Our Crashing Racial Diversity

San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com)
Ralph C. Carmona
Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Why do corporate and public leaders talk around addressing the nation's increasing racial segregation through nebulous catch words like "diversity"?

One obvious reason: Civil-rights efforts to integrate our society have been facing an anti-diversity "colorblind" politics since the 1970s. This triggered in California, more than a decade ago, voter-approved initiatives hostile to illegal immigrants, affirmative action and bilingual education. Although two-thirds of the state's voters are white, the majority of the state's population is of minority and multiracial composition. By mid-century, this demographic transformation will permeate the nation. At some point, California's growing multiracial dilemma, where unequal economic circumstances, turnstile justice and school segregation, among citizen and non-citizen alike, will take on a national relevance.
For insights on this brewing crisis, a state "DiversityFirst" leadership conference dialogue is scheduled this week in San Francisco. One panel will focus on the topic raised in the 2004 Academy Award Best Picture, "Crash," to examine the race-diversity connection. A provocative metaphor on a multiracial California, "Crash" is a fictional depiction of Los Angeles in racial conflict. It pulls America away from the dated 1960s civil-rights thinking and puts us in a different place from the thoughtful classics, such as "To Kill a Mockingbird," which revealed a black-white, legally-imposed apartheid American South.
"Crash" forces us to think about what racial reality is - we're segregated. It forces us to talk about it, and about what does it mean to us, to our neighbor. It forces us to go beyond the corporate workplace diversity exercises. Yet, underlying the movie's interdependent hodgepodge of emotional differences, conflicting fears and prejudices, there is a unifying theme that opens windows of hope through acts of common humanity.
The politics of "Crash" work in private and public ways. Thinking of a woman's place in American private life over 50 years ago, I teased my Mayflower descendant-turned-New Yorker wife one day that "back then, honey, I would have been bringing home the bacon and you would be home cooking and shining my shoes." Without skipping a beat and with my Mexican background in mind, she shot back: "Sweetie, 50 years ago, you would have been my gardener."

[To see the entire op-ed, go to: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/09/18/EDCLS7TCT.DTL]