Diversity "Awareness"

By Dave Mangold

There are myriad divisions that cause separation, necessarily or arbitrarily, right or wrong, implicitly or explicitly, within our society. Having grown up in hunter-gatherer groups of small size that exhibit classical primate social structure, human nature is to identify differences first. Individual identity, essentially an abstraction, is, at least in part, defined within those differences. However, those differences also (perhaps invariably) corrode the nature of individual identity, in that 50% of that identity exists outside the protective confines of the consciousness, in at-large perception. A black man who thinks he’s a white man still gets identified as a black man by everyone else; identity is not an act of conscious will. Anything that corrodes the individual identity does likewise to the cohesiveness of the social unit, no matter the size of said unit. Contemporary liberal ideologies gravitate towards the idea that this is avoidable or reversible, and somewhere along the way ‘awareness’ became the buzzword for the strategy taken to that end.

Whether ‘awareness,’ changes the nature of race perception and interaction does not require debate; whether it improves the nature of race perception and interaction is difficult to determine. Deconstructionist philosopher Pablo Derrida once said that naming something is an act of violence. One must ask: is attempting to gain an understanding of what it is to be black destructive to racial differences, or racial identity? Ideally the comment repeated so often on the tape, “I don’t see you black,” should have a certain kind of truth; a social structure null of racism would ostensibly not attach the connotation of “blackness” to the color of one’s skin. One could label such a state a sort of “blissful ignorance.” While clearly not attainable, perhaps approaching this sort of condition is desirable. Furthermore, no more attainable is a condition where a white person understands sufficiently what it is to be black– has enough awareness – to bridge the gap that separates them. In fact, much that appears as ‘racial sensitivity’ is laden with a sense of artificiality – the term ‘token black guy’ comes to mind. Indeed, if one is to use the model of a one-on-one friendship, it becomes clear that a high degree of sensitivity to prickly racial issues, in one direction or the other, is a stifling factor. It would seem that in order to take the first step towards racial unity, it would be better to ignore racial disunity as much as possible. That is not to say that it is not beneficial to know about racism, just as it is to know about the Holocaust or the Inquisition. But racism as a social pretext is not likely to prove itself a panacea.