A few years ago as a part of my voluntary community work, I was involved on the management committee of a Birmingham community advice centre. One day I bumped into a fellow Pakistani. When I told him about my involvement, he said “are there other ‘apne log’ (our people) involved there?” When Asians use this Urdu phrase, they almost always refer to not just people of their own ethnicity but also to those who come from the same clan, ethnic community and district.
The advice centre concerned was run under the auspices of a Church of England church, with a White vicar who had a real heart for the inner city and its people. Much of the congregation of this fairly ordinary church was made up of White or African Caribbean worshippers. Most of the staff of the advice centre were of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim background as were its clients who chose the advice centre in preference to their own community’s services because they saw it as more impartial and professional.
The question certainly made me think about who ‘our people’ were in such a situation. For example, for a Pakistani or Bangladeshi in need of advice, was it people from her own ethnic group, clan or fellow Muslims. Or was it the African Caribbean worshippers who donated their hard earned income so that she could access free advice; or perhaps it was the White vicar or the multi-racial management committee whose member I was. It made me wonder whether people emphasise too much their race and ethnicity and should go beyond this and focus on our humanity. We may then realise that we have much more in common than that which divides us.
That brings me to diversity. My involvement in it goes back to the 70s except it was called ‘equality’ in those days. It wasn’t until the 90s when ‘diversity’ was coined as a phrase. I believe it was with the publication of the book, in 1992, ‘From Equality to Diversity’ by Rachel Ross and Robin Schneider. This definition of diversity from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development best sums it up: “Managing diversity involves valuing people as individuals, as employees, customers and clients- everyone is different.”
The BIG QUESTION for me is: why focus on our differences when we have so much in common?
We share spaces; we often use exactly the same products and services in exactly the same way. By recognising and ‘celebrating’ diversity, are we in the danger of perpetuating the differences? Perhaps, instead we should focus on our commonalities?
There are many situations where there is a duplication of services. We have neighbourhoods where a service is provided for one ethnic group and down the road an identical service is offered for another ethnic group; both are funded from the same public purse. Surely, our communities have lived together for long enough and are mature enough to use a service alongside others from a different ethnic group. Wouldn’t it be far better to encourage us to go beyond the few differences we may have and focus on what we have in common?
So where does this leave Diversity?
Some of the orthodoxies have begun be challenged, albeit slowly. Munira Mirza from the Institute of Ideas, talking about diversity training, points out: “On one hand, trainers claim to eliminate stereotypes in the workplace, yet in talking about ‘different cultural perspectives’, they end up generating new and more insidious ones in their stead”. She points out that the “diversity machine is highly expensive, but more worryingly, it can be highly corrosive. It creates divisions within the workforce and generates an unhealthy preoccupation with racial tension in the workplace”. Ms Mirza goes on to offer diversity practitioners and others a challenge: “what has been lost is any sense of universal or common values. Contemporary society finds it difficult to claim that there are values and needs that are shared by everyone, regardless of their particular cultural upbringing, skin colour or ethnic background. Today, there is an absence of vision that can unite different groups.”
Later Ms Mirza makes a similar point in another article: “In our society we attribute much more positive significance to cultural differences, but increasingly lack confidence in people’s ability to transcend them.” She goes onto point out that we assume “that individuals born into a particular ethnicity or culture find it difficult to identify with people different from themselves”
Trevor Phillips, the recently appointed chair of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights, has pointed out: “My concern is that policies have got to the point where we recognise differences even if it is at the cost of equality,” he said. “Diversity is not damaging to society; what is damaging to society is the recognition of diversity without the recognition of commonality”. Of course, it was not long ago that the Commission for Racal Equality, which Mr Phillips currently heads up, was talking about ‘All Different, All Equal’; don’t times change!
And finally, the words of Shakespeare help to remind us of what we have in common:
If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh…Remember we all feel hurt, we all feel pain
Merchant of Venice
Note: this blog was previously published a few years ago