Why Diversity Initiatives are Important

One late night in the New York City United Nations World Food Programme office, I looked out of my window and stared straight down the Manhattan skyline at the new World Trade Center building in the distance. I needed to rest my eyes from the French presentation I was preparing that I would help make in Senegal to a room of West African government representatives. The presentation required a lot of fine details, as it was on the mechanics of a macro insurance mechanism that has the potential to revolutionize how food insecurity due to drought is managed on the African continent.

Over the previous year, I had made the startling realization that I actually found the principles of insurance and risk financing interesting. The realization was startling considering how concerted my efforts were in the latter half of my undergrad to avoid the business school from which I graduated with my Bachelor’s. Now there I was, actually relishing the details of what the financial model predicted, and of why countries could only insure a certain layer of risk, of why we needed a particular amount of money to capitalize the risk pool for its lifetime. There I was, actually enjoying the practice of insurance principles I had learned nearly a decade prior.

Until that day, I had always told myself that the reason I hated the idea of going into any kind of finance profession was because it had little to no relevance to poverty reduction, economic empowerment, human rights, gender equality, or simply making the world a better place. And indeed, much of the world of finance, insurance, marketing or other general business is not in place to make the world a better place by any of those measures. Much of the business world will continue to serve an abysmally low percentage of the world population – the few people of the world who can actually afford and use such services. That day, however, I realized the reason I hadn’t enjoyed the actual disciplines of finance, insurance or marketing wasn’t because the practice doesn’t do much to make the world a better place. I realized that day the reason I hadn’t enjoyed the actual disciplines was because of the environment in which I had learned.

By any modern measurable account, I went to a conservative university for my Bachelors degree.[1] Much of the student body watched Fox News without any sense of irony or disbelief – they watched Fox News as an actual news source. It wasn’t uncommon to hear a homophobic slur slipped into casual conversations. It wasn’t uncommon to witness a racial, religious, or falsely patriotic gesture on a weekly basis. And those were just the overt comments. As I mentioned in a previous post on racism, often the worst forms of discrimination are not explicitly expressed.

Sitting in my midtown Manhattan office, that night I finally understood the impact such a negative environment had had on me – a brown woman who is smart, intellectually curious, socially progressive, and abhors bigoted environments. I thought back to the many efforts I had made my first two years in undergrad to integrate myself in the business school – my attempts at joining the business school’s organizations, hanging out with fellow business school classmates, seeking out advice from professors*, or trying to start projects that applied what we learned in the classroom to an international context. I thought about how each of those attempts had been a spectacular failure.

For a long time, I thought these attempts were entirely due to my own shortcomings. Surely, as a young kid with no real business background, part of the reason these attempts failed was indeed because of my own shortcomings. But looking back at how I ran students organizations that did become a resounding success, I saw how I applied what I had learned in my business classes to real life. In the year that I ran our International Relations Organization (IRO), I had an ROI of nearly 300 percent, hosted statewide conferences, and spearheaded a microfinance trip to Togo (West Africa) that helped land me a place in grad school. So why did IRO thrive while my attempts at the business school failed? My guess? The environment.

The comparison between the students who populated IRO and the students who roamed the business school was stark. Certainly not every student fell into one category simply because of their IRO or business school affiliation, though it was plainly apparent that by and large, the socially progressive and open-minded cared more about the state of the world’s poor than they did about the stock market. Unsurprisingly, the progressive people tended to be a part of an organization such as IRO, not the “Young Investors Club of America.” Naturally, I gravitated towards an organization such as IRO for this very reason. And with that gravitation, I brought my business acumen, ability to lead, and most importantly – undying passion and hard work. Less than six months after I took over the organization, I was regularly invited to participate in meetings with university deans, senior administrators, professors, and even the university president. I needed the right environment to thrive.

Looking at the student profile of the university (at least while I was there), the average student was white, straight, Christian, didn’t travel abroad, and came from a middle class family. Those who were interested sought out different people, experiences and ideas. But the vast majority of the students either didn’t think to do so, didn’t know to do so, or didn’t care to do so. With few formal mechanisms to correct this imbalance in the business school, in the process, we were all cheated. Even though I didn’t know it at the time, being who I was effectively drove from participation with the business school because I never felt comfortable in that environment of relative close mindedness. And those in the business school were not exposed to even a sliver of what this incredibly diverse country and planet has to offer, and what that diversity means in more than a superficial context.[2]

The very principles of investing stress a diverse portfolio to achieve sustainability, robustness and growth. This very principle also applies to real life. This very principle is one of the main reasons why diversity initiatives are so important. The majority of the world is not white, Christian, and straight. When entire groups of people are cut out from a conversation, there is a lot of inherent value that is also cut out. It is illogical to create environments that are not welcoming to a diverse audience. In the long run, it is unproductive, inefficient, and detrimental.

When diversity is cut out from an environment, everyone is cheated. People like me take their ideas elsewhere and devote countless hours to another talent pool. Others are discouraged and never find a place for their talents. And those left behind are subject to a groupthink is laughable given the resources and demographics of the modern world. Diversity initiatives are important not only for those in the diversity categories, but for everyone. Diversity initiatives, by practice and definition, make for a stronger society.

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[1] I knew this going in. I did everything I could to go to a progressive school elsewhere, though my parents would only pay for an in-state school, and the idea of leaving undergrad debt free was too good to pass up. Part of me constantly regrets the decision, though I fully acknowledge how lucky I am to have parents who were willing and able to pay for my education in the first place.

* An interesting NPR transcript on the response rate of professors depending on the student's name.

[2] One minority (in race, religion, or thought) casually placed throughout a pool of thousands of students is should not be relied upon as sufficient to change the environment. Minor attempts at diversity inclusion, one minority, should not be obligated to represent all minority thought.

Discrimination of the Unknown and Assumed

A few years ago, I read an interesting article about how getting accurate readings on which way a district would vote in terms of American political parties requires an increasingly micro approach. In other words, overall voting results are ideally predicted at the neighborhood level. Indeed, my experience as an Indian-American, Hindu woman growing up in Central Virginia is also very specific to the exact time and place, and may in fact have little to no reflection of how two of my cousins – also Indian-American Hindus – will feel about their childhood in a neighborhood just 40 minutes away, 15-17 years later, once they are my age.

That said, I grew up in a place and time where Indian and Hindu cultures were unknown and therefore often hated. I could count the number of non-black, non-white, non-Christian people in my middle school[1] on one hand. Being a minority of a few unknown types prompted questions from both white and black kids, parents, teachers, and strangers:

“What are you?”

“What the hell is ‘Hindu’?”

“Indian? Like Pocahontas?”

Most of the time the questions were in a harmless tone, most of the time the questions were out of pure ignorance, but most of the time the questions were completely rhetorical. Most people weren’t asking to learn about something new, they were asking to highlight the differences between us. Even so, as I got older and learned how to speak my mind, I took a question as a question and would answer as well as I could, when I could. Sometimes, a curious thing would happen – people would listen. They’d hear about the Indian subcontinent, the openness of Hindu scripture, and the amazing ancient Asian societies that existed before the Bible was even written.

Those of us who are of a relatively unknown race or religion in our environment know that we are sometimes given a chance to explain who and what we are, even if it’s to say our race or religion are not a fundamental part of what makes us who we are. It’s not an omnipresent phenomenon and it’s not an easy battle to fight, but at least it’s an opportunity that does, on occasion, show its face. And with those small occasions, we are able to safely speak our mind and break down barriers of ignorance that come from a place in which people truly have not heard anything either way. Over time, these occasions can add up to create a completely different, more open context and understanding to the immediate environment.

In this way, the discrimination I faced being Indian and Hindu in the time and place in which I grew up fundamentally differed from what the black community, and increasingly the Muslim and Hispanic communities, face in America. The discrimination I dealt with was borne out of the unknown; as I described above, this unknown sometimes sparked questions, which sometimes warranted answers, which sometimes made things more open and better. But what happens when discrimination comes not from the unknown, but the assumed? What happens when a person or society does not ask an even rhetorical question, but assumes they know who you are based on your race or religion or style?

As Obama said in his public statement on the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the problems of the black community stem from a long, complicated, painful and fairly recent history of enslavement and institutionalized discrimination. However, Obama’s family was largely not of this history. His father was from Kenya and came to the States for a brief period in the 1960s; his mother was a white American woman from the Midwest. Yet Obama, a half-black man who mostly grew up in the States, has written in detail about his experience of automatically being relegated to a specific community, a specific set of behaviors, problems, and ideas based on his race. If the current President of the United States has faced these problems, imagine what this means for the diverse communities that compose the millions of black people across the nation.

Knowing that the atmosphere of a room has negatively shifted because you, a minority, entered; that look in the eye showing someone genuinely feels scared or angry at you because they think you are of an inferior race; that sigh of sadness because someone thinks you are going to hell for believing in a different manifestation of God. For those of you who have never felt unsafe because of your race, religion, sexual orientation, or any physical, mental or emotional attribute you carry, these ideas are probably very hard to understand, because these are discriminatory examples that can only be felt. Feelings are hard to capture in laws, policies or constitutions.

Hate Crime laws are one attempt to codify against discrimination. Though I personally think Hate Crime legislation is a tool that sends a powerful message, Hate Crime laws are predicated on the idea of someone targeting another because they are part of a particular social group, and are therefore best at capturing criminals who want to use or are open about using their discriminatory views as justification of their violence. Most people, minority or otherwise, would write these criminals off as extremists, vigilantes, racists, homophobes, or the insane. 

Those of us who have faced discrimination that is borne out of the unknown and/or the assumed understand that racism can manifest itself in many ways, and the hardest battles are often fought against people or societies that refuse to acknowledge there is a problem or are able to deny a problem exists. Purposely targeting someone in a strict legal definition is likewise one of the hardest things to prove and one of the hardest things to codify when trying to demonstrate discriminatory behavior in the real world.

What then happens when these discriminatory sentiments translate into violence? What happens when the George Zimmermans of the world are allowed to carry a loaded weapon on the street, chase down an unarmed teenager who has every right to be where he is, and then shoot this teenager at point blank range after starting the confrontation himself? What happens when the all-white (save one Puerto Rican) jury agrees with the white defense lawyers that the George Zimmermans of the world were justified in thinking this teenager – a black male in a hoodie – looked suspicious, but at the same time, we are not allowed to make the case the George Zimmermans of the world based their judgment call on race because the targeting was not explicit?

Any minority in America will tell you that one of the best defense mechanisms we have in these uncomfortable and unsafe situations is to simply walk away. We live in a country that up until this ruling, in practice allowed us to waive our chance to explain who we are in favor of simply removing ourselves from the situation and from any ensuing danger. The ruling acquitting George Zimmerman of shooting and killing Trayvon Martin has, in part, caused so much emotional turmoil because a person wishing to avoid confrontation that is based on bias or ignorance is now not even allowed to simply walk away. If someone does not like something about who or what we are, if they are able to convince a jury that this who or what we are makes us “suspicious” by default, we cannot walk away from the ignorance or discrimination. In effect, we have lost the right to be who we are and move ourselves to a place where we feel safe as who we are. Those of us who continue to fall into the unknown may have a fighting chance to defend ourselves under this system. But those who fall into the assumed never had much of a chance to begin with.

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[1] I have to give credit where credit is due. Though elementary and middle school were less than desirable experiences, I went to an internationally geared high school that was way ahead of the social curve, probably for the country and certainly for the area. It had a well-supported LGBT alliance, offered classes in 13 languages, and (at least for me), created an environment that was open to all religions, races, and sexual orientations and genders.