Responding to Diversity

 

I am not a "blogger". I write too much for work and school and will blog after retirement, but I want to take a break from systemic racism to discuss a framework for analytical thought that is also foundational to my belief that racism has not magically disappeared. Let’s see if I can edit 10 pages down to a blog post.

 

Norman Kunc is a disability advocate. In 1994 he wrote an article with Emma Van der Klift titled Hell-Bent on Helping: Benevolence, Friendship, and the Politics of Help. In the article he provides a framework for how people respond to diversity. While his focus was disabilities advocacy, that framework has informed how I think about responses to all types of diversity including racial differences. Quite frankly, it is easier to talk to predominately white teachers about using the framework to discuss racial diversity after we have used it to discuss how people respond to diversity when the difference is disability related.

 

We can respond to diversity by marginalizing, by reforming, by tolerating, or by treating it as normal and valuing. When it comes to race, we have not reached a societal point where all racial diversity is truly valued. It is still managed, controlled, and tolerated. When you truly value racial diversity, it has equal worth in the community and it would not community without it. When I consider what race means in this country historically, why would it have equal worth? Race is commonly accepted as a social construction. It was designed to separate—black was a mark of inferiority. While there is historical evidence of race language in other countries, in the United States; Africans were racialized to enslave them and render them less than. I understand when teachers say that they are colorblind. They first associate Blackness with something negative. Historical propaganda, contemporary policy, and present-day media work to perpetuate the laziness and inferiority stereotype that is a foundation of Blackness in this country’s psyche. It is up to individual Black people to prove their exception to this foundational rule. In a 1973 Freedomways article on selecting Black literature for children, Jacqueline Lee Young said that education has “a significant effect on the shaping of the black self-image.” Unfortunately, the educational system has made it impossible to reconstruct the Black self-image of the American descendants of slaves as an amazing ethnicity born out of the horrors of slavery so that Blackness is associated with greatness, but it gets high marks for pathologizing it. 

 

So, we know we don’t value racial diversity, but where do we fall? It depends and you can decide. According to Kunc and Van der Klift there’s marginalization. When we marginalize, we segregate or show aggression. We are motivated to marginalize people that we don’t want to be part of the community. We accept that they are there, but we don’t want them in our community (or too many of them at least). There’s reform. When we reform, we work to make them assimilate or we rehabilitate them. The motivation is to accept them if we must, but we will work with you and mold you into something more like us. Then there’s tolerance. When we tolerate diversity, we are quite benevolent. That’s a good thing, huh? But the motivation is not community or equal worth. We are motivated to tolerate because we want to look good and think we are doing the right thing. Or, we tolerate because we feel sorry and want to protect. How do we respond to racial diversity?

 

I will argue that when it comes to Black people in this country, we marginalize, reform, and tolerate; but we have not reached a value response as a society and I am fine with that for now. Attempts to integrate schools have little to do valuing diversity and more to do with reform and tolerance. As if making Black children feel less than because they aren’t learning alongside white children is mutually beneficial. Quite frankly it sets up a white/black relationship that is helper/helpee which affirms worth and superiority on the part of the white side of the equation and implies burden, inferiority, and obligation on the black side with a crossed out equal sign in the middle. This is another Kunc and Van der Klift framework that is aligned to disability advocacy.

 

As a member of the first generation in my family born with full civil rights, I am not expecting a valuing response in my lifetime, my children’s lifetime or my grandchildren’s lifetime and I refuse to be demeaned and labeled a victim simply because I recognize that there are many Americans who would not see their community deficient if it had no racial diversity. The racism, sexism, ableism, classism, etc. that permeated our systems from building a nation to slavery and on through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement did not just magically disappear. Look, I get it. White kids are feeling uncomfortable with the outlandish ways the "woke" advocates run anti-racism affinity groups and oppressor activities. But stop gaslighting. Racism still runs through America’s veins full-stop. Let’s converse about what truly valuing diversity looks like and set pathways that include high academic expectations, a positive self-image, and supports for all children.