Consequently, the United States has also denied, ostracized, and oppressed groups of people based on these same aforementioned identities e. This resulted in amendments to the U. The elimination of overt bias also creates the illusion of success. People begin to think that the problems are solved because they are not obvious anymore.
This highlights the need for diversity and multiculturalism in order to identify and expose covert bias and remind people that the struggles of the past are not just part of history; they undergird the problems we face today e.
Diversity can be defined as variety or having different elements. When applied to people, diversity then includes the kinds of differences that are reflected in multiple races, ethnicities, and cultures. The term multiculturalism similarly recognizes the various cultures that make up humanity. At the same time, differences have led to war, oppression, division, and strife. The high moral intent of diversity and multiculturalism is reflected in the foundational and contemporary rhetoric of the United States.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to The Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. The language captures a sacred American ideal that the one indivisible nation under a Supreme Being will provide all of its citizenry with liberty and justice.
History teaches us that this has not always been the case. Furthermore, it has been our differences that have been at the heart of many conflicts e. The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States indicates the following:. We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Words that stand out include order, union, justice, tranquility, welfare, liberty, and posterity. Again, these are excellent pillars with which to build a representative democracy. This also means that when we encounter human difference, we must go back to these concepts to make sure that they apply equally to all people in the United States.
Notions of diversity and multiculturalism are intended to help bring all people together through greater understanding, appreciation, and empathy. This article will address contemporary definitions of diversity and multiculturalism. It will also examine some of their historical development and resulting controversies.
Diversity at its core is about differences. In education we refer to the differences that can be found in human beings. In education, the setting becomes schools, classrooms, or anywhere formal education takes place. The differences are best described by the term social identities. Social identities can be incredibly unifying or divisive.
These differences are unavoidable in most cases because they constitute our makeup as human beings. The natural consequence of engaging with other human beings in educational settings is personal interaction. These interactions are crucial components of education. At the same time, diversity is growing in the United States. To underscore this point, Lindsey writes:. The United States of America will not become less diverse.
Diversity is our present and our future. Thus, educators have a great potential to take a lead role in developing generations of students to be more accepting and understanding of diversity. Furthermore, Cox notes that well-managed diversity efforts can a improve problem-solving, b increase creativity and innovation, c increase organizational flexibility, d improve the quality of personnel through better recruitment and retention, and e improve marketing strategies p.
Although Cox was referring to businesses, the educational implications are obvious. In a similar way, multiculturalism has had an important impact on society and education. Multiculturalism can be described as the presence of various cultural groups within a certain location such as a nation or state.
However, ethnic groups are highly diverse, complex, and changing entities. Therefore, Banks advocates that educators have more of a multi-ethnic understanding. The need for multicultural education grew out of a historical context that privileged some and oppressed others. There was a time in the United States when, if you were a person of color, a woman, gay, Jewish, Catholic, or one of a number of things but white, male, heterosexual, and Christian, you were not guaranteed all of your rights as a citizen.
Antebellum slavery was a particularly difficult and dreadful part of American history. Although the United States has been described as a melting pot of various cultures, European capitalistic values and traditions have dominated this mix since its inception, long supplanting the theocratic system imported to North America by the early settlers. The opportunity to make huge profits in the New World led colonial entrepreneurs to use any means necessary to exploit the vast untapped resources of their recently claimed land.
This included using force to extract labor from unwilling participants. Subsequently large numbers of Africans were brutally uprooted and shipped like cargo to strange lands hundreds of miles across the sea. Under this social order, enslaved Africans were treated like property and subjected to all types of mental and physical abuse. With regard to education, it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write. During this time period, women were not allowed to vote and were expected to marry, have children, and be silent and deferential to their husbands.
Women were to be seen and not heard. Slavery was first abolished in the Northern United States, while it increased in the South. Concurrently the North, with its emphasis on industry, was growing, in stark contrast to the South, which had a largely agricultural economy based primarily on slavery.
The American Civil War was followed by a brief period of progress called Reconstruction. This glimmer was quickly squelched as the Northern armies that provided protection and maintained order in the South pulled out. The Jim Crow era was a time of strict segregation of the races in the South and more de facto instances of racism in the North. The South established a rigid set of rules to establish and maintain the racial superiority and power of whites over people of color.
These rules were known as Jim Crow laws or Black codes. During this time period, women were expected to be subservient to men, homosexuality was viewed as abhorrent, and people with disabilities were ignored or institutionalized.
The American Civil Rights Movement of the mid- 20th century helped to bring an end to segregation in the United States and inspired other causes. The tactics used by the Civil Rights proponents included marches, demonstrations, sit-ins, boycotts, and other forms of what was considered civil disobedience. In the years after the Civil Rights Movement, the need arose to emphasize diversity and multiculturalism. The overt bias and discrimination of the past was disappearing and more institutional forms of discrimination began to emerge.
Additionally, because of residential housing patterns and Supreme Court decisions, schools started to re-segregate Tatum, In order to understand modern instances of more covert discrimination and to comprehend structural problems such as re-segregation, an awareness of diversity and an appreciation of multiculturalism is critical. The United States continued on a course towards greater equity in K—12 schools and society in the years after the Brown v.
Board of Education decision. The landmark Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case has been hailed as the single most important court decision in American educational history. The decision in this case overturned the Plessey v. Ferguson separate but equal clause by establishing that segregated schools denied African American students their constitution rights guaranteed to them in the 14th Amendment.
Unfortunately, long-term political and societal will slowly undermined these efforts. The number of people of color began to increase in many American cities. Great migrations of African Americans from the South and immigrant populations from other countries made urban cities much more demographically diverse.
As more people of color moved in, white residents at times chose to quickly move out of the neighborhood. According to Gladwell :. The expression [Tipping Point] first came into popular use in the s to describe the flight to the suburbs of whites living in the older cities of the American Northeast.
The perspective that precipitated these efforts was a mix of classism and racism that was sponsored by local residents, sanctioned by state officials, and endorsed by government entities Rothstein, This is an example of how racial and class bias evolved from the signs and codes of the Jim Crow era into a more institutionalized form of discrimination; however, this bias had an even deeper role in the structuring of American society.
Lipsitz elaborates:. As increasing numbers of racial minorities moved into the cities, increasing numbers of European ethnics moved out.
Consequently, ethnic differences among whites became a less important dividing live in U. Therefore, segregated housing tactics helped to create suburban areas where wealth was more concentrated than in many inner-city areas.
Furthermore, these same suburban areas created a social context where strong ethnic identity melded into an American white identity, making their differences less important or apparent and subtly emphasizing distinct racial differences e.
These efforts became the basis for much of the bias in American society. The attitudes to enforce these efforts consisted of patriarchy, racism, classism, and xenophobia. This was more than some kind of covert conspiracy; it was an investment. The increased possessive investment in whiteness generated by disinvestment in U. It fuels a discourse that demonizes people of color for being victimized by these changes, while hiding the privileges of whiteness by attributing the economic advantages enjoyed by whites to their family values, faith in fatherhood, and foresight—rather than to the favoritism they enjoy through their possessive investment in whiteness.
This investment was more than just in whiteness. It was an investment in male dominance, economic concentration of wealth at the top, and anti-LGBT messaging. These other outcomes came along with the investment. This was not the origin of the different forms of oppression, but this became a modern extension of these old ideas of bias and exclusion.
Therefore, understanding the evolution and solidification of bias helps us to recognize the importance of diversity and multiculturalism. This societal phenomenon had an incredible impact on schooling. Without the opportunity to socialize and engage with people of different races, ethnicities, economic classes, and beliefs, the educational pendulum swings back in the direction of segregation. Thus, white people with economic means began to move their families to the suburbs, leaving many urban areas with large and more segregated communities and schools of color.
The aforementioned social history helped to establish the modern context of bias and oppression, which necessitates the need for diversity. What has evolved is a mix of power and privilege that must be addressed by diversity initiatives and multicultural perspectives. Power is the ability to exert influence or change behavior. It is not negative or positive in and of itself. When a person or group utilizes power in the service of themselves, their group, or their interests, it can then be described as negative or positive.
In American society, who has or does not have power is based on history, habit, values, expectations, perspectives, and wealth Harro, In the United States, power is automatically ascribed to certain groups. Harro calls these agent groups , which include white people, men, heterosexuals, middle- and upper-class people, gentiles, Christians, and able-bodied people. Groups who lack power in American society are described as target groups.
To be more specific, it is the co-existence of diverse religious, ethnic or cultural groups within a society. People in a multicultural community retain, celebrate, pass down and share their unique cultural ways of life, traditions , behaviour, languages, and art. The concept of multiculturalism can describe an area with a mixed ethnic community where multiple cultural groups and traditions exist e.
In sociology, multiculturalism is a result of either a natural e. Furthermore, there are two major theories that explain the integration of different cultures into a single society. These are known as a melting pot and salad bowl. Salad Bowl — This model describes a heterogeneous society where people coexist but retain at least some unique characteristics of their traditional culture. In this model, different cultures are brought together like ingredients in a salad, but these individual cultures retain their own flavours, instead of merging into a single homogeneous culture.
For example, multicultural cities with ethnic communities like Little Italy and, Chinatown. Figure 1: Chinatown in New York. In general, the term pluralism refers to the existence of different types of people having different beliefs and opinions within the same society. There are different forms of pluralism, such as cultural pluralism, legal pluralism, political pluralism, etc.
For details on it including licensing , click here. This book is licensed under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3. See the license for more details, but that basically means you can share this book as long as you credit the author but see below , don't make money from it, and do make it available to everyone else under the same terms. This content was accessible as of December 29, , and it was downloaded then by Andy Schmitz in an effort to preserve the availability of this book. Normally, the author and publisher would be credited here.
However, the publisher has asked for the customary Creative Commons attribution to the original publisher, authors, title, and book URI to be removed. Additionally, per the publisher's request, their name has been removed in some passages. More information is available on this project's attribution page. For more information on the source of this book, or why it is available for free, please see the project's home page.
You can browse or download additional books there. To download a. Many people use the terms diversity and multiculturalism interchangeably, when in fact, there are major differences between the two.
Diversity The real or perceived differences between individuals. These differences can include race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, background, socioeconomic status, and much more. Diversity, when talking about it from the workplace perspective, tends to focus more on a set of policies to meet government-mandated diversity compliance standards.
Multiculturalism Looks at power and privilege differences in society. This chapter focuses on the advantages of a diverse workplace and discusses how to work in a multicultural workplace. While this is the legal and the right thing to do, multiculturalism looks at a system of advantages based on race, gender, and sexual orientation called power and privilege A system of advantages based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other components of diversity.
In this system, the advantages are based on a system in which one race, gender, and sexual orientation is predominant in setting societal rules and norms. The interesting thing about power and privilege is that if you have it, you may not initially recognize it, which is why we can call it invisible privilege. Recognizing power and privilege can help you begin to understand how you relate to others. This is an important emotional intelligence skill of relationship management.
Here are some examples of invisible privilege:. Victoria C. Plaut, Kecia M. Thomas, and Matt J. Another important aspect of power and privilege is the fact that we may have privilege in one area and not another. For example, I am a Caucasian female, which certainly gives me race privilege but not gender privilege.
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