The Real Meaning of Diversity

Gene Mage

I cannot think of a topic that his triggered so much raw emotion and so little reasonable discourse than diversity in the workplace. Those who might otherwise be party to genuine dialog instead cling tenaciously to clichéd mindsets.

The first mindset calcifying much of our national consciousness is social engineering. The social engineers are willing to use any legislative, judicial, or public relations means at their disposal to right perceived injustices, with little thought to the consequences. The present day shadow of what was once a vibrant American civil rights movement seems to have lost interest in whether their agenda actually improves the conditions of the people they say they want to help. Reparations, quota-systems, workplace “diversity” programs and “sensitivity” training programs coerce individuals into complying with various rules while injecting a more pernicious resentment deeply into the tissue of society.

The civil rights movement that began on a mountaintop of clear thought and spiritual grounding has descended into a valley of ineffectual clichés and trite emotionalism.

Organizational life, whether in the business arena, not-for-profit world, or in a government agency, has become a laboratory for experiments in human relations with employees relegated to the role of unwitting guinea pigs. How did we get to this sorrowful standoff?

The answer, I believe, was the unholy confluence of two enormously powerful forces in the twentieth century. The first factor was evolutionary science. The evolutionists, particularly those of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, argued that various classifications of organisms were locked in an endless epic battle between the fit and the not-so-fit. Therefore, if one sub-group were to prevail over another, it was evidence of genetic superiority. It then became fashionable, even trendy, to employ various measurements to test the “fitness” of human beings against some arbitrary standard. The concept of “eugenics”, or the progressive improvement of the gene pool through selective breeding and sterilization did not come from Nazi Germany; eugenics started right here in the USA.

It took the Nazis to combine the “science” of eugenics with the second powerful force, mechanistic rationalism. The rationalist is set free from the moral restraint that holds back “weak minded” people. The rationalist eschews superstition for an unwavering faith in reason and logic. And the Nazis took rationalism to it’s natural conclusion. They took action to fix what they perceived to be a contaminated gene pool by killing off and sterilizing those thought to be of inferior genetic make up. Fortunately for civilization, superstitious and weak-minded Americans prevailed in the battle. So much for the superiority of rationalism.

The latter part of the twentieth century was in many ways a reaction to the horrors of racial conflict. The civil rights movement in America embraced tolerance and social activism as a path to social and economic equality for those who were the victims of historical racism. Dr. King’s message was a repudiation of racism and a call to moral courage in the face of overwhelming resistance. King was a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, who believed and lived an ethic of race relations that seems terribly foreign today. That ethic? That we need each other. That we are only whole as an individual or society when we embrace the unique contribution people who are “different” make to the community. That is why Gandhi fought so strongly against the division of India into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.

In the nineteen sixties, inspired in large part by King’s work, the US government began to take legislative action to reverse the segregation so deeply entrenched in the American south. An outflow of that legislative change was a body of legislation commonly referred to as “equal opportunity” work rules. Corporate American, to avoid litigation and public relations disasters, has worked furiously to comply with a vast and growing volume of regulations on workplace human relations, which is called “Title 7”. Affirmative action, which lowers standards for members of protected minority groups, was an attempt to change the character of the workplace by changing the actual mix of workers.

Sadly, the legislative approach to human relations has done little to change the underlying tensions in the workplace. All that corporate “diversity” programs have done is force the issues underground. The real solution, I propose, is to take hold of the vision of Gandhi and King, a vision that appealed to the better part of human hearts. That vision, which we seem to have lost in a quest to coerce one another into compliance through legislative and judicial billy clubs, was not to create more separation, but to celebrate both the moral and practical benefits of a diverse community.