Final Reflection

     I came into this class with one overarching goal: to learn a new perspective on diversity and the issues surrounding it. I always had an idea what diversity meant, but had never lived it or experienced it in a meaningful enough way to truly grasp the entire kingdom it covers. Race, ability, politics, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation and so much more comprise what diversity covers. As the weeks went by, attending class and reading more from The Meaning of Difference (2012) taught me that although there are many aspects to diversity, there are also patterns that end up repeating themselves.
     One such pattern that seemed to arise in each of the readings were the ideas of identity and classification. These two ideas go hand-in-hand as choosing an identity typically implies that you will also be choosing a classification. One article that stood out in particular in reference to this concept wrote that humans rarely identified as anything unique in ancient times. This was mainly because the lack of technology and transportation kept people from travelling to foreign lands. Without this sort of travelling, there was little mixing of ethnicities, ideas and lifestyles. With everyone essentially belonging to a monoculture, there was no need for the word 'diversity' to even exist yet! What's most telling about this is that diversity and the concepts surrounding it are clearly man-made ideas; it was never instinctual for us to begin separating each other into unique identities based on various characteristics.
     So then why the creation of diversity? What is the aim of diversity? If there is one thing the modern world has come to embrace, it's order. We crave understanding and do best when things are orderly and explainable. Science has taken us away from the age of questioning and into the age of answers. When we don't have answers, we find ways to create them. When topics are neatly explained and are logical in our minds, we feel a certain confidence. Unfortunately, the world is an infinitely complex idea with countless topics being incapable of quantification. When we come upon topics that confuse and befuddle, we begin searching for reason.
     As globalization has progressed, the world itself has become a melting pot. Not only have people mixed with each other, but we also simply know more about different people and what/who exist in the world. We now know there are people that don't look like us and that have different lifestyles. There are people capable of different things and who like different things. Who are these people?? How do they fit into my once neat and orderly monoculture? How can I begin to understand their differences? This is where classification and identity begin to appear.
     It would never be enough to simply know that someone is different than you based on the color of their skin; people would need more answers like "Why are there so many others that look similar?" or "Why is their skin a different color?" As we try to find answers, we begin to find quantatative differences: eye color, hair color, skin color, language, religion. All these attributes become recognizable and explainable as we begin to classify these attributes. I grew up in a land full of brown-haired people, so who are these people with yellow hair and why are there so many? "Oh, they're from Europe and are known as Europeans. They're different from you."
     These classifications began to separate people into nice orderly groups so we could better understand our differences. As the world became more complex, so did our classification systems. Suddenly, classifying people soley based on appearance wasn't enough, there were other attributes to be sorted out: religion, gender, sexual orientation, politics etc. These too made people vary and deserved classification. This all seems well and good, except many of these attributes belong to a spectrum, rather than mutually exclusive categories.
     In "Where's the Rulebook for Sex Verification" (Dreger, 2012), she reviewed the countless attributes the human body has that lead to what we have classified as gender. While most people believe gender classification is as easy as looking at the baby's genitals, there are actually many other factors that might disprove the genitals. Various chemical balances in the body lead it to develop in certain ways; when the balances lean one way or the other, a series of development begins that leads people in the direction of a gender. Along the way, these balances can take several different turns, all of which lead to slight variations in the person's anatomy. Suddenly, the person who was born with male genitals realizes that they have the chemical composition of a female and the ovaries to prove it! "What does this mean? There are males and there are females!" It means that perhaps our idea of classification is flawed and cannot perform like we expect it to. Perhaps we need to look elsewhere to learn about each other.
     This is where the idea of identity enters. Identity is a construct of man that is the basis of each of our classification. While there is little we can do to change our physical classifications, there is much we can do to change our identities. Things like religion and politics suddenly become based upon our own decisions. This is where the idea of diversity enters. Suddenly we have a myriad of choices to make in order to create our unique identity. These choices are a direct result of diversity and only exist because of the diversity of the human race! This is a mixed blessing as people who are faced with so many options can still have difficulty trying to fit into any one identity.
     The problem then becomes not that diversity exists, rather that the concept of diversity exists. Since the beginning of the human race, many of the characteristics that make-up our diverse population have existed. These characteristics only became problematic when we tried to organize them. Suddenly we were taking everything that was natural and forcing it into an unnatural concept. This in-turn forced and is forcing people to make decisions about how they fit in to their society. Will they accept what's expected of them, or will they challenge people's preconceived notions of their identity? This is what is so difficult about diversity.
     The relief comes in the same form as the problem: diversity. While we are obsessed with trying to classify everyone, we are also recognizing the differences and expanding as we go. In the late 1800s, there were only three ethnicities recognized by the United States; currently, there are over 20. So now we know we're all different and are still trying to make sense of everything; however, we're becoming more aware of this and are expanding to make room. It's exciting to live during this time because there has been a dramatic shift in consciousness regarding this topic in the past few decades with much visible growth. As long as we can continue to celebrate differences rather than simply pointing them out, we will grow.

As we continue into the future, my hope is that we will continue expanding our understanding without questioning identities.