Which Bird? Wondering About Diversity

• Lucinda Garthwaite. ILI Director

  “We need to get more diverse.” 

  I hear that often from colleagues friends, and partners in ILI Reframing Equity work.  A few months ago, I responded differently than I had before.  I suggested my colleague consider an animal zoo that houses only mammals and reptiles.  Then I asked, “What would you add to make your zoo more diverse"?

  “Oh that’s easy,”  he replied, “Birds.”

  “Which birds?” I asked.  Raptors?  Songbirds?  Waterfowl?

  A quick internet search reveals forty different subspecies of birds, with 9,800 subspecies, and counting. How does one go about diversifying a zoo, then?  Which birds will represent that 9,800?

  So, I asked my colleague, when you say you want your organization to be more diverse, how will you decide exactly how to diversify? 

  It used to be said that there were three or four human races, but modern genetics has proven that there’s only one, human species, with no distinctions by race -- and it is impossible for any organization to contain the myriad ways to be human.

  Let me be clear: People who share ethnicity, culture, religion, gender, sexuality, and physical or cognitive differences generally also share an experience of persistent, often systematic exclusion and violence because of that shared aspect of their identity.

  And that is often where their shared experience ends.

  What to do with that reality, though? That some shared experiences result in persistent exclusion and violence, while others do not.  That there are millions of ways to experience and engage the world as a brown-skinned person, as a light-skinned person, as Muslim, Christian, Hindu, or Jew, as a person with disabilities. 

  You get the point, I imagine. Which bird, indeed?

  The notion of diversity as a tool for social change grew out of the idea of identity politics, but identity politics didn’t start out as it is today.  In the late 70s, writes Princeton University Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the Black feminist lesbian socialist Combahee Collective first used the term identity politics to highlight inequities based on specific experiences of the world, with “the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference.”    Yet today, Taylor continues, identity is “frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interest.”

  When writer, scholar, and activist adrienne maree brown writes, “I’ve long felt that people spent too much time analyzing the labels of past generations and too little time feeling part of the mystery and miracle of humanity,” she does not mean to ignore the realities of bigotry and violence.   She means human experience is complex.

  As a biracial person, brown writes, “My first experiences of race were of people asking me to choose a side, choose a parent. People telling me that in spite of the love, joy, and wholeness of my family, I didn’t fit, or offering me unsolicited judgment about who they thought my parents must be. These people showed no interest in my actual experience.”

  It is simply impossible to achieve a level of diversity in any organization or other defined system that comes close to reflecting the actual diversity of human experience.  So “getting more diverse” inevitably leads to arbitrary decisions; again, which bird?

  I know my work, our work at the ILI, will -- actually, must -- benefit from diversity. But I mean it with a little “d.” I’ve begun to think in terms of experience (both current and ancestral) and perspective rather than identity.  

  There’s danger in this thinking, I know.  It’s too easy to slide from “humans are complex”  and “there is no such thing as race”  to “we are all the same” and “there is no such thing as racism.”

  Humans are not the same, my gosh no. And racism (and bigotry of all stripes) is all too real.

  And that is an urgent concern; for many it’s existential.  A notion of identity, and therefore diversity, that leads to “closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interest” will not address that threat.

   I am more interested in changes in behavior – of people and systems – so more people thrive, and have access to what they need to live into their complex capabilities.

  If Diversity as a tactic for driving that kind of change doesn’t work, then why not move on to something new?