Living diversely
It’s hard for a white girl to praise diversity without sounding like Richard Florida in his Creative Class books. When I reread the first one for Info and Labor last year, I realized just how patronizing and insensitive Florida’s attitude toward (specifically) racial and ethnic diversity really was. “It’s great, as long as Those People are amusing and never actually get in the way or anything,” says Florida; “what are they for, after all, if not amusement for their betters?”
Which is a horrible, horrible message, and one I want no part of. Florida’s people want to be proud of diversity without engaging with it, want to be entertained but not enlightened by it, want it to stay confined to a downtown playground without any actual impact on their own pet neighborhoods—you know, the ones they actually live in.
(I am treading on the edge here, because Florida works at MPOW. But oh, well; he’s got nothing to fear from me, so why would he care that I despise his first book and have since I first read it? And, for the record, his work is like anybody else’s with regard to the performance of my job duties.)
So I feel I’m on thin ice saying this, but I want to say it nonetheless: I’m glad for the diversity of the place I now live in. I dig hearing Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish on the morning bus ride. The things I’ve learned about English-Spanish code switching from other people’s cell-phone conversations would make a great dissertation. (I wish I had a better time with Cuban Spanish, though. The missing esses throw me off, still.)
I love that ordinary grocery stores like the one I shop in have fresh serrano peppers and seven different kinds of queso fresco. (Actually, I wish the cheese selection here were better, but that’s what happens when you move away from Wisconsin; cheese becomes a specialty food instead of an acknowledged staple.) And, hey, I finally found the tahini, so go me.
It makes me happy that MPOW can claim to have the most diverse student body in the country. I don’t know if it’s true, even (though from the summer inhabitants, I’ve no reason to doubt it), but I love that they claim it, that they’re proud of it.
Half the people in my building don’t look a damn thing like me, and that suits me just fine. And no, that’s not just because I get tired of looking at my own homely countenance, though I do.
Not all is roses. It’s easy for me to rejoice; I just jumped a social class or two, from pink-collar all the way to professional. (I’m finding it sits awkwardly, but that’s a subject for another post.) I cringe at the racial homogeneity of, say, the librarians I work with as compared to, say, the folks working in the food court. It’s just embarrassing. And I hear “Salvadoran gangs” tossed carelessly around by white folks, and it makes me want to go eat at the hole-in-the-wall Salvadoran place down the street (if I weren’t absolutely sure there’s not a vegetarian choice anywhere on the menu), just to put my money where my annoyance isn’t.
I want to hope, though, that the price of diversity is not social injustice. I want to think that injustice that fractures along ethnic lines is only made more visible thereby. That’s dreadfully naive of me, I suppose—the usual result is the invisibility of injustice, instead. It’s not as though there’s a whole lot less injustice in the white-ville I came from, however; given the choice between a lily-white unjust society and a diverse unjust society, I prefer the latter.
And not for the serrano peppers, lovely though they are.