Notes in Praise of Diversity
Suppressing diversity imperils all of us in the name of a colossal White lie…
Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bull-fighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile, and two-horned topics? ―José Ortega y Gasset
I. A few years ago, I heard an NPR interview with Pat Buchanan, one of MAGA’s godfathers, who has always insisted that the U.S. was better off when white Europeans with Christian convictions set all the standards and called all the shots. Asked why multiculturalism makes things worse, Buchanan said, “Well, maybe it’s preference, you know. I feel more comfortable. I’m a homeboy, and I feel more comfortable with the people I grew up with.” So now we know why the regime in D.C. treats diversity as the number one threat to the American homeland—more dangerous than nuclear weapons, climate change, economic chaos, and sociopathy in high places. Pat Buchanan and his political kin want America to be their personal comfort zone from sea to shining sea. If that zone is bigoted, racist, xenophobic and homophobic, with all the attendant dangers to human life, I guess they count that as “collateral damage” and send thoughts and prayers.
II. Like Brother Buchanan, I began as a “homeboy,” but amazing grace set me free. Born in 1939 (three months after Buchanan), I grew up in an affluent, all-white, predominantly Christian suburb. I came of age in the 1950s when white America was in the driver’s seat and asleep at the wheel—so I knew next to nothing about the stunning and creative diversity of the human family. If I hadn’t been blessed as an adult with frequent opportunities to live and work with folks of diverse races, ethnicities, social classes, faith traditions, sexual orientations and gender identities, I’d probably still have the mind of a straight, white, male Christian adolescent who’s seen only a tiny slice of the world. At age 86, I would have been deprived of the many gifts I’ve received from a life spent in “the company of strangers.” And, like a lot of my white male age-mates, I’d probably be scared to death by today’s U.S.A.—a country that will soon be less that 50% white, where same-sex marriage is legal, and people have the uppity habit of insisting on their Constitutional rights. To a mind like that, the challenge diversity poses to white supremacy would most likely look like the devil’s work.
III. Given the life I’ve been privileged to live, I know that the devil’s real work is white supremacy. That sick set of beliefs was also the key to the MAGA president’s razor-thin 2024 win. His pledge to “lower the price of eggs” was not what took him to the top—he barely had time to mention it amid his torrent of lies about marauding thieves, murderers, rapists, and pet-eating legal immigrants. He won by playing the white supremacy card in a country where too many white folks are afraid of losing cultural dominance and white privilege. That’s why his supporters adore his attacks on DEI, and cheer at videos of chained and bowed deportees who were deprived of due process—even as the cost of living keeps rising, recession looms and chaos reigns at home and abroad. But, Houston, we have a problem: white supremacy is a colossal White lie. If slavery, Jim Crow, the New Jim Crow and voter suppression don’t make that clear, ample evidence is close at hand. Listen to any white supremacist and see for yourself how un-supreme he or she is. You’ll find examples on cable TV, down the street, at some churches, in a nearby bar, at your statehouse and on Capitol Hill. How could this country have flourished in any worthy way if such folks were the only show in town?
IV. Mother Nature has urgent lessons to teach us about the relation between flourishing and diversity, as I learned years ago on a road trip with a friend who’s an organic farmer. For nearly an hour, we’d been driving the back roads of southern Minnesota, past acre after acre of corn lined up in orderly, tedious and mind-numbing rows. As we crested a hill, my friend said “Check it out.”
Afloat in the sea of uniformity called American agribusiness was an island of wind-blown grasses and wildflowers, a riot of colors and textures to delight the eye. We got out of the car and walked through this patch of prairie my friend had helped restore, dotted with the kinds of plants whose names make a found poem: wild four o’clock, bastard toadflax, Ohio horse mint, Royal catchfly, purple Joe-Pye weed. After some silence, my friend spoke again, saying something like this:
There are more than one hundred fifty species of plants on this prairie—to say nothing of the insects, birds, and mammals they attract—just as there were before we first broke the sod and started farming. It’s beautiful, but that’s not the whole story. Biodiversity makes an ecosystem more creative, productive, adaptive to change, and resilient in the face of stress. The agribusiness land we’ve been driving through provides us with food and fuel. But we pay a very steep price for this kind of monoculture. It saps the earth’s vitality and puts the quality and sustainability of our food supply at risk. The prairie as it once was—a state to which it can be restored—has a lot to teach us about how we need to live.
American democracy at its best is like that island of restored prairie. In a world where human diversity is often suppressed—where authoritarian regimes have kept people lined up like rows of cultivated corn, harvesting their labor and sometimes their lives to protect the interests of the state—the diversity that grows in a democracy is life-giving for individuals and the community.
V. The diversity that enriches us goes beyond our demographic differences. Equally important are the wildly different lenses through which we see, think, and form our beliefs. At the center of this country’s public life is a marketplace of ideas that only a free people could create, a vital, colorful, chaotic bazaar of religious, philosophical, political, and intellectual convictions. When democracy is working as it should, it’s a complex and confusing mess where we can think and act as we choose, within the rule of law; can generate social and technological advances via the creative conflict of ideas; and can still manage to come together for the sake of the common good. As the late, great Molly Ivins wrote, “The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.”
Today, America’s vitality is threatened by a regime that is actively intolerant of contrarians, suspicious of every discipline from science to history to literature, and seeks revenge against its opponents with no regard for the Constitution or the courts. As long as this regime is in power, it will do everything it can to hammer us into conformity and compliance.
But I don’t believe that a majority of Americans are willing to serve as raw material for Project 2025’s Brave New World. We will resist, we will overcome, and having awakened from the White American Slumber Party that has gone on far too long, we will recommit ourselves to forming a more perfect Union.
Is that overly hopeful? Not if we understand that hope isn’t a noun, it’s a verb. Hope is holding a creative tension between what is and what could and should be, each day doing something to narrow the distance between the two. Working with whatever is within our reach, let’s DO hope and move our country closer to its highest aspirations.
[NOTES: Portions of this post were stolen from two of my books—please don’t tell the author. My ten books are HERE and HERE. If you’re looking for the United States of America, it’s HERE. I welcome donations and free subscribers, all of whom will always have access to everything I post.]
Thank you, wise sage. Your book, Healing the Heart of Democracy, is on my bookshelf as I type this. I often puzzle over how men - because it's mostly men - can be so fearful of sharing power with people who are different from them. Perhaps there's some projection happening; they fear that others will treat them the way they treat - mistreat - other.
Those wildflowers form a "cohesive culture" you know. It's not just the color and "race" of those flowers, it's the music that they create together. How boring, for instance, to have just roses, which though they come in many colors, have only one scent.