How Diverse is Diversity? On the Limits and Dangers of Ideology

Last updated on: May 1, 2009 at 2:00 pm by Sam Rocha

How Diverse is Diversity? On the Limits and Dangers of Ideology 2009-05-01T14:00:00-05:00 Sam Rocha

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(This is the manuscript of a short talk I gave this morning at the 14th Annual Diversity Forum and Graduate Student Poster Fair sponsored by the Ohio State College of Education and Human Ecology. The theme of the day was: “What is the Role of Diversity in Research? Responses from a 21st Century College of Education and Human Ecology”

As some of you will notice, I took portions of my previous post on ideology and adapted them into this short talk.When I finished I felt like I had just farted in church, which confirmed my suspicions about the ideology of diversity. The general response was mostly one of shock, confusion, excluding a few quiet supporters who talked to me afterward. My discussant said something to the effect of, “Well, Sam, your ideas certainly are very provocative and interesting, but I was a bit confused by some of your terminology. Moving on…”

I am sharing it here to invite a more vigorous engagement. It is also evidence that bloggers can and do engage the world outside the blogosphere in different ways.)

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
~ Gandhi

There is little doubt, by this very gathering we are having here; that “diversity” is what Gandhi called a “holy name.” And holy names are tantamount to ideology.

Ideology, however, is part of the human condition. Nonetheless, its function is not always the same. When it is used in advance, ideology censors the need to intimately know the other thing. It serves as an excuse to consume the other before she is given to me. It distorts and reshapes the other according to my own horizon of possibility. This function of ideology, ideology-in-advance, sanitizes and deodorizes the world with a fragrance I can control and live with. There is no room for death or dying in this world.

No, there are only numbers, objects, lists, casualties, quotas, and statistics to be advanced for the sake of our ideology-in-advance. Ideology-in-advance quarters and measures the world and the person. Ideology-in-advance is as colonial as the conquistadores who raped the Nuevo Mundo. As passionate as we may become and as “pure” as our ideology may seem to be, even an ideology of love, compassion, democracy, diversity, multiculturalism, or what have you, used in advance is still just language and need not be innocent.

One can never escape ideology. But ideology should only come after our encounter with the world and the people whose existence we intend to mourn. And the excessive and overwhelming nature of the world and real people should make the ideas we decide afterward tremble with uncertainty and humility. Our ideology should always remain ideology-to-come, never quite decided, always suspended, yet rooted in Truth.

Dr. King’s precious work has become a slogan and Gandhi has been reduced to a nice old man. But their wisdom was not in what they did, rather, in the work they each left to be done, in the fecundity of their legacy. It is myth to think that either one of them, or any other of the notable humanitarians of the past century, was a multiculturalist, if by that we mean someone who accepts that strange cocktail of ethical and cultural relativism and idealist notions of reality. No, quite the contrary, each of them burned with love—real, true love. Not the l-o-v-e word sold in bulk by other ideologues, not its connotation, they believed deeply in its phenomenological veracity—only known in the flesh of suffering—that required that the human person be treated with love and be free.

There is nothing tolerant about Zapata’s claim “La tierra pertenece a quien la trabaja.” (The earth belongs to the person who works it.) There is nothing relativistic about Freire’s fight for the oppressed. These activist claims are truth claims that are non-negotiable, which is what gives reason and substance to their activism and rebellion. There is something amiss when Marxist revolution is cast as relativistic. Even Derrida’s deconstruction or Foucault’s analysis of discipline and punishment are not for the sake of instilling a new demagogue or colonial language, indeed in every case I’ve mentioned there is a strong spirit of righteous intolerance of objective evils in the world like hate, genocide, racism, xenophobia, sexism, and more. The greatest opposition and intolerance seems to be to the gross dehumanization of the person into a mere object or resource—the transformation of the homosapien into the homoeconomicus.

The problem, as I experience it, is that the language of activists and critical theorists has been reduced to slogans for the business of diversity. There is a strong corporate interest at the educational, business, and political level to be “diverse.” They want my Mexican identity to work at their institution in order to sanitize their hands and prevent them from getting infected by the commercially toxic label of racist. And they will pay me for it. But my race is not for sale or advertisement!

The most telling sign of an ideology is when questioning its key words, or its preferred language, creates the impression that the questioner is somehow evil or morally suspect. But, as Gandhi reminds us, it makes no difference to the oppressed what we call ideology. Oppression can come under many different nomenclatures including diversity and even love. That is why deconstruction and critical insight must always remain under erasure and reconstruction.

When we settle on a maxim like diversity, democracy, or what have you, we lose the essence of its meaning. Radically pluralistic ideas are not relativistic or patronizing, and yet they are never decided once and for all, they thrive in the flux, in constant motion. They are spoiled by being still. Even if we were to exchange names we would still miss the point, which is to remain nameless, undecided, yet dogmatically committed to fight injustice through the power of Love. This can only be accomplished if we suspend our ideology-in-advance and make it an ideology-to-come: diversity-to-come.

The restlessness of ideology-to-come reminds us of the flesh of matter. The numbers, statistics, good causes, and other things that were once human persons before ideology-in-advance cleansed them, become human once again. They become more than posters and slogans bragging about how many poor and colored folk we have collected, which is supposed to be a sign of how non-racist we all are.

Suspending our ideology makes those people, real, bleeding persons to be loved. All the while, we are tragically blind to the ideology-in-advance that still remains after we have fooled ourselves into thinking that we have been healed.

This is our task: To reject diversity in order to restlessly hope for it to come.

Education

Sam Rocha

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