The "D" Word or "Diversity"

As you all know, tomorrow is the meeting date we've chosen to dedicate to discussions on diversity. This is a particularly difficult topic for our community to discuss. In fact, it is an amorphous and messy thing for any group to take up.

One of the issues that "diversity" raises as a topic is, ironically, that it is far more than merely topic-al. It implies, in other words, that there are things that are to do with difference and other things that are exempt -- they do not fall in line under that particular topic.
We might even recall a related, pervasive, and rather peculiar assumption in a variety of academic and extracurricular or even private settings: diversity means raceclassgender in general and blackpoorgay specifically. I suppose we all recognize the conflation going on in these instances. Perhaps this sentiment is to blame for smart people with good intentions offering up ideas on diversity that are of the "how I will accept and help those others" variety.
However, can any one or any thing or any place or any time really opt out of diversity? Can any piece of the material world say that it is a starting point? Can we simply claim a neutral space where diversity is a non-issue because we do not, for example, have any people with visible marks of being other than mainstream? And how do we define mainstream, anyway?
A related matter: at times, one might hear something like, “I’m sensitive to issues of diversity,” or “issues of diversity interests me,” or “I’m interested in increasing the diversity of our staff.” These are loaded and highly problematic statements to be sure. And though it is difficult to admit, these are among the very best of the statements I’ve heard on diversity. They stand in due to a lack of a better something else.
I want to suggest here that diversity is the term we ought to use to draw attention to heterogeneity over and against originality. We are not all the same, and this is not very profound or surprising. However, living in a late capitalist age in which narcissistic expressionism appear to be the dominant mode, I suppose we feel the need to devote meetings to diversity in order to offer space to reflect on the ways we are different and not ways in which we are better. We are special, maybe, but not all that remarkable. There are things we owe to each other and yet nothing is really owed to any one of us. There is no clean line that separates me from you from they, but there is difference nonetheless. Our work as tutors should linger in the tension of this impossibility – in a space where it becomes possible to live differently. I think the McIntosh reading is, therefore, appropriate not because it brings up issues of race and racism. This ought not to be the meeting where we only admit or deny our privileges, though that could be nice. Instead, I find value in McIntosh’s implicit call for more humility, more understanding, more thoughtfulness, and more love – these things all require less ego and more responsibility.
I tend to believe that we are highly diverse from day-to-day; our identities, I’d say, are complicated and inconsistent performances. If we are giving our attention to diversity, we are honoring the ways in which we cannot entirely know ourselves or others; we are allowing for ellipses that go un-interpreted; we are giving our selves and others space to perform without judgment…