Advisors, Authors A-H, Education, Inclusion

Renewing Diversity Part 9: Rediscovering My Professional Journey – by Carlos Cortés

For nearly a year I’ve been going through an out-of-body experience. It was launched by a simple request that has turned into a not-so-simple journey.  Here’s what happened.

In the fall of 2024, Steven Mandeville-Gamble, Director of the University of California, Riverside, Library, asked me to donate my professional papers to the library’s Special Collections.  Feeling quite honored, I agreed.  Since then I have been preparing my papers for delivery.  This has involved months of wading through file cabinets, bookcases, and stacks of boxes crammed with books, articles, correspondence, course notes, past public lectures, workshop outlines, video and audio tapes, and published and unpublished manuscripts. 

It has also meant confronting multiple versions of myself stretching back more than half a century to January, 1968, when I began teaching at UCR.  Since diversity has been one of my specialties, this meant revisiting multiple stages of my thinking about that topic.  This was particularly true when I reorganized a file cabinet with more than five decades of my public speeches and workshops dating back to the early 1970’s.

In his haunting novel, The Go-Between, L. P. Hartley provides my favorite literary opening line: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”  At times my talks and workshops struck me as being from such a foreign country.  Back in the 1970’s we thought differently about diversity.   

When I say differently, I mean differently than some diversity trends that would develop later.  We championed the bridge-building inclusion of groups that had been excluded, but we did so without dividing the world into the oppressed and their oppressors.  We committed ourselves to critical, uninhibited dialogue about diversity issues without obsessing over whether some people might be offended.   We challenged exclusivist history and institutions with a sense of inevitability-driven optimism.  When we sang “We Shall Overcome,” we meant it.  Let me describe two examples of my “we shall overcome” educational actions in that foreign country called the 1970’s.

In January, 1970, I began teaching UCR’s first Chicano History class.  While pursuing graduate study in history and literature from 1962 to 1965 at the University of New Mexico, a campus with a large Latino student body, I had encountered Spanish borderlands history, but not Chicano history.  From a 1970’s perspective, the early 1960’s were a foreign country.

I dedicated myself to making the Chicano past an integral part of the UCR curricular landscape.   Chicano students deserved the opportunity of learning about their rich heritage and non-Chicano students, too, needed to know it.   My class was a story comprised of the good, the bad, and the ugly without trigger warnings.  But how could I design a course that targeted the Chicano experience while also being inclusive of others?  

One of my course requirements was a family history research paper.  Chicanos could write about their own families.  Non-Chicanos could choose to write about a Chicano family they interviewed or conduct some other kind of Chicano-focused research.  

One young lady of Irish American ancestry asked if she could write about her own family.  Since it was a Chicano History class, my first inclination was to say no.  However, I told her I would consider her request.

I did and realized that my assignment was anti-inclusive.  It excluded this young student, who yearned to find out more about her roots.  So I told her that she could write about her own family, but that she would need to address the similarities and differences between her family’s journey and the Chicano historical experience.  She wrote a fine paper.  The next year I made this more-inclusive, bridge-building comparative history option available to all.  That experience taught me an inclusivity lesson.  If you want to be inclusive, you can’t exclude.      

Less than two years later, in the fall of 1971, I was invited to serve on California’s first statewide task force to evaluate ethnic content in social studies textbooks being considered for statewide adoption.  According to Section 9305 of the California education code, adopted books were required to “correctly portray the role and contributions of the Negro and other ethnic groups.”  If that wording makes you flinch, please consider that this was “woke” in that foreign country called 1971.  They did things differently back then.  

The task force meetings were open hearings and I soon became a minor public celebrity because of my meeting comments.  I received invitations to speak about textbooks at colleges, school districts, and public events.  I was also invited to write a chapter on Chicanos for a 1973 book, “Teaching Ethnic Studies: Concepts and Strategies,” edited by James Banks.  

When that book became widely adopted for teacher training, I found myself on the national speakers’ circuit for the brand new field called K-12 multicultural education.  Chance had made me a public voice.  As I re-read my old talks and workshop outlines, it became clear that bridge-building inclusivity, uninhibited dialogue, and we-shall-overcome optimism had become embedded in my thinking.  

With states and school districts across the country pursuing multicultural education, I conducted diversity-related training and speaking in 48 states (sans Delaware and West Virginia).  I worked with both liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, often in states that today ban “wokeness.”   We didn’t definitively “overcome,” but we certainly made progress.  In contrast, diversity educational efforts have today been put on the defensive.  What happened?

Part of the reason lies in the inevitability of resistance.  Some Americans resolutely opposed and continue to oppose the pursuit of educational equity and inclusivity.  This will always be the case.  Overcoming is an ongoing challenge, not a process of definitive problem-solving.

My concern, however, is the following.  What did diversity advocates do to contribute, albeit unintentionally, to losing the support of ,many who previously supported diversity efforts?  How can we regain the compelling narrative that fueled such 1970’s curricular reform efforts as ethnic studies and multicultural education?  I have no simple answers, but here are some observations. 

As the decades passed, some diversity advocates began to neglect such diversity movement-founding ideas as full inclusivity, uninhibited dialogue, and critical optimism.  Instead they pursued strategies of selective inclusivity (which really means selective exclusion), “I’m offended” whininess (which impedes robust dialogue), and criticism pervaded by pessimism (the United States is so inherently and hopelessly regressive that we are unlikely to ever overcome).  In the process the diversity movement squandered some of its momentum and moral high ground.

The diversity movement needs a course correction.  I hope it’s not too late.  I still believe that support for diversity principles remains strong among much of the American populous, even as government entities try to crush diversity efforts.  I also believe that we can reanimate that reform spirit by drawing on the founding principles that drove diversity educational efforts in the 1970’s while also modernizing our efforts by integrating scholarship and lessons learned from the past half century.

My professional papers journey of the past year has helped me develop a personal diversity vision that goes like this.   “Reflect honestly on the past.  Apply this to the present.  Then pivot to the future.”   Simply hunkering down, defending DEI, and “resisting,” whatever that means, is not going to get it done.  Diversity advocates must sharpen their thinking and proclaim our vision of a better nation and world, including our educational vision.   

We need to apply critical acumen without wallowing in negativity.  We need to reemphasize inclusivity and eschew the divisiveness that has polluted some diversity efforts.  We need to recognize the importance of language equity but without the myopic fixation on things like microaggressions and avoiding offense at all costs, which lead to the chilling of robust, honest, and visionary conversations about diversity.   

We need to reclaim and proclaim the proud, optimistic, and inclusivist narrative of the 1970’s.  If not, we allow others to caricature us, which they have been doing effectively.   We can still overcome. 

Dr. Carlos E. Cortés
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