Diversity is the word of the day everywhere you look, particularly in employment and in the media. But they only mean certain types of diversity. Anything related to class or politics doesn’t count.
Our Diversity Isn’t That Diverse
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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The ideal metaphor for corporate “diversity”? The New York Times runs a column every week about house/apartment hunting in New York City. She’s a second-generation American who went to Yale and speaks Hindi and English fluently. She’s a director of a nonprofit and her parents run a law firm that handles medical patent litigation. He’s a left-handed bisexual MIT graduate who works at his family’s hedge fund. He’s self-diagnosed himself as being on the spectrum and only eats organic kale. They’ve only got a budget of $980,000 (and family might kick in to help out) and they’re looking for someplace near the night life, museums, the theater, and (of course, good schools — not that they’ll be sending their accessories to anything as tacky as a local school). And they’ll need quarters for the nanny. They have a 2-year-old, Starwind. Starwind is their nongendered child (“We don’t want to stifle them or set any conditionality on our approval and love, which is absolute. After we ship Starwind off to boarding school, we’ll deport the nanny of course and move, if the market’s right.”)
Which of three options did they choose? The 2nd-floor apartment on the UES ($950,000)? The pre-war condo in the Village ($920,000). Or did they slum it and pick the teardown brownstone in Park Slope with parking spot ($840,000)?
THAT’s diversity. At least for the New York Times.
I got into an argument once that a team of all black women engineers is less diverse mathematically than a team of 9 Caucasian men with one woman. The other party was angry at me.