Reading Uday Dandavate's essay "A Shared Destiny on Borrowed Land: Democracy at 250" reminded me of what diversity means today, and how, in the 250 years of the U.S., we have seen this nation grapple with race, color and assimilation. There is a wealth gap that separates people into islands, a rootlessness with no shared ground, and caste-like hierarchies stemming from slavery and the complex intersections of race, gender and class. These still marginalize people today. I believe what Dandavate is really describing isn’t just two sides shouting past each other. It's what happens when a society keeps asking people to assimilate instead of belonging. The distance doesn't close. It just moves somewhere else.
From my many years in the corporate world, in multicultural marketing and operations at large Fortune 500 companies, there has always been a belief that diversity of people will make a better company. This is the theory. However, what we have learned is that to be part of these groups, you have to assimilate and become like the masses, and people lose their identity because they are afraid of being judged. That demand for conformity doesn't reduce differences. It pushes them underground, and it resurfaces later as resentment or distance.
What "Diversity" Actually Asked of Me
I remember early in my career, working as a customer service representative at a major corporation, when the head of human resources gave me advice to cut my hair. At the time I was growing dreadlocks, and it was almost an unwritten rule that your hair should be short, cut and well-maintained. He said to look at everyone at the top and see how they look. I was so young that I didn't really understand how a small thing about hair was part of a system, and it was a system that was not created by my roots. In my mind, to succeed you had to do these things, no questions asked.
I did not cut my hair, but I did have to make sure everything else about me matched the culture of that company, from how I spoke and carried myself, to my opinions I raised and which ones I kept to myself. Back then, I felt like a rebel. Today, I think the rebellion is speaking your mind fully.
This is the gap between assimilation and belonging that Dandavate is really pointing at. Assimilation asks you to fold yourself into an existing shape. Belonging, the word he returns to throughout his essay, asks the shape itself to change. My hair was allowed to stay, but the rest of me still had to fit.
A Blending of Philosophies
Today, I see our young people being more vocal and more sensitive. They are compassionate about their cause and their purpose in life. Dandavate has held community dialogues in the U.S. and India, and online, bringing together people from different backgrounds to talk through what democracy and belonging mean to them now. Across the many conversations, he found something similar to what I’m describing. The ideas that consistently resonate with younger people are curiosity, compassion and imagination. I believe there is a real blending of people's thoughts and philosophies happening. It is a generation less willing to trade away who they are just to be let in the door. That is the opposite of what I was taught with my hair.
Where I Part Ways With Dandavate
Dandavate believes curiosity, compassion and imagination are what will revitalize belonging. I agree those things matter, but I have sat in enough corporate meetings to know that curiosity and compassion were already in the mission statement. They were on the training slides. They were in the values printed on the wall. None of that changed who got heard in the room or who got told to cut their hair. Belief is not the same as infrastructure. A company, or a country, can believe in curiosity and still build nothing that requires anyone to act on it.
This is close to a framework I've come to live by. Engage or fade. Community trust is not built through broadcasting. It is built through listening. Organizations that treat engagement as a checkbox will fade, while organizations that treat it as infrastructure will endure. Engage or fade is the measure of which one you are actually doing. It applies to companies that write the diversity policy but never sit in the discomfort of actually listening. It also applies to individuals who stop being curious about the people and the world changing around them.
Going Where They Are
I would take it even further. We as a society need to embrace other cultures and go where they are to really understand them. That means being in uncomfortable situations so that you can learn. This isn't only a gap between a dominant culture and everyone else. That same distance also runs within communities that share a history of marginalization but disagree on how to move forward. Closing it has to happen in more than one direction.
The U.S. claims to be the land of the free and the land of opportunity, but it is for those who can learn the nuances of other cultures. A truly shared destiny, the phrase Dandavate uses to close his essay, would mean everyone has to learn to notice and adapt to the unspoken rules of a culture that isn’t their own, not just those of us who have always been asked to do it. That includes the people most comfortable in the current order. Not once, symbolically, but as an ongoing discipline.
