why does anyone care about diversity?

[ovcatto]

Originally Posted by Frankie117

Question; How does diversity enrich your life?

God where does one begin...

"I went to a high school that was about 50-50 white/black, the racial tension made the school as cold as ice. It was always the white suburbanites vs. the poor blacks, and a small mix that was always caught in the middle. Sorry, but I fail to see how violence and having to constantly watch my back throughout high school simply because of race has enriched my life."

Well, I was born in segregated New Orleans but grew up for the most part in Berkeley, California, a good deal of which was spent on the U.C. Berkeley campus where my mom worked. We once moved to Richmond, Ca and very early on I was confronted for the first time, face to face with the racism when a gentleman told me that ******s weren't wanted. I think I was 9 or 10 at the time. A delegation of parents who were of Jewish, Italian, Japanese and Mexican descent came to my house and told me that I would always be welcome in their homes and to play with their children. It was an experience that has remained in the forefront of my mind for almost 50 years.

When my mother died, and I had to move back to the South, that lesson kept me immune from much of the hatred and distrust that black folks who had to endure the utter vileness of segregation and racism.

Over the years, I learned the interconnection between African and Latin Caribbean culture by playing music with Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Brazilian musicians, to speak Yiddish in the kitchen of a friend's aging Ukrainian bubbie, and to understand the problems confronting Irish Catholics over a glass of Jameson. I've hung out or worked with people from dozens of countries and each encounter has enriched my knowledge of how we are wonderfully different, and how we as humans are alike.

I don't have a single doubt in my mind that at your school, a black kid and a white kid made that same discovery which had they not been afforded the opportunity may have gone unrealized for the rest of their lives It is too bad that you couldn't look beyond the mistrust and preconceptions to find a way to make the same discovery yourself.