How (not) To Argue Against Diversity

During the first or second class session for Ethnicities and Churches we were asked the question “what might constitute present systematic racism here at Fuller Seminary?” Something about many of the initial responses put red flags up for me: “language,” “teaching styles,” “academic expectations.” I reacted to some of these, and proceeded to reflect on why I found these answers problematic.

Such answers are far too open-ended and broad, to begin with. This in itself is no great moral failing. When put on the spot we students cannot be expected to consistently come up with careful, brilliantly crafted answers. However, it is bothersome to me that when asked to identify areas of racism students quickly picked up on areas of cultural particularity, labeling them “bad.” This combined with the broad nature of the answers is problematic because it seems to make cultural particularity itself evil. The evil of racism, classism, and ethnocentrism is not that one group is different from another, but that this difference is either believed to make ones group better than others or is used as a weapon against other groups. Thus, the fact that it will be difficult to get along in most US cities without a grasp of the English language is not by itself racist. It would be absurd for me to feel oppressed living or visiting Argentina simply because I did not speak Spanish and everyone else there did. However, that the United States recognizes only English as an “official language” is a good example of systematic racism, particularly in the South-West where Spanish is both widely spoken and is historically part of the culture.

My root concern is that when we simply identify difference, particularity or the inherent difficulty of cross-cultural communication as evil we miss the point entirely and are dangerously close to denouncing difference or diversity itself as evil or lamentable. We need to carefully distinguish between simple cultural particularity and diseased forms, expressions or uses of culture. We need to be wary of confusing the difficulty of cross-cultural communication with evil and corruption.

An anecdote may illustrate this. When I visited Germany a year ago, the most difficult period of time was our stay in former East-Germany. We (my fellow students and I) were all housed with different German families for a few days and spent almost all of our time with our host families. Culturally there was a far greater difference between us and the East-Germans than between us and the Western Germans we had been staying with a week before. It was the first time in Germany that I really felt “yes, this is culture shock.” But that week was the most rewarding and moving week of my whole month in the country, and I came to feel a greater sympathy with my east German acquaintances than I did with the West Germans. Some of the other students on the trip absolutely hated the time in East Germany and wanted to leave as soon as possible. Many of them framed their feelings in moral/spiritual terms, they just “felt oppressed” in this city, and so on. I cannot speak for them, but I did wonder if these students mistakenly construed the difficulty of communicating and identifying with the East Germans as bad and oppressive.