Perhaps too many Americans are forgetting or have forgotten the wrong thing.  Recall that before American education writers adopted the term “multicultural” (in the 1980’s); before “diversity” became a buzzword (in the early 1990’s); and before schools were referred to as “inclusive” (in the mid- to late-1990’s), there was the Supreme Court case of McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950) in which the University of Oklahoma law school was required to remove the separate-but-equal restrictions under which George McLaurin (a black man) was attending that institution.  

Also prior to the contemporary ballyhoo about diversity or inclusivity, there was the Supreme Court case of Sweatt v. Painter (also 1950) whose verdict required that the plaintiff Herman Marion Sweatt (also a black man) be admitted to the University of Texas Law School.

Together, these two cases--both decided on June 5, 1950--signaled the end of the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) in graduate and professional education, thus paving the way for the monumental decision of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ended de jure segregation in all American schools.  Without these groundbreaking cases, there would be no “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” or “inclusivity” as popular educational or cultural platforms.

So, today, any talk of diversity needs to be properly backgrounded.  Any talk of diversity also demands some understanding of the conceptual, historical, and material unfolding of diversity itself.

Many individuals enthusiastically cite recent U.S. demographic statistics as proof positive that race or color is a less salient, or even no longer a salient issue.  Last spring, a faculty member at a Bay Area (California) independent school suggested that the explosion of the Latino and multiracial populations was making race obsolescent.

A 2008 report issued by the Pew Hispanic Center, for example, projected that, by 2050, Latinos would constitute 29 percent of the U.S. population, making nearly 1 out of 5 Americans an immigrant.  Compare the former percentage to that of 14 percent, which was the Latino population in the U.S. in 2005.

The Associated Press, in June 2010, reported that the fastest-growing demographic group in America was multiracial Americans, making up 35 percent of the U.S. population.  As of 2009, there were 5.3 million persons who identified themselves as belonging to “multiple race or ethnicity.”

Simplistically, some Americans think that these increased numbers of Latino-Americans and the rising procreation of multiracial babies will magically make the inveterate and painful legacy of race or color in America disappear.

Perhaps even more naïve is the notion that the mere passage of historical time or the  progression of modernity and its trappings, namely, the appearance of nomenclature like “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” and “inclusivity,” guarantees that we do, indeed, live in a post-racial society, or at least that race is passé, a hang-up of previous generations.

However, David Theo Goldberg in his 2002 book, The Racial State, points out the following:

“. . . the modern state in the twentieth century came to promote its claims to modernization more and more through its insistence upon racelessness.  That is to say, upon its insistence upon rendering invisible the racial sinews of the body politic and modes of rule and regulation.  Racelessness came to represent state rationality regarding race . . . the colorblinding state can be understood in this scheme of things as the ultimate victory of states of whiteness purged of their guilt and self-doubt, the language of race giving way to the lexicon of a bland corporate multiculturalism and ethnic pluralism [italics mine].”

The gist here is that the idea of racelessness or colorblindness is promoted as a hallmark of modernity itself.  The more that the racial pillars buttressing modern polities like the U.S.A. are concealed, the more “modern” such polities understand themselves to be.

Hence, the very language--and the conceits behind that language--of diversity is an attempt to rub out “the history of racist invisibility, domination, and exploitation,” argues Goldberg, and to replace the latter with “the denial of responsibility for radically unequal and only superficially deracialized presents.”  In other words, diversity,  inclusivity, multiculturalism, or pluralism--choose your term--is a dodge, a calculated evasion of the racial histories and realities that continue to pervade our world, despite all efforts to retreat to some “neutral universalism.”

Diversity, then, is not only a strategy of erasure, but also a diversion from and a weak substitute for what the American philosopher, educational reformer, and social critic John Dewey (1859-1952) called “creative democracy.”

First of all, democracy is not “something that perpetuated itself automatically,” wrote Dewey in Creative Democracy--The Task Before Us (1939).  Neither is democracy “something institutional and external.”  Rather, Dewey conceived of democracy as the following:

“Democracy is the belief that even when needs and ends or consequences are different for each individual, the habit of amicable cooperation--which may include, as in sport, rivalry and competition--is itself a priceless addition to life.”

Though Dewey presumes that conflicting interests can ultimately be reconciled through well-disposed and combined effort--which may have been overly optimistic of him--the very process or experience of “day-by-day working together with others” in an attempt to understand and express our personal and cultural differences defines “creative democracy.”

Instead of downplaying, erasing, or retreating from difference as it has been articulated through traditional racial categories--which, by the way, is the ulterior strategy of diversity or inclusivity with its homogenizing imperative of representing the norms of whiteness as the ideals of colorblindness--Americans might benefit from a return to their highfalutin, democratic roots of “giving differences a chance to show themselves because of the belief that the expression of difference is not only a right of the other persons but is a means of enriching one’s own life-experience,” proposed Dewey some seventy years ago.

Democracy, or at least “creative democracy,” as Dewey defined it, is “a personal way of individual life,” which is “controlled by personal faith” that we, as Americans, can work together to fulfill our different or diverse needs as different and diverse peoples.

The immense challenge of overcoming postmodern cynicism, disillusionment, and apathy requires us to be creative, socially and politically inventive, in order to attain the new American frontier, which is not physical or geographical or even technological.  The new frontier is an old frontier that we, as a nation, have never genuinely, with that Manifest-Destiny, John-L.-O’Sullivan, we-are-the-great-nation-of-futurity, pioneer zeal, sought to achieve: the creation of a society wherein the so-called least of us lives, if not like queens and kings, then as paladins of human greatness.

The “futurity” of which the great white sloganeer John L. O’Sullivan spoke in 1839 entails, today, confronting our new frontier, not evading it by means of voguish strategies of racelessness or colorblindness.