Throckmorton and Brynhildr dropped by. (Spoiler alert: I survived.) Throckmorton started lecturing Brynhildr on diversity. “You know, Brynhildr, T. H. White said ‘I can imagine nothing more terrifying than an Eternity filled with men who were all the same. The only thing which has made life bearable … has been the diversity of creatures on the surface of the globe.’ I think I’d better hang out with a diverse person and see what all the fuss is about.”
“Throckmorton, you are truly a whack job. There is no such thing as a diverse person. Diversity is a property of a group. If all the members of a group are the same, there is no diversity. If they are not all the same, then the group is diverse. Wearing uniforms reduces diversity. Perfect uniformity is zero diversity.”
“So does that mean I’ll have to hang out with more than one diverse person?”
“Idiot!”
“Why are you calling me names? Does my diversity annoy you? I read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He said that “He who is different from me does not impoverish me – he enriches me.” I think this diversity business is important.”
Brynhildr softened. “Throckmorton, you have a good heart. At least it is in the right place. But you need to understand that it is not simply other people who differ from you that are diverse. That perspective makes you the standard, the norm, the right way of being, and makes the other the deviant. Diversity doesn’t work that way. If you and another form a group, you with brown eyes and she with blue eyes, then the group is diverse with respect to eye color. That doesn’t mean that she is diverse. Neither one of you by yourself is diverse. It is the two of you that display diversity.
“Likewise with respect to gender. You are male, she is female, and the group that you form is diverse with respect to gender. Diverse works like the adjective ‘mixed.’ A mixed sex school has a student body that is diverse or mixed with respect to sex. But each individual student is not diverse or mixed. ‘Mixed’ describes the entire student body.”
“Okay, I think I get it. So does that mean that if you take all the people in the world as the group, then the group is diverse in all the ways that people differ?”
“Yes, Throckmorton. Now can you tell me the one thing that your group of all the people is not diverse about?”
“Huh? We just said the group is diverse about everything?”
“Everything except their humanity. They are all people. They differ in all the ways that people can differ, but each and every one of them is a person and so there is no diversity with respect to their humanity.”
“Okay, but why is that important?”
“Well, there are people who have been taught to believe that not everyone is as human as they are. They mistakenly believe that some people are less human than others. These dehumanization lessons teach people to focus on the differences and degrade and oppress one subgroup while treating a different subgroup as the good, right, standard group worthy to benefit at the expense of the dehumanized group.”
“Wow! That sucks! I guess they never read Gene Roddenberry, the creator of “Star Trek.” Gene said, ‘If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear.’
“Yes, Throckmorton, that was probably not part of their upbringing.”
“So what can be done?”
“Minds can be changed. Thoreau said, ‘It is never too late to give up your prejudices.’ Gandhi said, ‘Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.’ “
Richard Bogartz is a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.