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.
We need not be apologetic about what the diversity movement has accomplished since the 1960’s. Maybe most important it has caused the nation as a whole to become more cognizant of the idea of otherness, including a recognition that societal groups have benefited differentially from our nation’s trajectory. The movement has galvanized efforts to narrow those gaps, although there has always been opposition, an inevitable dimension of the pursuit of social change. In the decade of the 2020’s we face powerful headwinds that threaten to undermine — in fact, have already undermined — some of those gains.
We must continue to confront those forces that have long opposed diversity, but we also need to deal with another challenge. Diversity advocates seem to have lost traction with — in some cases have actually alienated — natural allies in the pursuit of equity and inclusivity. This past November’s election provided dramatic evidence of that shift, with large numbers of previous Obama voters becoming transformed into Trump supporters. This includes significant numbers of people of color who have turned their backs on the supposedly pro-diversity Democratic party and migrated to the DEI-targeting Republican party.
Immediately after the election some of the media-based elite chattering class began ranting about racism, sexism, and transphobia. Certainly those factors continue to exist, but they alone don’t explain voter shifts. Diversity advocates need to look more intently in the mirror, reflect more deeply, and ask themselves the question: in what ways have our actions, our messages, and our messaging gone awry?
That concern was on my mind when I delivered a keynote address at this past November’s national conference of the National Association for Multicultural Education. In the spirit of self-reflection, I titled my talk, “Renewing Multicultural Education: An Ancient Mariner’s Manifesto.” In that talk I drew on my more than half century of experience in multicultural education to reflect on some of the bad habits that have crept into multicultural education practice. I then pivoted to suggest how we can reenergize the field of multicultural education by developing a more robust future-oriented vision, by building on that vision through reflective practice, and by communicating our vision more effectively beyond the usual pro-diversity echo chambers like diversity trainers and college faculty lounges.
But what about the diversity movement at large? How can we renew and reenergize the diversity movement, win back alienated doubters, and also effectively contend with the relentless opposition? Here are three work-in-progress ideas.
Focus more on concrete future-oriented actions, while restraining the regressive, backward-looking tendency to simply “admire the problem” — History is important. I say this as a retired history professor. But excessive wallowing in the recollection of past abuses ultimately becomes counter-productive. People are looking for action-oriented visions to foster a better future (notice, I don’t say “solve the problem,” because the reduction of inequality is a problem that will never be fully and permanently “solved”).
Diversity advocates need to become more adept at making that past-to-future pivot. Admiring the problem through the endless repetition of canards about things like oppression, social marginalization, and settler colonialism may provide a personal sense of self-cleansing. However, it isn’t likely to win support from those who are looking for concrete ideas about making life better for themselves and their families.
Consider my personal challenge as co-director of the University of California, Riverside, School of Medicine’s health equity curriculum. Since assuming that role four years ago I have attended myriad talks on health disparities, an important topic. However, I have ceased going to such events because they so often become trapped in admiring the problem. It’s fine for scholars to come up with imaginative new ways to document inequitable health care practices. But too often they stop there and frustratingly fail to pivot to the future by positing ways to address those inequities. Diversity advocates need to get better about making that pivot.
Become More Inclusive — Diversity advocates like to proclaim themselves as champions of inclusivity, one of the three core legs of the DEI tripod. Yet, in practice, some diversity advocates have fallen far short of full inclusivity. This is why I now refer to this tendency as “selective inclusivity” because of the common habit of arbitrarily including some groups while pointedly excluding others .
Consider the selective inclusivity present in certain workshop exercises on the topic of privilege. For many years I facilitated trainer-of-trainers classes on teaching about privilege at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication, where we critically analyzed privilege training strategies. Some shamelessly divisive strategies involved stereotypically manipulating workshop participants into such polarizing categories as “the privileged” and “the unprivileged.”
When used with nuance, privilege is a marvelous lens for examining inequities and determining courses of action. However, we should stop approaching the topic from the clichéd, finger-pointing perspective of “privileged vs. unprivileged” (or oppressors vs. oppressed). With medical students I address what I call “the privilege gap” in health care institutions and practices – where some groups are favored and others are disfavored, be it intentional or unintentional. My goal is to reduce the privilege gap by helping students learn to identify, assess, and address those examples of unequal treatment, but without the accusatory identity-based finger-pointing so prominent in some privilege training.
Stop obsessing about “offensive” language — The pursuit of language equity is laudable. The obsession with continuously looking for offensive language is not. In fact, efforts by many diversity advocates to try to sanitize language have become counter-productive, alienating would-be allies and distracting from the scrupulous examination of inequitable structures and practices.
The obsession with offensive language has placed a primacy on searching for speech “errors” and calling people out for them. At times during the discussion of diversity issues good intent becomes pilloried. The result is that many well-intentioned people bail out of those discussions, thus avoiding the possibility of being accused of “mistakes” or microagressions. It has also alienated natural allies who support diversity goals but are fed up with sanctimonious, sometimes authoritarian, efforts to sanitize the language environment.
Let’s call a moratorium on being offended or searching for microaggressions. In the new current era of attacks on diversity efforts, we need to foster personal resilience rather than encouraging retreats into “safe spaces.” We need diversity warriors who don’t have time to be offended and who shrug off microaggressions, As I wrote in my November, 2024, ADR column, “We Failed George Floyd,” I much prefer the sinewy “We shall overcome” to the pusillanimous “I’m offended” or “I don’t feel safe.”
I’ll stop with these three suggestions for pivoting to the future. I’ll offer more in future columns. So for now I’ll summarize these three renewal suggestions:
***re-envision the future while resisting the “admiring the problem” tendency to become mired in looking backward.
***become more broadly inclusive rather than selectively divisive in our practices.
***encourage resilience by moving beyond being offended and searching for microaggressions.
Let’s make 2025 the year of diversity renewal. Make it a year of bridge-building, of attracting, rather than alienating, potential allies, and of developing robust future-oriented visions. We need to more proudly and publicly define ourselves, not let our antagonists define us.
Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash
He also edited the four-volume Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia (2013).
- Renewing Diversity #4: Pivoting to the Future – by Carlos Cortés - January 5, 2025
- Renewing Diversity #3: We Failed George Floyd – by Carlos Cortés - November 4, 2024
- Renewing Diversity # 1: High School Ethnic Studies – by Carlos Cortés - September 4, 2024