Is Diversity Enough?

I came to this program out here in the summer feeling like I was only there to add color to their admissions brochures. The school treated issues of diversity like my middle school treated sexual education - quickly, akwardly, and never in relation to anything else. Issues of diversity of course means things regarding to race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and other societal systems of oppression. This feeling was shared by a couple of my classmates who decided early on that they were going to comment on this phenomenon. When our teaching methods course commenced with a teacher dressed in a baggy football jersey telling us how she wore a do-rag to school to help relate to her students, one student wrote a letter to the director of the program. She quickly came back and told us that the director of the program responded like a cornered dog. When the methods teacher told our class that we should accept that our students are going to steal another student raised her hand to say that, maybe, statements should be qualified or they could be misconstrued to speak for an entire racial group. The director came in to class the next day and said that people should be more forgiving when they are offended by comments like the teacher made. In response a group of students went to talk with her at her house and all of them came back saying the director straight up yelled at them and attacked them. Finally when one of these students went up to meet with the director to talk about the atmosphere of the program that was being created by the methods teacher I went along with them for the meeting. I saw for myself the most cowardly display of a person in power exerting their influence over the very people they were supposed to be taking care of. I saw the students being verbally berated by the director for criticizing her program. I felt the fury just as well as they did when I tried to defend them even though I had not said anything to the director before about this matter. Walking away from this meeting my fellow students had all of their passion to change the program extinguished. All of them felt horrible about coming here and were doubtful about their prospects for making it better. Being new to this harrassment I could only sympathize with them, as I had not yet harbored such feelings for this program or this university. My plan instead was to do everything within my power to change the progam and the school.

I found students interested in crafting a new goal for the program that was quickly adopted by the faculty. This goal set out clear areas of Diversity which the program should aim to discuss and for students to foster. I ran for student government and was elected the V.P. of Diversity. Along with the members of the Diversity Committee we set up a series of panel discussions about issues of Diversity on campus. These discussions brought together faculty, students, deans and others to talk freely about practical and theoretical issues around race and gender. The faculty invited were all excited by the series and the opportunity to talk to people on their same campus with similar interests. Some of the people had never met each other. Finally we are in the process of setting up a free diversity conference for all the members of the HGSE community to allow them to work on these issues of diversity and prepare to integrate them into their own professional and personal life.

Today I finish shipping off the last of the copies for the conference about ten minutes later than I planned making me late to class. I arrive at class the same time that one of my classmates does. The teacher asks the classmate about the day's reading, she replies she did not do it. The teacher later asks me about the day's reading and I try to generalize based on what I heard in the conversation. The teacher is the director of the program by the way. Sensing my generalization is a bit off, the director asks me if I read the reading, I said no. The teacher tells me to get out and that she does not want me in my class. I left and went home and continued planning for this conference kind of mad about the whole situation. What I did not know was that there was a student before both of us at the beginning of class who did not read and she asked the class at that point to take five minutes and read. After I left the teacher did not call on anyone who had not been allowed to take five minutes and read, or any of the students who came in later than I did. Also, the two students who did not read and were allowed to stay in the class were white females, like the director.
In the middle of planning this Diversity conference I got stuck with this situation which made me feel like there almost is no point in doing this. The whole idea of a lot of these divesity things are kind of like the multicultural festivals we all had in middle school where we bring in our cultures food, dress up like our cultures, hold hands and sing michael jackson songs (i.e. heal the world, or perhaps black or white). This is not enough. My director had to have gone through all of this stuff in order to have her position, and to do the research that she does (school reform).

The problem with Diversity as it is currently treated is that it fails to connect these issues to a persons consciousness. The people leave thinking "wow that diversity stuff is great", and "man there are a lot of diverse people", basically that Diversity is a fixed object or a trait carried by a group of people. What they need to come up with is that Diversity describes the mixture of this society that we live in. This mixture has power relationships that are associated with it. People like my director, who probably did not notice that she was using her power unevenly among the people in the program along lines of race, fail to connect the issues of Diversity to their own realities. For people in power, they need to connect an understanding of Diversity issues, of the dynamics of the people they have power over, and how they implement their power. The entire class got the message that someone other than the power group got kicked out of class, meanwhile everyone else in the class who did not read could consider themselves free from such punishment. Not only did this fail to help her meet her objective of showing that doing the reading is important, but it also made me feel like I am inferior and I do not belong. Which is not the place I need to be in when I am about to go chair a Diversity conference. Thanks for reading my story. Throw me some prayer or something if you can.