02.26.06
Divergent Thinking
Diversity: from diverse: 1. Differing one from another. 2. Made up of distinct characteristics, qualities, or elements: “Prague … offers visitors a series of excursions into a rich and diverse past†(Olivier Bernier). Source: American Heritage Dictionary (online).
Recently, I went to “Orientation Day” at my job. As a new employee, I was required to go to the event in order to learn about the company who hired me; the company’s goals, philosophy, requirements and offerings were the focus of the several-hours-long event. Of course we watched a video about harassment in the workplace, and this led on to our participating in a game about diversity in the workplace — which, in turn, got me to thinking.
I don’t know about you, but my experience has taught me that, far from being valued in the hearts of fellow employees, regardless of company policy, diversity is seen as inherently problematic for most folks. What is seen as “acceptance” is, more often than not, actually evidence of how well people are able to overlook or sublimate perceived differences. This is why, I reason, one week I can tell someone a fact about myself that makes him or her uncomfortable, and he or she will have “forgotten” it or painstakingly re-interpreted it or otherwise blocked it from his or her consciousness by the next week. This is also, by the way, why white people proudly talk about being “color blind”, as if by their having taught themselves to ignore shades of brown they have magically leveled the playing field for everyone and made everyone equal.
A word or two about corporations:
Corporations want their employees to be all right with the diversity of others. If Adam has a Steve, or is as brown as the ace of spades is black, or feels remarkably passionate about the rights of nervous chickens and large-eyed cows, etc., well, the corporation wants its straight, white, meat-eating employees to be okay with that (especially as they, the S/W/M-Ers, are the vast majority of the company’s employees). This is because all corporations want their operations to run smoothly, without any of that useless friction caused by the building up of social sticking points. They want all their employees to be able to function correctly. It will not do to have a cog refuse to mesh its teeth with another cog simply because that other cog has a rainbow painted on it or happens to be one Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X usually addressed or happens to eschew eating McAnything or donning leather. The corporation needs to have “tolerant” cogs. It also needs its cogs to understand that if they fail to be “tolerant” then they will be removed from the machine. What the corporation doesn’t care about is found in the answer to this question: “Does it have to do with the successful functioning, the profitability, of the corporation?” Who has the “how” is careless of the “why”.
But let’s not kid ourselves. My fellow co-workers still crack wise about how so-and-so is a such-and-such and “I don’t go that way… I’m sorry — but that’s gross” and their audience snickers or chuckles or remains quiet. Including me. I stay quiet because I have seen how “tolerance” works in the workplace and my co-workers wonder enough about me already, thank you very much. It may not be naked as it was when I was in grade school, but the attitudes are still there just beneath the surface, sometimes poking up out of the ground like the bones of a violent past. It may be sublimated more or less, but the world keeps throwing up the evidence to the contrary: we, as a species, do not view diversity as a good thing.
We value that which protects the sanctity, the functioning, the coherence of our herd, whatever herd that might be. And when I say herd I mean clique, class, “race”, religion/cult, generation, tribe, grade, club, gang or species. “Diversity” means, to the average herd member, “that which diverts from” the aforementioned sanctity, functioning and coherence. That is why the message is one of “tolerance” and not “get over your damn fool self”.
But at least corporations do manage to enforce the goals of “tolerance” with some degree of success. Those who founded my nation, the United States of America, did their best (take your grain of salt here) to ensure that the country would at least protect diversity. It is to the honor of the SCOTUS that we’ve come as far as we have in broadening the understanding and implementation of that fact (though recent changes in the lineup have me worried). The Bill of Rights and the Consitution were written in a way that would give room to harbor a broad understanding of diveristy. Which of course the majority of citizens have ever since been attempting to limit and restrictively redefine, despite the overtures of those founders who saw the danger of allowing herd mentality (a.k.a. “mob rule”) to rule the day to the nation’s rueing.
Perhaps that is the single best hope we have in the corporate takeover of America. Perhaps we’ll see some enforcement of “tolerance”. And although our nation’s founders would be sickened by what happened to the nation, we’ll all have a little more room to breathe freely even as we carefully navigate between the Scylla of covert ostracization and the Charybdis of losing our diverse identities altogether to the corporate herd.
