How to Succeed at Diversity Without Really Trying

Context: my college has a daily paper for which anyone can write articles, be they so inclined. I wrote a response to a letter written in yesterday. I wasn't sure how it would go over, so I put my mailbox number instead of my name. My response was the front-page feature today. At lunch, I was told by several people that the article was really good. They did this without any prompting. Better, when I went in search of a knife, I saw some guy read the front page, pass it to his neighbor, and specifically point at the thing I wrote. I'm feeling pretty great, basically. Here's the piece.

So, yesterday there was a letter in to the Bullsheet advocating for actual active diversity. Well and good. But then this line caught my eye:

"Go to a BSU meeting. Not just one meeting. Several. Go to ANY multicultural club. Interact with someone who does not look like you. For goodness sake widen your minds a little. It's not going to kill anyone. But it might force people to examine themselves and be better than who they were before."

So, basically what you've proposed here is that rather than making friends based on similar interests, we should instead focus on acquiring as many token points as possible by inserting ourselves into not-us organizations. I'm sorry, no, BSU and groups like it do not hold meetings to facilitate this particular Very Special Episode of your college experience.

Example: I've had queer friends complain that their QS class discussion is run by cishet white girls who think they understand what they're talking about, and said queer friends are not okay with being drowned out by these outsiders who are out in search of ally cookies. Now, okay, there are problems with that viewpoint, because the cishet white girls kind of have to participate as part of their grade, but that's sort of the point here, that at least in this situation, there's a valid reason for not completely shutting them down. And that is where the situation diverges.

Tell me, if a queer person is uncomfortable with the viewpoints of a cishet straight person being shared IN A CLASS, how are people at the BSU going to feel about you flouncing in and waiting to be ~enlightened~? Sure, maybe these groups are totally fine with this idea in the abstract, but every story like this I've ever heard has included severe discomfort about artificiality on both sides of the table. Because this isn't actually wanting to be diverse. This is about wanting to check a box on life's roadmap.

Do you know what might actually work? Trying this: Let's say for the sake of argument that you are a giggly-ass white girl. You're in a class that has several of your giggly-ass white girl friends, some acquaintances, and then some people you've never spoken to before. Next time there's a randomly assigned group project, instead of bitching and moaning about how you aren't with your entire giggly-ass white girl cohort, try actually getting to know your group. Odds are, at least one of them is someone you never bothered talking to because they seemed totally different from you, but not in a quirky compelling way, just in a "black person" way. Don't go into it like "HELLO, I AM A WHITE PERSON SEEKING A BLACK COMPANION TO ENLIGHTEN ME ABOUT RACISM AND COLOR-BLINDNESS, EXCEPT NOT THE MEDICAL KIND BECAUSE THAT'S FOR MEN AND DOGS," instead be like, "Hey, what did you think of SNL last weekend?" When she inevitably says "I didn't watch SNL because I was partying/gaming/asleep/

offcampus/SNL has been bad since Tina Fey left," work from there. Discuss Tina Fey's film career and how it's a total tragedy that 30 Rock isn't on Hulu. Talk about stuff you do on the weekend. And keep talking from there.

That, folks, may sound like how you talk to your friends. Good. Because it is. Making friends with people who are in some way obviously Different From You shouldn't be like a wolf making friends with a platypus. We're all people, we all have common interests, and actually acting like that's true is how you can achieve diversity on campus.