Differences

A friend’s post at Segullah about the pain of being different has gotten me thinking.

I went to law school with a woman who had done her undergrad degree at Wellesley. For whatever reason, she found herself slumming at BYU for law school. She was constantly lamenting the lack of diversity around her, as in “gee I wish I were still at Wellesley, where there was so much more diversity.” This comment bothered me on more than one occasion. Because she was looking only for cookie cutter diversity. She wanted people to look different and have different belief systems before she would recognize the diversity of her surroundings. She failed to recognize that despite commonly held beliefs (not everyone that attends BYU, even for law school, is LDS but the majority are), our law school classmates came from all over the world, with mind bogglingly diverse circumstances. We had an Ethiopian Supreme Court judge who had been removed in the political unrest of his country and accomplished attorneys from Brazil, China and several other countries who were seeking additional degrees with which to start new lives in this country or to return home to their own countries. We had people who had come from all walks of life and she complained because there wasn’t a lot of color (it is still Provo). Why couldn’t she have been warmed by the unity of beliefs and ideals drawn from the world over? She couldn’t see it.

My children currently attend an elementary school that gives me fits at times (we won’t get into all the reasons). The school includes in its mission statement overblown phrases about empowerment and the value of diversity (and little about teaching individual children). But there is more of a bullying problem at this school with its “value of diversity” than at our other school where the teachers focused on teaching each child where they found them.

The thing is, despite all this embracing of and seeking after diversity, no one wants to be the different one. My child being harassed at school because of his quirks doesn’t enjoy his contribution to the emotional diversity of his classroom (nor does he feel terribly “valued”, but then we see how far a mission statement, even when recited school wide every morning will get you). It isn’t fun to stick out. I have lived much of my life in an active, though ultimately unsuccessful attempt to avoid sticking out. I suppose the diversity thinking is that if we talk about overtly welcoming those not like us, the differences will melt and we can feel more unified in the sameness of our difference. It doesn’t work that way. In “embracing diversity” no one actually gets hugged.

And that’s where the beauty of my friend’s post actually struck me. We are all different sometimes. And I know I feel most embraced when I’m actually, personally, hugged: when someone sees me, serves as my angel, my sounding board, my escape hatch, anything that involves me as an individual and not as a faceless member of a diverse body. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that the individual way in which the Lord teaches us, calling us by name, because He knows our names, gives me chills every single time. It’s one of those tender mercies on which I survive. That’s the key, I think. I’m trying to be more of that kind of a person and I figure the more actual people I see and the more frequently I listen well enough to be someone’s angel, the more the diversity problem will cease to be one at all.