Diversity as Fraternity Lite
Rent from DeepDyve- Diversity as Fraternity Lite
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!—Katherine Lee Bates/Ray Charles
"Diversity," our conference theme, is a watered down, misguided ideal. Its most immediate ancestor, the more robust "affirmative action," embraced certain specific goals and for a while even flirted with quotas to mark real progress (businesses, after all, get ahead by setting quotas). For political and practical reasons (outright opposition to positive discrimination, difficulty in successful implementation), affirmative action morphed into "diversity." One positive result: success can more easily be claimed. An organization's diverse mix may include offspring of Kenyan politicians or of Pakistani physicians, but that is fine.
Lingering far in the background, behind both "diversity" and "affirmative action," lies a remote and now mostly discredited ancestor, "fraternity." Conservatives, fearing state-imposed philanthropic mandates, reject it as unwarranted social engineering. Liberals, recognizing its religious roots (not to mention the term's inherent sexism), hardly dare speak its name. So we are left with "diversity," both more readily attainable and consistent with two widely embraced social goods, tolerance and multiculturalism. The triumvirate, diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism, comes up short, however, when looked at from the perspective of fraternity, final partner in another triumvirate, that of the eighteenth century, matching fraternity with liberty and equality. A nation solicitous of diversity risks turning into a "silosociety." In such a society, multiculturalism translates practically into islands of mostly isolated communities, punctuated by some interaction in the public and occupational realms. Tolerance, for its part, tends to emphasize the negative. It's a "leave-them-alone" kind of virtue. It does not encourage genuine affiliation or even active dialogue. It may, indeed, be quite compatible with the insular group life of "identity politics" rather than with an integrative "mongrel" model of mixing, blending, and changing.
The pejorative tone associated with the word "mongrel" is unfortunate. My substitute, drawn from Caribbean authors, albeit with differences, will be the term "creolization."1 A society in which fraternity remained a guiding value [End Page 120] would do much to rehabilitate the term and the aim of fostering a transformative rather than a more static multicultural ideal. Under the umbrella of "fraternity," the transformative dynamic would be one that emphasized engaged transactionalism rather than the oppositional extremes of homogeneity and fragmentation.2 Fraternity, however, seems not all that prevalent in either contemporary theory or practice. Even its twentieth-century philosophical friends, Bergson and Dewey most prominently, seem, as we shall soon see, flummoxed about how to characterize it. Not only can we say that diversity represents fraternity "lite," but that actual interpretations of fraternity tend to be themselves thin or "lite."
Some history first of all. Although fraternity does not occupy a prominent place in contemporary consciousness, it was not always so. The now abandoned Champlain Canal, site of great commercial activity, would seem an unlikely place for exhortation to brotherhood. Yet an 1812 report explained how canal commerce would "strengthen the bands of union and preserve brotherly affection in the great American family."3 Such an open embrace of fraternity has deep roots. In 1630, John Winthrop reminded new colonists how the great divergence of human character, far from being a flaw, was divinely ordained so that "every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the Bonds of brotherly affection" (Winthrop 1630, 79–80). His sermon takes us back to the seventeenth century, a period when the largest urban area in the colonies was called the City of Brotherly Love. The high point for fraternity (and maybe the low point as well) came in 1789 with the French revolutionary slogan embracing it as co-equal with the more universally recognized democratic ideals of "freedom" and "equality."
By the late nineteenth century, when Katherine Lee Bates was celebrating brotherhood in "America the Beautiful," the ideal itself had slipped into the shadows. Such a waning was accompanied by important criticisms wondering if it should ever have been an ideal in the first place. Freud leveled a crucial one in Civilization and its Discontents. Another came from a strident critic of John Stuart Mill, the lesser...
