yep, this is a diverse country - almost 300 million diverse individuals, each with their own background, each with their own perspective on life, each taking their unique abilities and their cultural background and their family life and making something out of it. It's stupid to make assumptions about you based on your skin color, your nationality, whether you're male or female, who you have sex with, and whether you celebrate Christmas, Yom Kippur or Cinco de Mayo or Ramadan. No two people are alike, and thinking (for example) a Lithuanian woman will enhance an organization simply because she is a Lithuanian woman is simply wrongheaded. That individual's contribution will depend on where she is going, not where she came from.

Saying we need to recognize and embrace differences between groups of people sounds good on the surface, until you realize you are not liberating the individuals you lump into those groups - you are limiting the way others view those people.

We don't need a world where every group is valued. We need a world where every individual is valued.