Reply to comment

I was really intrigued by the idea that was raised in our discussion of diversity being helpful in some situations and harmful in others.My gut reaction is to not want this to be true, but I refuse to believe this is just because political correctness tells me it mustn’t be true. It just doesn’t make intuitive sense to me because I honestly don’t think I can think of a situation where diversity in some form is not useful. None of my friends are very much like me in terms of background or personality, and this is something I really appreciate. Our conversations are always interesting, and I get really useful advice on problems I’m having because my friends are able to come up with solutions I nevr would have thought of. Also, as frustrating as it can sometimes be, I am really glad that in all of my classes there are many students that offer vastly different perspectives from my own. Our Senior Seminar is a perfect example: how boring would the last two classes have been if we all thought about these issues in the same way? The important thing to remember is that any group that comes together for a particular purpose, be it friendship or education or work or a community-based project, will always have more in common than they do differences among them. The commonalities provide a means of communicating with and relating to one another, but the differences are what cause people to grow in these situations, and to create something outside of themselves that they would not have been able to alone or with others exactly like them.

All that being said, I think we get into trouble when we assume that people from different socioeconomic or ethnic backgrounds automatically must have different outlooks on life. Here in the bi-co, I’ve encountered several examples of people from different countries with different experiences resulting in very similar outlooks on life and the world. When we assume that differences in race or religion can automatically provide a formula for creating “neurodiversity” in a work environment, we are taking a shortcut and wind up missing the point. It is of course important to have a team that consists of differing perspectives, but the only way to really know this is the case is to get to know the people under the labels that are put on them based on their physical appearance. Otherwise you are just using people as tokens and trying to create the appearance of diversity for external reasons that have nothing to do with increasing productivity.