The current Supreme Court will continue to whittle away at civil and human rights. Advocates will continue to sign petitions, march, and hold demonstrations, as if these activities would cause the federal judiciary to change its mind. They won’t.
The US will continue to become more diverse, especially by Hispanics and Asian-Americans. More people will identify as multi-racial. The percent of African-Americans will continue to remain relatively constant. However, despite this, the diversity practitioner and CDO field will continue to be dominated by African-American women.
The Chief Diversity Officer function will continue not to be represented at the executive team table along with other mission critical functions.
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
~Hosea 4:6
Throughout the years, the approach to dealing with “diversity problems” has included fundamental concepts, such as education, training, and communication. While the terms diversity training and diversity education are sometimes used interchangeably, others differentiate between the two terms. Diversity training involves providing people with skills and tactics to enable them to navigate a specific diverse environment while diversity education is more comprehensive and involves mindset shifts and frameworks that enable one to utilize broader knowledge to navigate various, complex environments. Communication also plays a key role in building awareness of similarities and differences as well as building respect and trust among people from diverse backgrounds. Together, diversity training, education, and communications have been regarded as essential in creating diversity, equity, and inclusion. Continue reading Diversity Trends 2023 – by Dr. Gail Dawson→
They’re wandering outside with the guns and urging us
to be in peace
they’re torching house after house and village after village
and claiming to have driven away the darkness
they’re killing people with no conflict and talking to remain
consoled after the enemy is slayed.
Letting us hold the chit of the suffrage of our voting right
they’re pulling us to be enslaved
stamping over the people under various parties by
disfiguring, splitting, slashing, kneading and decimating
only to say you’re complete.
They’re raping women and giving the sermon on
women empowerment
having opened the factory of unemployment, they’re
promising a thousand employments in thousand days
picking up the neighbor’s skullcap in trident they’re
talking of secularism.
Shooting the democracy, they’re hailing the victory
of Ram in the country
having opened the breweries, they’re talking of
liquor prevention.
Depriving the citizens of their rights and dismantling
the constitution and the judiciary
they’re talking about civil rights
selling the country out to the hands of the foreign land
they’re talking about patriotism.
Lost in a silent land
or swept up by a cloud of whispers.
Entire worlds left in deep space, abandoned
to their savage winters, their burning
stretches of ice over mountains
and empty valleys.
Diversity language seems to wander through a series of predictable phases.First, someone comes up with a new term like micro-aggressions, or retrofits an old dictionary word like violence.A few terms catch on and become diversity specialist standard fare, then enter public lingo, sometimes celebrated, sometimes mocked.Finally, after the heat dies down and new verbal fads replace them, those formerly-hot terms settle in for the long (or short) haul, during which people tend to mouth them in a relatively mindless, sometimes authoritarian fashion.
Unfortunately, such has been the trajectory of the term privilege.Beginning with its entrance into diversity world in the 1980’s, privilege has passed through several stages, ultimately becoming corrupted into little more than a simplistic, polarizing accusation.This is a real loss, because as formulated by Peggy McIntosh, privilege provides a valuable lens for examining the world around us.It does so by calling upon people to recognize and reflect on the unearned advantages that have been handed to them.
“Education is a passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those, who prepare for it today”, as proclaimed by eminent civil rights activist, Malcolm X, bears a deeper intellectual connotation. It brings out the very holistic foundation of education as an instrument of social awareness and development,with a subtle mention of its contemporary beneficiaries, “the Youth”. Yes, it is the young people who through their rational interpretation of core educational principles, harness the progressive socio-political development of the world.
The recent phenomenon of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shift to the digital mode of learning, have accentuated the need for increased efforts towards larger educational accessibility, quality and affordability, central to the role of global development in complete coherence with the recently initiated in the “Education for All” under the broader purview of the “MillenniumDevelopment Goals”, laid out by the United Nations, thereby demanding more nuanced responsibility of the young blood in spearheading a meaningful atmosphere of social inclusion , cohesion and stability.
Stanford University’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI)
Stanford University in December of 2022 issued the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) to eliminate potentially harmful terms used in the United States within the technology community. Most of the recommendations are trying to avoid trivializing people’s experiences and avoid devaluing others. Other recommendations, from this reader’s experience, are a stretch and assume that we are not able to distinguish the context in which a word or phrase is used.
The EHLI is a courageous and noble endeavor. I would also argue it is US-centric, Anglophilia, and elitist! And may or may not be transferrable to the larger society.
The following is a sampling of the terms/phrases in the EHLI’s thirteen pages of terms and my reaction to them.
Outside my mind, his breath is shallow;
I see him gasping for air,
his emaciated chest rising and falling.
Some days—no, many— I let him in.
I feed him, clothe him, let him soak in the bath.
I would not want him to suffer.
And yes, some days—no, many—
I let him spend the night.
You might think this would satisfy him,
rekindle his desire for independence,
and sometimes, it does.
Then, I am satisfied, my good deed committed.
I have saved a life.
as darkness turns
changing pain
like the razor’s edge
Careful now
she sets in quick under a bright sky
when I want them to fade quickly
Not to play the victim
or take one little fall
between spaces where
human traits reveal themselves
where pride falls to the floor
nothing to separate us
from the weak
The sun is crackling
now on granite boulders
piled in disarray
as frozen in mid-shift
as molten immobility
and heat is oozing up
to drive the cave bears
rumbling out
from fiery crevices
to claw at stones
and scorch their paws
then roar in helpless rage
at the inescapable
They slice the air
to swipe at me
and miss
me seated on the flat
and only mossy stone
out of reach
for only now
Snakes are seething
on their bellies
pissed and breathing
spit from hell
fangs bared
for taste of flesh
dripping honey-venom
they look at me
with threatening eyes
a hint of death
trembles in my spine
There is no turning back
Wish what I will
there’s nothing for it
but to bear the heat
thread the needle up
up the path serpentine
and trust in possibility
of blue-skyed Golden Sun
Only the dragon
rousing underneath the rocks
cocks his ear in pleasure
at the mounting fire
knowing
(brother to his sister Phoenix)
flame is fuel
to wings that would be spread
And as I remember Icarus
the dragon tells me
fire put to proper ore
with heavenly alchemy
creates the glowing crucible
kindles rising pressure
tempers diamond
from the coal
______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Greg Bell writes because he must. A critical illness finally roused him to publish in 2013. He’s since placed work in literary journals & anthologies and was the 2019 recipient of the Kowit Poetry Prize. He’s the author of the hybrid poetry collection Looking for Will: My Bardic Quest with Shakespeare (Ion Drive, 2015) and two award-winning plays: [1] Says he, ‘We are the witnesses, the Jiminy Crickets, the agents of change’; [2] let’s go!
Image Credit: Diamond-cut wallpaper abstract [itl.cat] spanning colors to symbolize the red hot stress of adversity to the cool blue of hope
