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19DiversityLennard J. Davis
What is diversity? Its message is beguilingly simple and
effective. Humans come in a variety of formats—with
differing genders, skin tones, hair color and types, eye
shapes, and sizes in the realm of physical differences,
and diverse languages, religions, nationalities, and
lifestyles in the realm of social differences. While
diversity acknowledges the unique identity of such
peoples, it also stresses that despite differences, we are
all the same—that is, we are all humans with equal
rights and privileges. No one group is better or superior
to another.
Disability would seem naturally to fall under the ru-
bric of diversity. Yet much of the time, when one sees
lists of those included under the diversity banner, dis-
ability is either left off or comes along as the caboose on
the diversity train. One could explain this negligence
by saying that disability is just not that well known as
an identity category; and that, when it is, disability will
then take its rightful place along with more familiar
identity markers such as race, gender, nationality, eth-
nicity, sexual orientation, and citizenship. One could
say it will just take time and more activism and even-
tually people will be educated. Or one could say the
problem is structural. This entry will explore the latter
position.
To understand the concept of diversity and how it
fits in with (or does not fit in with) disability, we might
want to understand when historically the concept came
into play and what preceded it. We might begin with
the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, which stressed not the value of di-
versity but rather a “scientifically” determined notion of
normality. Various groups were statistically aggregated
based on their health, intelligence, size, strength, and
so forth, in an attempt to determine which groups were
normal (and therefore which groups were abnormal).
Using a bell curve, statisticians determined where in-
dividuals fit into various cohorts and how subdivisions
of the population compared with each other. Not sur-
prisingly, white, middle-class European citizens were
seen as more normal (or less abnormal) than immigrant
groups from eastern and southern Europe, Africa, and
Asia, as well as the indigenous working classes.
Thus the key distinguisher of groups during this pe-
riod was how normal or abnormal they were. The goal
of social policy and public health during this period was
to reduce the number of abnormal people, often called
“degenerate” or “feebleminded,” and increase the num-
ber of “fit” people. Obviously, there was no ideology of
diversity, since diversity was exactly what eugenics tried
to eliminate or minimize.
The idea that some groups were normal and others
were not began to lose public acceptance in the after-
math of the Nazi use of eugenic theories of normality to
eradicate groups like Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and
disabled and Deaf people. Further, the civil rights move-
ment of the 1960s made it harder for the label of “nor-
mal” to be applied to any ethnic or national group as op-
posed to another group that would be seen as abnormal
(although it took a few more years for gay and lesbian
citizens to lose the “abnormal” qualifier). During the
last half of the twentieth century, cinema, photography,
television, popular music, and artworks increasingly
argued for a “brotherhood of man” and later, as part
of the feminist movement, “sisterhood” as a powerful
good. The civil rights movement brought about changes
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d i v e r s i t y l e n n a r d j . d a v i s62
in laws that made discrimination based on differences
such as race and ethnicity harder to accomplish. The
feminist and sexual rights movements included gender
in this schema and, eventually, gay, lesbian, and trans-
gender groups were added as well.
Economic discrimination based on race, however,
continued, since human rights did not apply to eco-
nomic justice and income inequality. One way that eco-
nomic injustice based on race or gender was envisioned
as disappearing was through equal opportunity in edu-
cation and employment. The concept of affirmative ac-
tion arose in the mid-1960s as a counter to the former
discrimination based on race. At first not controversial,
the idea of placing one group over another based on for-
mer discrimination eventually became a flash point for
a new kind of racial prejudice based on the perception of
preferential treatment. As “affirmative action” became a
somewhat less acceptable phrase based on the ire it cre-
ated in nonminority populations who complained of
reverse discrimination, the word “diversity” may have
arisen as an acceptable substitute. Now we have “di-
versity officers” at universities and in businesses rather
than “affirmative action” officers or “minority affairs”
administrators.
The Americans with Disabilities Act, implemented
in 1990, may have changed some practices and abuses
toward people with disabilities. But it did not change
very much the way culture regards people with dis-
abilities in relation to diversity. Our current interest in
diversity is laudable, but websites and advertisements
touting diversity rarely include disability. It is not that
disability is simply excluded from visual and narrative
representations of diversity in university materials.
More significantly, disability is rarely integrated into the
general media or, more pointedly, in K–12 and univer-
sity courses devoted to diversity. Anthologies in all fields
now cover topics like race and gender, but the inclusion
of disability rarely happens. In popular media, it is rare
to see blind people or people with Parkinson’s disease
included except in settings that reek of melodrama or
sentimentality. Is there ever a depiction in a film or
television show of a Deaf couple talking or a group of
wheelchair users gathered in a park in which the point
is not to highlight their disability? When disability does
appear on the Internet, it is generally cloistered on web
pages devoted to accommodations and services or as an
exotic feature on a YouTube video.
Disability is not just missing from a diversity con-
sciousness; disability could very well be antithetical to
the current conception of diversity. It seems clear, as
Walter Benn Michaels points out in his book The Trou-
ble with Diversity, that current conceptions of diversity
nicely suit the beliefs and practices of neoliberal capi-
talism. Michaels argues that the idea of diversity func-
tions to conceal economic inequality. But one could
add that diversity also represses forms of difference that
are not included under the better-known categories of
race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In other words,
diversity may only be able to exist as long as we exclude
physical, cognitive, and affective impairments from the
diversity checklist. Perhaps these need to be repressed
because they are a collective memento mori of human
frailty; but more than that, they are narcissistic wounds
to the neoliberal belief in the free and autonomous
subject. The neoliberal subject’s main characteristic is
individuality and the ability to craft one’s destiny and
choose one’s fate as a consumer-citizen. But in such a
mind-set, disability seems a lot less like a lifestyle choice
and a whole lot more like an act of fate and evidence of
powerlessness.
Universities are not exempt from this neoliberal way
of thinking. College courses on diversity are intended
to celebrate and empower underrepresented identities.
But disability seems harder for “normals” to celebrate
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d i v e r s i t y l e n n a r d j . d a v i s 63
and see as empowering. The idea presented by diversity
is that any identity is one we all could imagine having,
and all identities are worthy of choosing. But the one
identity one cannot (and, given the ethos of diversity,
should not) choose is to be disabled. No one should
make the choice that their partner be disabled or their
child be born with a disability. So how could disability
legitimately be part of the diversity paradigm, since it
speaks so bluntly against the idea of consumer lifestyle
choice and seems so obviously to be about helplessness
and powerlessness before the exigencies of fate? If diver-
sity celebrates empowerment, disability seems to be the
poster student for disempowerment.
Disability is not the only category eschewed by di-
versity. One never sees crack addicts, homeless people,
obese people, or the very poor in any celebration of
diversity. These all fall into the category of what some
might call the “abject” and must be forcibly repressed
in order for the rainbow of diversity to glimmer and
shine. This group of outcasts is excluded from the typi-
cal frame of university brochures or course materials,
and this exclusion emphasizes how limited and prob-
lematic the project of diversity really is. These limits
are laid out in diversity’s main message: “We are all
different—therefore we are all the same.” But if differ-
ence is equated with sameness, then how can being
different mean anything? That contradiction is usu-
ally resolved by finding one Other to repress—an Other
whose existence is barely acknowledged. That Other is
disability. What diversity is really saying, if we read be-
tween the lines, is that “we are different and yet all the
same precisely because there is a deeper difference that
we, the diverse, are not.” That peculiar sameness of dif-
ference in diversity has as its binary opposite the abject,
the abnormal, and the extremely marginal—and that
binary opposition gives a problematic meaning to the
general concept of diverse sameness.
One of those deeper differences might be thought of
as medical difference. Medicine defines a norm of hu-
man existence, while diversity superficially seems to re-
ject norms. There is no normal human being anymore,
as there was in the period of eugenics. Diversity seems
to say that there is no race, gender, or ethnicity that de-
fines the norm—as, for example, the white, middle-class
heterosexual European male used to do. Indeed, that is
a tenet of diversity studies. But in the realm of medicine,
the norm still holds powerful sway. No one wants to cel-
ebrate abnormality in the medical sense—no one is call-
ing for valuing high blood pressure or low blood sugar.
There is no attempt to celebrate “birth defects” or can-
cer (although we celebrate those fighting cancer). What
people most want to hear from the obstetrician is that
their child is “normal.”
If diversity rejects the idea of a normal ethnicity,
it has no problem with the notion of the normal in a
medical sense, which means of course it has no prob-
lem with branding some bodies and minds normal and
some abnormal. As long as disability is seen in this med-
ical sense, it will therefore be considered abnormal and
outside the healthy, energetic bodies routinely depicted
in celebrations of diversity. Recall that students of color
are referred to as African Americans, Asian Americans,
and so forth, but on the medical side of campus stu-
dents with disabilities are most likely to be referred to
as patients.
For a long time, in disability studies, there has been a
cherished belief that if we work long and hard enough
in the academic arena, we will end up convincing peo-
ple that disability is a real identity on par with the more
recognized ones. That position remains a hope, and
activists will help that moment come sooner, if it ever
comes. But it may well be that diversity as an ideologi-
cal paradigm is structurally related to the goals of neo-
liberalism. As such, diversity must never be allowed to
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