specialagency.net: Diversity vs Pluralism

June 15, 2004

Diversity vs Pluralism

I went through elementary school in the early eighties, during the formative years of the movement that would come to be known as "political correctness." My teachers, God love them, were totally keen on the idea and worked as hard as they could to recognize and celebrate the diversity of the students in their classrooms.

Unfortunately, we lived in a small, ethnically homogeneous town in southwestern Virginia, and in second grade there were three of us in Ms Branchaud's class who could concievably be considered "diversity." On our annual Culture Awareness Day, the three of us would be trotted up to the front of the class for a special show-and-tell, during which we would show off some cultural artifact demonstrating how we enrich the fabric of American society with our weird foreign ways. On this day, Benjamin (Jewish) wore a yarmulke to class. Kanaka (Indian) brought a small figurine of the Hindu god Ganesh. And I wore an elegant Korean hanbok, an elaborately embroidered silk garment that had been passed down through generations of my family to me.

Or, to put it in second-grade language: there was the guy with a frisbee on his head, the girl who prayed to elephants, and the boy in girl clothes. Needless to say, we got beaten up almost as soon as recess started.

I want to point out, this wasn't anything having to do with racism. It's just the nature of second-graders to mock and torment kids who exhibit any difference at all. The first kid in our class to start wearing glasses, for example, got into fights every day for weeks, until Bruce broke his arm playing touch football and we all got distracted by the cast. But I think this illustrates, on small scale, why the rhetoric of political correctness is failing ethnic minorities in America.

Politicians will often make grand, sweeping speeches about the virtue of "diversity". The ethnic and cultural diversity of America, they will argue, adds vitality to American culture by offering fresh opinions and new points of view.

Hogwash. Diversity, as far as it goes, isn't a virtue at all. It's already an undeniable fact of life for residents of almost all American cities that this country is no longer a white, Christian, Anglo nation, if it ever was. "Diversity" takes no work. Moreover, race riots, like the one that gutted Los Angeles' Koreatown in 1992, are still possible even in the most ethnically diverse of American cities.

"Tolerance", I suppose, is a bit better. "Tolerance" at least moves us away from outright violence between minority groups. But mere tolerance is still not the same thing as acceptance. Consider the recent history of the gay culture in America. Will and Grace has been a hit sitcom since 1998. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was the cultural phenomenon of the year last year. Ellen Degeneres' eponymous talk show has already won four Emmys in its first season on the air. Tolerance of gay culture -- or at least, of depictions of gay people in the mass media -- is at an all-time high.

But as soon as homosexual couples start demanding the right to have their relationships recognized by the law in the same manner as their heterosexual counterparts, states start passing laws defending the institution of marriage from being sullied by this queer taint. The apparent "tolerance" of gays in America is still, at best, a superficial, begrudging acknowledgment of our existence. Former blogger noahlogue went further and once referred to Queer Eye as a kind of gay minstrel show -- straight culture's ironic and patronizing appropriation of those aspects of gay culture it finds humorous or useful.

I’d like to suggest that we stop thinking about diversity and tolerance as if they are ends in themselves. If American society values diversity at all (and democracy inherently should), it has to be in the context of an active, engaged pluralism in which individual cultures interact substantively with one another while preserving their own unique and valuable aspects. I would argue that the cultivation of this intercultural dialogue should be the real ultimate goal of all identity politics.

Now you see where I’m going with this.

Diversity isn’t a goal; it’s an undeniable fact of life in modern America. But multiculturalism without intercultural understanding is dangerous, as different cultures have different and often incompatible values and interests. Recent history provides any number of examples of multicultural nations where internecine tensions remain unaddressed and eventually turn into ethnic violence. And the problem with tolerance alone without a commitment to dialogue is that it doesn’t provide a way for groups in conflict to cultivate a truly pluralistic common society.

Political values, like all social values, are culturally contingent, and insofar as American society can be thought to consist of competing “red” and “blue” political cultures, I would argue that American political discourse between liberals and conservatives demands the same kind of active engagement that the interaction of any cultures in conflict do.

What’s most upsetting about the vitrolic tenor of American political discourse, for me, is how much it sounds like the rhetoric of ethnic conflict. Both liberals and conservatives accuse one another of being immoral, leading to a contemptuous sort of superiority complex. For pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Roger Moore, and increasingly the webloggers who attempt to emulate them, political discourse is all about belittling their interlocutors and suggesting that their opponents are not only less ethical and less rational than they are themselves, but also somehow less human.

The internet has this amazing unrealized potential to become just the sort of meeting space where pluralism can flourish. Getting to know how The Other Side thinks about an issue could be as easy as hopping over to a conservative chat room or reading through any of the now countless gay blogs on the net. And message boards, to me, seem like they could be the perfect place for people from different backrounds and different political cultures to interact.

But as it stands now, the internet may only be helping to exacerbate the problem, because it's so easy for me to limit my reading to only those blogs that I already agree with. Why should I have an open mind, I might think, since there are all these people who already agree with me?

So while we here at specialagency have been a little obsessed with how the political discourse in America is broken, I'd like to suggest that the problem is really much deeper. People naturally just aren't good at dealing with people who are different from themselves, and the ability to be open-minded when confronted with difference is something that has to be learned. The impulse that drives us to be intolerant -- whether this manifests as racism, homophobia, sexism, religious intolerance, or poisonous political rhetoric -- is always the same, and, unfortunately, all too human.

Posted by Peter at June 15, 2004 01:04 AM

Comments

Great post, Peter.

I think that in some ways, America does remarkably well at being a place where people get along despite differences. It's had to. We're living in a strange experiment, this really big country made up almost entirely of people from someplace else, and part of why we haven't fractured completely or all killed each other yet is that it's so easy to become American. The culture is shallow-rooted, diverse and absorbent; you pretty much show up here and you can call yourself American. You belong. Regardless of all the differences in how people across this country live and think, we all share some identity and certain cultural (even pop-cultural) experience as Americans.

The flip side of this success, and of the melting-pot propaganda that's helped create it, is that Americans tend to have a hard time knowing how to deal with real cultural differences. Not to idealize, say, European countries and the ways they handle cultural differences, because there's a whole world of bad shit there too, but it's a slightly different kind of bad shit. Growing up in Europe, you're inevitably aware that all around you are countries full of people who live differently from you, who think and behave differently from you, who may hold different values, who have different styles of speaking and arguing and humor. It doesn't necessarily stop anyone from making value judgements about each other's cultures or hating the differences, it just forces some awareness of a pluralistic world as reality.

Whereas living in the USA, the default is to be pretty isolated from the rest of the world, except the parts you read about or see on TV (and the news our media shows is primarily national). Especially if you haven't travelled much, it's easy to imagine that the rest of the world is basically Just Like Us, or else in the dismissable category of bewildering (vaguely sub-human) Other. And this carries over into how we think about each other within the country, too!

I think we do have a really hard time with pluralism. It seems to me that the USA is a bit stuck in its own simplistic, dogmatic ideals: all men are created equal, we may look or sound different but we're all just the same underneath, and so on. These ideas have been *vital* to Americans getting along with each other at all because they make it possible for wide varieties of people with conflicted histories to share a national identity. But they make it hard for people to take the next step to saying "... And sometimes we're really different. Let's try to understand how, or at least accept that it's okay." If you think we're all coming from the same place, then it's hard to recognise different paradigms when you encounter them. And judging everyone's speech as though it were all spoken out of your own paradigm, nothing's going to make sense that doesn't agree with you.

Posted by: Karen at June 15, 2004 01:14 PM

Amen to this post, and Karen's reply.

I returned to the USA last fall after 4 years living abroad, and it's kind of frightening how polarized the country has become. I see it in myself -- I used to think of dialogue with Republicans (or Communists, or whoever I disagree with) much more in terms of finding interesting common solutions. Now I am much more likely to think in terms of Beating Them.

Posted by: Benjamin Rosenbaum at June 15, 2004 04:27 PM

Good food for thought.

But I wanted to add a comment on this line: "Getting to know how The Other Side thinks about an issue could be as easy as hopping over to a conservative chat room or reading through any of the now countless gay blogs on the net."

The problem with the Internet as a place to see The Other Side's perspective isn't only (as you note) that there are so many people who agree with you who you could be reading instead; it's also that those who disagree are vituperative about it.

I used to be kinda curious about the Libertarian political blogs, for example. And then I read some, and saw just how much space the ones I read devoted to calling leftists "idiotarians" and slamming anything said by a leftist anywhere online, often in point-by-point snide rebuttals full of vicious name-calling and sarcasm. I can't read that stuff; it makes me too tense and angry.

It's almost as bad when the people I politically agree with do the same thing; I have a hard time nodding in agreement when I'm busy wincing in sympathy with the targets of the nastiness.

And knowing that there are people out there who have no compunctions about posting snide nastiness in any forum they find makes me less willing to attempt to talk calmly or carefully about any of this stuff in any online context, 'cause I don't want to be on the receiving end of the nastiness. (And I don't want my journal's comments section to be a war zone, and I'm usually not willing to delete people's comments.)

...Shift of topic (not related to the above, but I think potentially related to what you wrote): At Swarthmore in the early '90s, the whole multicultural thing really came out in full force. There was a campus-wide imbroglio that I later took to calling "the great racism-and-prejudice brouhaha of 1991." It was eye-opening for a lot of us in a variety of ways, but also very painful for everyone. There was a lot of emphasis around campus on being aware of difference, on celebrating diversity. (Part of why it was so painful for some of us is that a lot of us white liberals had been brought up believing the old "we're all the same underneath it all" message, and now suddenly we were being told that we *weren't* all the same underneath it all, that our well-intentioned efforts were not only not helping, but were making things worse.)

But I attended Swarthmore graduation sometime in the last couple years, and heard an extremely different message: the president of the college explicitly told the graduating class that we're all the same underneath our superficial differences.

I guess it's probably a cyclical thing, but I hadn't expected the cycle to be this short; I'd thought the celebrate-diversity ideas were still gaining ground.

Anyway, that's only one data point; it might be a fluke. But I thought it was interesting.

Posted by: Jed at June 15, 2004 04:45 PM

The Quakers have an expression, "Everyone holds a piece of the truth." For those who truly believe that, engaging and listening to the diverse perspectives of others is the only way to be informed, possess a more complete understanding, and make appropriate decisions.

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