Word

This week I went to a talk at Cornell by Andrea Smith, author of the book, Conquest: Sexual Violence And American Indian Genocide. Professor Smith is at the University of Michigan. Smith made so many connections between violence against Native women and the global oppressions of capitalist industrial complexes such as, academia, the military, and the state that I couldn’t help but start to try and write out a few connections of my own.

First, Smith deconstructed the word “Crime” and then “Hate.” So, what happens when these words are put together by the State and we get, “Hate Crimes?” Smith argued brilliantly that what we get is that the State gets to define what is hate and what is a crime and guess what? Genocide isn’t a hate crime. Hate crimes, as concept, physical violence, and law, becomes co-opted by the State and used to benefit all those who already benefit. Yet, most people would say the Hate Crimes bills are good and necessary. This is a tension because both positions are true. Smith asked us to imagine other ways of eradicating violence against oppressed peoples that don’t fit within this paradigm. Can you do it?

I’d been thinking a lot about diversity as a word, exclamation, and question. These are the ways I’ve been thinking about the word: “Diversity!” and “Diversity?”

The first way, “Diversity!”, represents a multicultural sampling approach where everything is delicious even if a bit strange and exotic but not too hard to swallow after all you can brush your teeth in a few minutes. Don’t forget to floss. It’s fun to stand in line and taste good food. Music also falls into this category because everyone knows that whether you love this diversity music or not you will be able to turn it off in just a minute and as soon as you get to your car you can get back to NPR. Folkloric speakers and dancers fall into the multicultural sampling as well because these can be consumed as products of another culture without any changes of heart but let you feel good about having participated from the comfort of your own dominant spaces. Applause applause applause, wasn’t that beautiful?

Now, there most definitely is a place for beauty. No, let me correct that, there must be beauty. I cannot live without beauty. But beauty as multicultural sampling by itself is fashion and here I’m trying to see if “Diversity!” is more than fad. Multicultural sampling as representative of the “Diversity!” approach is fundamentally about consuming the other as a commodity with the concomitant capitalist action of having a “choice” of what to consume. If you like it, you buy it, you stay. If you hate it, you leave. In either case, nothing changes but you participated, you had a choice, you can tell people you love chicharrones. I mean you wouldn’t eat them everyday because they clog your arteries, but it was nice to have a taste of that fried food.

So what does “Diversity?” have to offer that is any different from exploitation and consumption of the other? Well, it has this question to deal with for starters. It also is a question rather than a claiming of the other’s beauty, food, and music. But is a question enough? No. It’s a different start. What if you went to a “Diversity!” event and asked, “How is this changing systems of exploitation?” “Am I consuming the other like any other brand of product?” It sounds kind of like this; “Today we’ll have a speaker from X country to talk about her people’s struggle against genocide. Free and open to the public.”

Okay, these words need to be deconstructed in a manner that Smith was advocating. What do these words produce in you? What do they allow you to imagine? How is the public constructed? Is genocide just a word you can go and listen to and then go eat chicharrones? What does it mean that this talk is free? Even saying that it is free is to say that we could charge you for this, we could ask for money. Requiring tickets more clearly illustrates that diversity is a product you would need to buy. And if you have to buy it, you’ll decide whether or not it’s worth your money. You might ask yourself, “Diversity?” But, I’m not advocating for selling tickets to “Diversity!” What I’d like to know is if you can imagine something different than “Diversity!” and “Diversity?”