Learning that diversity is an asset and not just a problem to be solved

Sam Smith – Long ago I learned, contrary to the common view of many liberals, that diversity was an asset and not just a problem to be solved. I had made this discovery not intellectually but from the experiences of my own life.

For example, I was one of six siblings and so found early that other people frequently didn’t think like me. One of my sisters is a Trump supporter and another was trying to block an oil port in Maine while my older brother was helping to start one in Puerto Rico. I would have four Puerto Rican nephews and nieces, along with their mother, my sister in law. I started my high school’s first jazz band, took drum lessons from a black guy, and, unlike many of my classmates,  ­­­­had black musicians instead of white athletes as my role models.

Even my introduction to politics affected my thinking. When I was 13 I stuffed envelopes in a campaign that ended 69 years of Republican rule in Philadelphia. The guys in the office where I did my work included labor unionists and blacks, and much more interesting than my parents’ friends. I would learn that diversity was not just a moral issue; and it was a lot more fun than life at home.

I went to a  non-diverse Quaker high school but took course in anthropology.  As I wrote some years ago:

Part of what had attracted me to anthropology in the first place was the search for a society that would find my personal traits and rituals acceptable enough for membership. Like, I suspect, many real anthropologists, I was a subculture of one looking for my lost tribe. I began this search for the lost tribe of Sams at an unusually early age thanks to the fact that my school - Germantown Friends in Philadelphia - was one of only two high schools in the country that offered a course in anthropology at the time. And in ninth grade.

At this precise moment of teenage alienation and confusion, the school offered the reverse of a Pandora's box, for when opened, anthropology freed hope and possibility, leaving locked safely inside the myth of the single, homogeneous cultural answers.

In the middle of the stolid, segregated, monolithic 1950s, Howard Platt showed us a new way to look at the world. And what a wonderful world it was. Not the stultifying world of our parents, not the monochromatic world of our neighborhood, not the boring world of 9th grade, but a world of fantastic options, a world in which people got to cook, eat, shelter themselves, have sex, dance and pray in an extraordinary variety of ways.

Mr. Platt did not exorcise racism, and he did not teach ethnic harmony, cultural sensitivity, the regulation of diversity or the morality of non-prejudiced behavior. He didn't need to. He taught something far more important. Mr. Platt opened a world of variety, not for us to fear but to learn about, appreciate and enjoy. It was not a problem, but a gift.

This was the 1950s, a time with hardly a nod towards multiculturalism. Then I went to Harvard, and one of the unassigned books I read was Stride Towards Freedom by Martin Luther King. As I once described it:

I had just been introduced to Marx and, unlike college students of a later generation, thought him dreary and opaque. King approached Marx with curiosity and analysis and when he was through, concluded, "My reading of Marx also convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each, represents a partial truth. Historically, capitalism failed to see the truth in collective enterprise, and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. Nineteenth-century capitalism failed to see that life is social and Marxism failed and still fails to see that life is individual and personal."

So Martin Luther King came to me not just as a civil rights leader but as a philosopher-friend, the first non-mushy pacifist I had come across, and a guy helping me get through Marx. Not that civil rights and race weren't important. I had become an anthropology major and that experience combined with a Quaker education helped form a strong revulsion against the cultural myopia of white America….

It was also a matter of rediscovering friendly turf, the reintroduction of decency as a value, a mutual regard for cultural differences and a mutual recognition of common aspirations. I knew it was true, because Martin Luther King had taught me: "Something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right."

In short, by the time I reached adulthood I not only knew the world was diverse, but I also liked it. After all, for a guy who wanted to think and act his own way, having others doing it as well was an asset.

So it was no problem for me, after graduation, to move back to my hometown of DC which would have a black majority for about a half century, in 1971 reaching 71%, a fact which is almost totally ignored by the national media. I lived there most of that time, a white journalist and activist part of making DC diverse.

Which is a major reason I support folks doing what they want to do as long it doesn’t hurt others.