Advisors, Authors A-H, Books

Renewing Diversity  Part 16: Revisting The Children Are Watching – by Carlos Cortés

It’s hard for me to get my head around the fact that it’s been more than a quarter century since the year 2000 publication of my book, The Children Are Watching: How the Media Teach about Diversity.  In that book I proposed a framework for looking at the mass media as a sprawling, multifaceted informal educational curriculum that competes with schools in the teaching process.  Whether or not media makers think of themselves as teachers is irrelevant.  Once they create media, their products become sources from which people learn.  

As the title suggests, the book focused on the theme of diversity.  I argued that the mass media provide a form of informal public multicultural education through the ways they depict groups, portray intergroup interactions, and publicly examine how  institutions and organizations interact with diversity.  The book addressed a series of questions.  How do mass media treat the theme of diversity (not simply the treatment of individual groups)?  What impact have media had on public thinking about diversity?  How can school teachers better incorporate the media treatment of diversity in their classrooms and pedagogy?  

Prior to my book, the previous three decades had witnessed an explosion of books and articles on the media treatment of individual groups:  for example, racial; ethnic; sex; gender; religious; sexual orientation; and disability groups.  Some books discussed the depiction of multiple groups.  However, to that point — in fact, never since — had a book addressed the media treatment of diversity as a theme. 

The Children Are Watching attracted considerable attention and presented enough novel  arguments that I soon found myself being asked to further address the topic through more writing, public lectures, and workshops.  It also led to opportunities for me to work with media, not just analyze them.  For example, the book contributed to my becoming the Creative/Cultural Advisor for shows like Nickelodeon’s “Dora the Explorer” and “Go, Diego, Go!” as well as Cultural Consultant for the Dreamworks’ feature film, “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.”

Yet there was one particularly tricky part of the book.  The Children Are Watching dealt with the traditional mass media: film; television; radio; newspapers; and magazines.  When I completed the manuscript in 1999, social media were still in their infancy.  Consider the fact that Facebook did not come into existence until 2004.  

However, even then I realized that I had to at least tentatively address the existence of social media.  But how?  For professional historians like myself, the pivot from history to futurism can be awkward.  Some cynics claim that historians are specialists in predicting the past.  

I chose to address this dilemma through a single concluding chapter, which I entitled “Multicultural Education in the Cyberspace Era.”  Every so often I re-read that chapter to see how right and how wrong I was.  Predictably, I was both.  

I didn’t envision all of the 21st-century media-related technological changes that would occur.   Nor did I foresee some of the myriad ways that technological change would affect human behavior, particularly media-related habits, such as people’s addiction to spending their lives on a 24/7 digital leash.  And I certainly did not envision how the social media would contribute to the development of the 2020s’ social mediated battleground in which words like diversity, equity, and inclusion have become political piñatas.  In fact, when I was writing my book, DEI as an administrative structure was barely coming into existence.

On the other hand, the book’s basic arguments, including the final chapter, hold up quite well.  The mass media have lost ground to social media, but the basic precepts of the media public teaching process remain.  The traditional mass media still teach about diversity, but so do the myriad social media outlets, including the hundreds of millions of individuals who comment on diversity-related topics through their postings, repostings, likes, and memes. 

As I re-read that final chapter in preparation for writing this column, I was particularly drawn to pages 166-168, in which I proposed two possible diversity scenarios for the new social media.  In the first, optimistic scenario, I envisioned a possible future in which individuals would both gather together to explore their intragroup identities while also using the internet to create robust, bridge-building intergroup conversations.  In contrast, I also envisioned a more negative scenario in which like-minded identity groups would create self-selected cybertribes that fostered hate, reinforced stereotypes, and erected barriers to intergroup understanding. 

One particular paragraph stood out as particularly visionary, although unfortunately so.  On page 167 I began by observing that, whatever their weaknesses, particularly when it came to their treatment of diversity, the traditional mass media did provide a type of national “social glue” and “common cultural reference point.”  Then I moved on to the social media.  

“Through cyberspace, intragroup mass communication can facilitate a polarizing circle-the-wagons Pluribus, champion Unum as an exclusivist idea (an America in which there is only room for ‘real Americans,’ meaning Americans just like ‘us’), and jeopardize the creation of a fully inclusivist Unum.  The triumph of isolationist, hate-based ethnocentric intragroup solidarity based on the exclusion and oppression of others could turn cyberspace into a multicultural education nightmare.”  Today we are living that nightmare.

The signs are all around us, disseminated every second through the media, both traditional and social.  The reinterpretation of the 14th amendment to propose excluding from citizenship the U.S.-born children of non-citizen parents.  The lowering of the wall between church and state, a demand of the resurgent Christian Nationalist movement.  Assertions of the relegation of women to secondary status (“your body, my choice”).  The negation of the existence of transgender people.

Those quests are certainly not yet triumphant and may never fully be.  However, in the past decade such divisive ideas have migrated from the margins and, partially through social media, have attained far more prominence in mainstream discourse.  They have challenged the diversity triumphalism of the 2010’s (which turned out to be a fragile triumphalism) and the delusionary post-George Floyd anti-racist euphoria of the early 2020’s (I was part of that).

So what does this mean for diversity advocates?  Among other things, it requires honing and pursuing a vision that can inspire those outside of traditional diversity-supporting ranks.  It requires pivoting away from the divisive, dyadic societal framings (for example, oppressor-oppressed) that have become popular among some diversity advocates.  And it requires developing the jargon-free capacity to effectively present our visions to people outside of the diversity-supporting academic/arts world complex.

I won’t go so far as to say that my year 2000 The Children Are Watching was way ahead of its time.  But it may have been.  My hope is that diversity advocates can successfully pivot from wallowing in the inequities of the past to successfully framing and pursuing an inclusivist, equitable Pluribus-Unum future.  In short, I hope we can achieve my optimistic scenario and trash my pessimistic scenario.  I’d love to be proven wrong.

Dr. Carlos E. Cortés
Latest posts by Dr. Carlos E. Cortés (see all)