People are trying to understand and manage neo-diversity.  That’s what I have been observing and teaching since 2005.  I grew up in the Jim Crow South; that time of legal racial segregation. But now, we no longer live in a society where our racial contacts are controlled and restricted by law. Nowadays, everyday, each of us has some occasion to interact with a person from another racial, ethnic or gender group. And those persons come from multiple racial, ethnic and gender groups. So, today our interpersonal encounters with race are not black and white, but neo-diverse.  That is why I say today diversity in black and white is dead.  Long live neo-diversity.

     Fast; this has come upon us very fast. That rapid social change has involved race (Jim Crow to President Barack Obama), gender (bra-burning to female CEOs and national politicians), communication-technologies (telephones to Iphones to Ipads) and international-relations (peaceful coexistence to being a post 9/11 America).  Those rapid, and simultaneous, social changes have put each of us in situations where we have to interact with people on an equal footing, but people who do not look like and sometimes do not even sound like us.  That is neo-diversity and that neo-diversity creates social uncertainty about how to interact with people. 

     In my essay “Post-Racial?: Something Even More Bizarre and Inexplicable”(see Essays link), I work out the idea of neo-diversity in more detail.  My point now is that it has become more, and more, clear to me that this is what we are struggling with the most right now.  That is why we are so quick to call people names (Harry Reid is a Racist; see my post on this).  That is why we have people who can be led to believe that our President is a Muslim plant with the goal of turning American into a Muslim country.  The quickness of the social changes in our society means we are not psychologically prepared and so we are filled with anxiety about who is who.

     Racial segregation did many things, but one of its main functions was to make clear who was a “we” and who was a “they.”  All that started to change when we struck down the unjust, immoral laws of racial segregation.  Along with all the other changes that started to happen, the removal of racial segregation meant that more and more each of us had to figure out who was a “we” and who a “they” and we couldn’t reasonably use race as the indicator.  As I remind my college students, everyone on our campus is a citizen of the campus. No matter what your classmate looks or sounds like, I say, when it comes right down to it, that student is your classmate, and is therefore a “we.”

     That is the neo-diversity that people are trying to understand and manage.  Sanford’s One-by-One is an example (see my earlier post, Back to the Future II).

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