{"id":2214,"date":"2015-06-19T20:55:23","date_gmt":"2015-06-20T02:55:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=2214"},"modified":"2015-06-19T20:55:23","modified_gmt":"2015-06-20T02:55:23","slug":"what-if-diversity-is-not-our-strength","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/06\/what-if-diversity-is-not-our-strength.html","title":{"rendered":"What if diversity is not our strength?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A while ago I drafted a post that went something like this:<\/p>\n

We say this over and over again: \u00a0\u201cdiversity makes us stronger,\u201d and we celebrate the mixture of cultures in this, the Land of Immigrants, and we tell ourselves that the different points of view that all these immigrants bring, makes our country more vital, energetic, creative, forward-thinking, and poised to succeed in the 21st century, bounding past stagnating monocultural countries.<\/p>\n

But what if we\u2019re wrong?<\/p>\n

What if the desire to be with one\u2019s own \u201ckind\u201d is simply so built-in that our efforts at integrating everyone, while simultaneously preserving their native cultures, are doomed to failure?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, that\u2019s as far as I got, but I was thinking about a link from a facebook friend<\/a>, to a site pushing back on the use of the label \u201ctransracial\u201d to draw a parallel between\/mock the Jenner and Dolezal stories. \u00a0The article pointed out that transracial is already in use to refer to cross-race adoption, e.g., black children with white parents. \u00a0So, fine, but this was an article on a site called \u201cLost Daughters\u201d and the article continues with this:<\/p>\n

For the past 35ish years, I\u2019ve considered myself to be a transracial adoptee. The \u201ctrans\u201d in transracial for me, never meant my race changed. It meant I was a multiracial black girl, adopted into a white family. It meant I was taken without my consent from one home, one place of origin and put inside another family, another culture, another race, one that didn\u2019t belong to me. It meant I had to learn how to navigate my blackness and my black girlness, inside an often times racist, religious, violent and rigid white world. It meant living in a house and community that simultaneously erased me, racialized me and tokenized me. It gave me a language to articulate what was happening to me. But you know what it didn\u2019t do? It never actually changed my race. An even with all the \u2018privileges\u2019 of whiteness, even with all the education, the middle class living, camping, fishing, hunting\u200a\u2014\u200aIt never made me white.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which reminded me of an article I read and commented on<\/a> a while back, on Korean adoptees returning to Korea as adults; though they lamented the cruelty of Korean society at the time, unwelcoming to single mothers and their children, their complaints about their American life were not really about adoption per se as living as a minority and feeling that they \u201cbelonged\u201d elsewhere, where they would be in the majority culture.<\/p>\n

And now we have this awful, awful story out of South Carolina. \u00a0The details are spotty, but the Washington Post <\/a>has about as much information as I\u2019ve seen anywhere else, though I\u2019ve run out of page views for the month on the computer on which I\u2019m typing this \u2014 but none of it makes much sense: \u00a0dropped out of high school after 9th grade, then, at the age of 21, he\u2019s unemployed, but no one yet has any idea, that I\u2019ve seen, of what he\u2019s done in the meantime. \u00a0There are reports of an imagined \u201crace war\u201d that places him in the same category as the killer in Norway who imagined that he would rally Norwegians to his anti-immigrant cause. \u00a0Did he think that his action would cause black residents to riot, and his white imagined-peers to fight back? \u00a0Or was this his crusade, and his alone?<\/p>\n

In his case, his parents haven\u2019t had anything to say but his uncle has said something to the effect of \u201cthat\u2019s not how he was brought up\u201d \u2014 and we don\u2019t know whether that\u2019s completely the case or if there was an undercurrent of racism that metastasized into this monstrosity. \u00a0Was he \u201crecruited\u201d by White Power groups online in the same way as kids who run off to join ISIS or undertake Lone Wolf attacks, or, if not, did he read and follow them and buy into their ideas from afar? \u00a0To judge from the angry twitter comments, South Carolina is lousy with racists \u2014 I don\u2019t really know one way or the other.<\/p>\n

But what can you do? \u00a0We can\u2019t imprison these groups. \u00a0And if a child, as a teen or young adult, \u201cconverts\u201d to white supremacist ideas, it\u2019s hard to imagine that parents can consistently succeed in raising their kids in a way that\u2019s \u201cimmunized\u201d to racism.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the old song, \u201cYou\u2019ve Got to be Carefully Taught<\/a>,\u201d that expresses the idea that it\u2019s only due to one\u2019s upbringing that one is racist, that by nature we are welcoming of differences, and\u00a0what perpetuates racism is racist adults passing it on to their children. \u00a0But what if it\u2019s the reverse \u2014 that racism is inborn, an \u201coriginal sin\u201d if you will, and lies there, dormant, biding its time, but ultimately, being at risk of manifesting itself in some mild way like a preference for socializing with or living near others who look like you, or the extreme of this sort of unfathomable violence \u2014 and that openness to those who are different is what has to be taught, and that with difficulty, and with the lessons at risk of being unlearned in the face of some future life circumstances?<\/p>\n

Yes, maybe this man, like other recent killers, was mentally ill, and maybe it was just the nature of his delusions that he convinced himself of a \u201crace war\u201d rather shooting at a school or a movie theater. \u00a0But it\u2019s more likely to turn out that that was wishful thinking (after all, then we can tell ourselves, \u201call we need to do is identify the mentally ill people, treat them, and keep guns away from them\u201d), and that he is just as much of sound mind as those ISIS-joining teens. \u00a0What then?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while ago I drafted a post that went something like this: We say this over and over again: \u00a0\u201cdiversity makes us stronger,\u201d and we celebrate the mixture of cultures in this, the Land of Immigrants, and we tell ourselves that the different points of view that all these immigrants bring, makes our country more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat if diversity is not our strength?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A while ago I drafted a post that went something like this: We say this over and over again: \u00a0"diversity makes us stronger," and we celebrate the mixture\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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