Diversity

Yesterday, I was thinking about staff diversity in my class in Honolulu, where no one looks like me. Last year I had two co-editors, one African-American and the other a gay Filipino-Japanese young man. The class of twenty had two Chukese, two Hawaiians, one Cerebral Palsy, three African-Americans, twelve Filipino, one Samoan, and fifteen Hapa (mixed ethnicity or national origin) of Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Malaysian, and Irish. I wonder what the diversity issues are in a situation such as this.


One "issue" is the labeling of my students. I hated doing this in all the places where I have lived. When I taught outside of Los Angeles, when JFK was assassinated, we didn't check labels as we held one another in grief. When I taught in DC, we talked in class about why "black people hate white people: students answer was fear," and when I talked with people in Northwest DC about why "white people hate black people," the answer was fear. When I worked with gangs and occasions of homicide it was hood vs hood. And in Honolulu it was common experience of poverty, homelessness, various racial and sexual orientation phobias. Fear seems to be a common thread through so many different groups of people. Perhaps that is the diversity issue and on-going question: How do we overcome fear?


Media can play a vital role in this, either for good or for bad. Maybe another diversity issue is good media and bad media. What are the criteria? I like the two basic normative ethics practices of beneficence and nonmaleficence: do all the good that you can and do no harm. John Wesley said it this way: 

“Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.”