On Finding Diversity

[omorka]

On the one hand, I teach at a school that has no majority population. Our kids are roughly 30% African-American (including a non-trivial number of first- and second-generation immigrants from West Africa), 30% Hispanic (with a plurality but not a majority hailing from Mexico within the previous three generations), 20% Asian (including, but not limited to, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Korean, and Indonesian), and 10% white (including a small but significant Eastern European recent-immigrant group). Even my group - the math nerds - is far from homogenous; as I mentioned to my group at the Aggie tournament, in a sea of white folks, we were a small island of South Asians, East Asians, and Hispanics.

On the second hand, I attend a church that deliberately attempts to be a home to liberal Christians, liberal Jews, liberal Muslims, true Unitarians, generic theists, religious humanists, agnostic spiritual seekers, humanist atheists, nontheists, Buddhists, and NeoPagans. The co-ministers work very hard to make sure that all of these ideas are supported in their own turns from the pulpit, and that smaller groups within the larger congregations tend to each of these needs. They also work very hard at making sure these different ideas bump up against each other, rub shoulders, scrape a few rough edges, and get a chance to, if not cross-fertilize, at least stay in motion instead of getting stagnant.

So I look around my RL friends group, and what, pray tell, do I see?

1) A very, very bleached group. Off the top of my head, there's but a single person of African heritage, and one or two Asians. No Hispanics at all. Now, I recognize that a lot of my interests, like Celtic music, are statistically unlikely to have too many African-American fans, but given that we're anime geeks, you'd think there would be more Asians around. In contrast, I can count the number of former students I'm still in contact with who are white on the fingers of half a hand.

2) A culturally fairly homogenous group. No one in the group that I can think of is more than two steps removed from me in social class. I can't think of anyone who speaks something other than English as their home language. There are some Libertarians in the group, but few if any social conservatives. And, while we're certainly not religiously homogenous, I have very few friends who are both monotheistic and devout. Those that I can think of are uniformly on the liberal wing of their denomination.

This is embarrassing. Clearly we need to find some new people to be in this social group. Maybe once I leave the school, I really should start inviting my graduates to things. (I can think of a couple I'd like to convert to gamerhood - shouldn't be too hard, as they're hard-core videogamers and anime fans already . . .)

Comments

[bassfingers.livejournal.com]

Wynn had his devotion to James Brown's music, as well as his early descriptions of being the white guy who showed up at the Buddhist temple. I recall his stories about both and wonder how much, if any, of that placing himself in a "stranger in a strange land" situation was based in him trying to find his identity as a gay son of an episcopal family.