All posts by Dr. Carlos E. Cortés

ADR ADVISOR Carlos E. Cortés is a retired history professor who has been a diversity speaker, educator, trainer, and consultant for forty-five years. His books include: The Children Are Watching: How the Media Teach about Diversity (2000); his memoir, Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time (2012); and a book of poetry, Fourth Quarter: Reflections of a Cranky Old Man (2016), which received honorable mention for the best book of poetry in the 2017 International Latino Book Awards. He also edited the four-volume Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia (2013).
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Renewing Diversity No. 8: Updating the Classics – by Carlos Cortés 

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To a great extent, popular culture is a series of remakes.  Remakes of classical theatre.  Remakes of children’s stories.  Remakes of old movies.

There’s nothing basically wrong with that.  Hamlet has been restaged thousands of times, sometimes preserving its original historical context, other times being modernized.  Film director Akira Kurosawa transported “Macbeth” and “King Lear” into Japanese historical reimagining with stunning effect in “Throne of Blood” and “Ran.”  Director John Sturges reciprocated when he repurposed Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” as a rollicking American western, “The Magnificent Seven.” 

But each remake occurs at a specific moment.  Times change and, with those changes, we get altered views of both the originals and the remakes.  Changing views of diversity have deeply influenced that process.

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ADR Advisors, Authors A-H, Generational, Religious Diversity

Renewing Diversity No. 7: A Sliver of Bone – by Carlos Cortés 

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“Do you have any religious or ethical reservations about what kind of bone we put in your mouth?”  That question both startled and pleased me.  As I answered with a simple “no,” I broke into a broad smile.

Some context.  My young periodondist was in the midst of trying to save my 90-year-old mouthful of teeth from the ravages of aging.  To do so she was giving them a thorough laser treatment and selectively rebuilding my dental structure through new bone.   

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ADR Advisors, Authors A-H, Gender, Sports

Renewing Diversity #6: Trans Talk – by Carlos Cortés 

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“Can we finally stop talking about trans sports?” read the headline in the February 11, 2025, Los Angeles Times.  Of course this was followed by a column talking about — you guessed it — trans sports.  So the answer is no, we have to keep talking about trans sports for the same reason that people keep climbing mountains: because they are there.

 Four years ago I ended my ADR column on trans sports by positing that “the case of transgender female athletes may pose one of the ultimate tests for diversity advocates because it requires the difficult weighing of competing legitimate equity concerns, with no simple win-win solution in sight.”  I illustrated that conclusion by positing two hypothetical situations.   

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ADR Advisors, Authors A-H, Social Issues

Renewing Diversity #5: Wrestling with History – by Carlos Cortés 

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In his new book, A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present, historian Glenn Adamson muses, “every story about the future is also a demand to intervene in the present.”  I should also add that every story about the present has its roots in the past.

I was trained as a historian, receiving a Ph.D. in Latin American history way back in 1969.   I taught history for twenty-six years at the University of California, Riverside.  Different kinds of history.  Latin American history.  Chicano history.  Film and history.  History of the mass media.

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ADR Advisors, Authors A-H, Trends 2025: Chaotic Times

Renewing Diversity #4: Pivoting to the Future – by Carlos Cortés

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Somewhere during my ninety-year journey I developed a three-line, fifteen-word personal action mantra.  It goes like this.

“Look unflinchingly at the past.
Apply it to the present.
Then pivot to the future.”

So when I think about diversity in 2025, I think about pivoting for renewal, not merely defending the diversity past or doubling-down on current diversity strategies.   That’s why my current  ADR column series is entitled Renewing Diversity.  As circumstances of the past few years have made abundantly clear, the diversity movement is long overdue for renewal, lest it relegate itself into footnote status in the long course history.

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Renewing Diversity #3: We Failed George Floyd – by Carlos Cortés 

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In 1999, Malcolm Gladwell weighed in with his praised and criticized bestseller, The Tipping Point, a provocative exploration of the process of social change.   A quarter century later, in 2024, Gladwell revisited the topic via Revenge of the Tipping Point, a meditation on where he had been right and where he had gone wrong with his broad thesis.  Musing about his personal journey, Gladwell observed: “Maybe it would be a good idea for anyone who writes a book that tries to make sense of the world to be forced every 25 years to go back and revisit the original thesis.”

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Renewing Diversity # 1: High School Ethnic Studies – by Carlos Cortés

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We may be living through the most turbulent half decade in the history of the diversity movement that took off in the late 1960’s.  In the process, the very idea of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has been taking a shellacking, including legislative restrictions on its very existence.   Consider some of events.

The publication of The 1619 Project and the ensuing  attack on Critical Race Theory.  The police killing of George Floyd.  The growing strength and virulence of the anti-diversity movement, ranging from President Donald Trump’s 2020 ban on federal diversity training through Florida’s passage of the Stop Woke Act to the national surge of diversity-related book banning.   The 2024 presidential campaign, with inflamed and accusative proclamations about biracial identity, transgender rights, White nationalism, immigration, and, yes, tampons.

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ADR Advisors, Authors A-H, Generational

Diversity and Speech No. 46: The Art of Turning 90 – by Carlos Cortés 

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I never really thought much about turning 90.  That is, until April 6, 2023, the day I turned 89.  That’s when my daughter, Alana, asked me the life-altering question:  “Dad, what are you going to do special for your 90th birthday?”

“As little as possible,” I responded in my best bah, humbug voice.  “Maybe Laurel and I will go to Del Taco.”  Anything to avoid the deluge of obligatory phone calls and discordant group renditions of “Happy Birthday.” 

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ADR Advisors, Authors A-H, Gender

Diversity and Speech Part 44: Generations of Gender Talk – by Carlos Cortés

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Keeping up with the ongoing changes in diversity language has become a matter of lifelong learning.  For a near-nonagenarian  (I turn 90 on April 6), this means continuous learning as well as relentless unlearning.  That is, trying to unlearn old uses of language that decades of repetition have deeply wired into my brain.

Take gender.  Growing up in 1940’s Kansas City, Missouri, I learned that men were men and women were women.  I inhabited a world of man talk and woman talk, men’s jobs and women’s jobs, men’s clothes and women’s clothes.  It wasn’t much different in college during the 1950’s.   We were men and women, not cisgender or transgender men and women. 

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Diversity & Speech Part 43: How 3 College Presidents Flunked Their Speech Midterm Exam – by Carlos Cortés

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Since Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, the world has been convulsed by the carnage emanating from the Middle East.  That convulsion has migrated to the United States, where it is expressed daily in protests, demands, threats, and moral-grandstanding often reeking of dehumanizing language. 

The carnage has claimed the lives of thousands in Gaza and Israel.  It has also claimed other kinds of victims in the United States.   This includes three college presidents, whose December 5, 2023, testimony before the Education and Workforce Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives brought them instant public infamy because of the way that they positioned themselves in regard to speech. 

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