Diversity’s a great thing. People seem to think that diversity is just about the visible things like skin color or sex, but it’s not. Diversity also includes invisible things like religion, sexual orientation, or neurotypicality status. In recent times, people have been doing a good job including those kinds of things...to a degree.
See, a less-visible, I would say the least-visible, type of diversity is diversity of thought. Personality. Experience. Culture. Groups like “Black,” “Christian,” “transgender,” and the like aren’t monoliths; their members can disagree with one another. That’s not a bad thing in the office; it actually helps boost the effectiveness of group discussions. Picture you’re in a brainstorming session with your coworkers of various backgrounds, trying to develop a product or ad for a mass audience. One of you suggests X, another Y, a third Z—“As a Hindu, Bob, I can confidently say that your ad idea will turn off potential Hindu customers.” or “A hypothetical customer with a disability won’t find this product accessible in its current form.” Things like that. Bringing differing perspectives to the table is good for business.
Outside of the business world, a willingness to hear out those with whom we disagree can broaden our friend group. Sure, that conservative might disagree with her liberal neighbor about climate change, but if they choose to continue being around each other, they might learn that they both like superhero movies and rock music. Presto! Each of them just had their circle of friends increase by one. Two separate circles become connected, and maybe they both take a step closer to being willing to hear “the other side” out.
According to Denise Young Smith, while she was Apple’s vice president of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, she made a particular statement that people seemed to not like: “There can be 12 White, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.”
The full quote1 was “I focus on everyone. Diversity is the human experience. I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color or the women or the LGBT or whatever because that means they’re carrying that around...because that means that we are carrying that around on our foreheads.
And I’ve often told people a story– there can be 12 White blue-eyed blonde men in a room and they are going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.
The issue is representation and mix and bringing all the voices into the room that can contribute to the outcome of any situation. So I focus on everyone, but I also focus on allies and alliances because there’s an incredible amount of power in those who have platforms or those who have the benefit of greater representation to tell the stories of those who do not. So whenever we can accomplish that, then that is a win for everyone.”
In my view, the controversy here is unwarranted; using myself as an example, I’m a brown-haired, brown-eyed White male diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy. My glasses are a visible indicator of my visual impairment, and my cane and ankle brace indicate a motor impairment, but you can’t tell right away that I have a processing speed issue or that my glasses don’t raise my vision to 20/20. Ascribing traits and beliefs to people based on immutable physical characteristics is reductive and, to me, runs counter to diversity efforts. Visible diversity’s nice and all, but if you ask me, it’s just window dressing if we’re not also cultivating the types of diversity that are invisible.
The bottom line here is that respecting diversity of thought, experience and culture is good for your bottom line, and also for your social life. Living with and tolerating different points of view may go against the tribalism that seems all too rampant these days, but it’s still possible. Drawing lines between “us” and “them” isn’t something we’re hardwired with from the moment we’re born, it’s something we learn. We can make the choice to choose tolerance.
Mitch Blatt is the Editor-in-Chief of The Understanding.
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