Some key questions on diversity

Tony Michael Roberts (roberts who-is-at mail.msen.com)
Sun, 5 Oct 1997 10:39:09 -0400 (EDT)

1. What did your father do for a living? 2. How was your education paid
for? 3. Are you queer? 4. How much money do you make? 5. Who in this
class do you find sexually attractive? 6. Who in this class have you
already defined as a potential problem? The answer to #6 is "the person
who would ask #1 thru #5 on the first day of class" . Their are some
honorable exceptions to this but they are rare and precious.
In most classes emphasizing "diversity" the instructors point of
view is taken as a Gods Eye point of view on social reality and used as a
protected launching pad for ad hominun assaults on students. Such classes
reflect not an acceptance and celebration of diversity but a terrified
denial of the death of grand narrative, of the fact that few students are
living the same story as their instructors.
Diversity classes typically grow out of faculty and staff horror
at what some students find it possible to live out as a plausible story
about the world. Diversity in this sense is being seen as a problem and
diversity classes are an attempt to solve the problem. PC bashing is a
counter-discourse designed to redescribe this attempt at moral
re-education in ways which neutralize it as a spoiling influence in the
lives of those students whose story about the world is not acceptable from
an institutional point of view.
The "resistant" student is, in many cases, the student who
prefers a self-definition derived from her own socially situated cultural
experience to the spoiling definition offered by the institution.
Diversity classes are an attempt to solve the "problem" of diversity from
an institutional point of view. There is another point of view. That of
those students whose diversity the institution can not tolerate in good
cheer. I would love to get the five questions I started with on my first
day teaching a class. It's really sad that students would be afraid to ask
those questions and I would be afraid to answer them if they did.
See Ya,
Tony Michael Roberts