  November 1995
Q: When will minorities be the majority and vice versa?
A: The discussion about this is a muddle. When we talk about "the dominant culture" being white males, that's wrong. When we talk about women being a minority, that's wrong. When we talk about "minorities" being a minority, that's wrong.
"Other" outnumbers any of our categories.
"White" is a mixture, a combination, a hybrid category of its own. Here's a child who has been in the USA for a few months, is not a U.S. citizen, whose language is not English, and who was officially designated a minority in his former (overwhelmingly white) country. He starts school in the U.S. and is put into Ethnic Category 6, which is "majority culture." This determines which elementary school he can go to, in the name of "racial balancing."
Does this make sense to you? That child is not part of the "white majority" of the U.S. either subjectively or objectively.
I believe that most people are "none of the above." I think the dominant culture of the USA is people of difference.
Most people are, if you look below the surface, something special, unique. The U.S. scrambles both the words and the concepts that apply to cultures, nationalities, ethnic groups, races, and skin colors. In the U.S., those are interchangeable synonyms. This amazes and confuses most of the other people in the world.
When the U.S. government promulgates these classifications and checklists, it is acting in a way characteristic of paternalistic colonialist powers with malicious intentions. And yet many diversity programs build their work on such a foundation.
I recently met an elementary school principal who is sent a form at the beginning of the year in which she is expected to fill out the racial composition of the students in her school. She refuses.
How is she supposed to determine the right answer? She is expected to make a guess, without talking with the students or their parents. This is common-many times, people are assigned a place on a checklist without their knowledge or consent, based on what someone else thinks they look or sound or act like.
When we say "white male," that's a code. It's shorthand for "white, heterosexual, Christian, healthy, English-speaking, non-Hispanic," and probably some other things. It's a political term, and when diversity programs use the term they are being political. Indeed, doing diversity work is basically about organizational and cultural politics.
As long as we keep accommodating to these terms, we keep ourselves far from accomplishing any victories for diversity.
Q: Quebec almost seceded from Canada, Yitzhak Rabin was slain at a peace rally. What is going on?
A: Diversity is about accepting our common humanity. When all is said and done, it is about seeing ourselves in a common mirror. A partial view is not good enough. Diversity work must continue to unwrap, unfold, expand, peel away layers. A diversity effort that does not intend to keep going, or that holds back or quits, is a crime against humanity.
Q: What does the controversy over affirmative action tell us?
A: Clearly, if we say we have "liberty and justice for all" and we don't, it's going to drive people crazy. It makes us liars and it's no way to develop a healthy group of people in a community or a country.
We can hardly lead every schoolchild every day in a recitation of "liberty and justice for all" and not try to live up to it. So we came up with "affirmative action" as opposed to negative action or no action at all. Affirmative Action was a positive, active approach to rectify blatant or covert disparate treatment of people and the adverse impact suffered by some people because they were subjected to discrimination because they didn't belong to the ruling caste.
It's only been 30 years that we've had affirmative action. That tells you how much effort it takes to change a system peacefully, through social science instead of war. You could argue that 30 years is not long enough if the system it is meant to influence is at least 500 years old.
What does it take to help democracy live up to its promise? Institutions are holograms or projections of who we are. The question is, who do we want to be and what will it take to get there?
 January 1996
Q: What are your reflections for the new year?
A: Less than four years until 2000. Time to move on from the 20th century. Gather what we can from it and let it go. Will we carry our 20th-century troubles with us? It is only recently, less than 30 years, since we first saw our planet from space. We haven't had time to digest that yet.
We are still being held back by the generation that has a mentality formed before we saw the whole earth, held back by the Cold War generation mentality. How do we move on to a new mentality? That is the issue.
The present generation of senior management can go either way, like Janus, the two-faced god of January, guardian of the window to the future. They can be visionaries or they can back up, back track, do a U-turn. It's hard to know what they are doing, protecting their flank or betting on new combinations of humanity.
We are hobbled by the 20th century, by "the color line," as DuBois said. From Sarajevo to Sarajevo, how far have we come? Most people stay where they're born; for how much longer will that be true? As we spin and mix, what will we be like?
Maybe diversity work is trying to create a centrifuge, or a particle accelerator, to simulate the eventual collision of everyone's lives.
When we do this work, maybe we are anticipating and creating new possibilities, beyond our present constraints, without the necessary life support systems in place yet. Diversity is the triumph of quantum emotion over linear habits.
Maybe that's it, a clash of energy systems, inertia vs. intimacy. Maybe diversity work is so difficult because we haven't found the right medium to work with. I've already said there isn't enough passion, art, love, or humor in this work, but maybe it's even more than that.
We need tgo move away from the 20th century ethos with its genocides and ethnic cleansings and forced assimiliations. It was not a good century in which to be "minority" nationality, culture, religion, skin color, or ideology.
The 21st century might be a time in which difference is accepted. As more differences start circulating around the planet, what other choice do we have? You can't hide inside "gated communities," in self-exile from the turbulence of the world.
Organizations still try to insulate themselves from the turbulence that is humanity's natural state. They try to impose some arbitrary and capricious calm. Organizations are part of the larger world, moving from these false ideas of order (and the toll they take in human terms) to some kind of chaos, with its own dynamics and irregularity.
Diversity is our name for the process of distinguishing the signal from the noise. Diversity is bandwidth, both in individuals and in collections of people. Diversity is what makes sense of the world.
Happy new year.
Q: Any Zen lessons to pass on?
A: A diversity council has been meeting for five months. They feel like they're floundering. How much do they meet? Two hours a month. In other words, only enough to flounder.
Q: What would you like to do this year?
A: I'd like to hear from readers of this column. Even more, I'd like to get together with groups of readers in various places around the country.
I'd like to bring together all the diversity councils within a national organization for a summit, a jamboree, a reorientation. And I'd like to bring together all the diversity councils within various metropolitan areas, whatever employer they work for, to compare notes and blend their experiences.
The most productive program I did last year was "Stages of Diversity Work with Individuals, Groups, and Organizations." I'd like to do more.
I'd like to work with a group that is ready to move on, to have an adventure, to break through their bonds.
I'd like to write some columns that make a difference to somebody.
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