By studying Diverse Perspectives, we can describe and critically examine how different cultural and intellectual frameworks shape our social reality through a comparative study of diverse socio-cultural institutions and practices of historical, local, and global contexts.

Perspectives

Geel, Belgium, is famous as the site of the martyrdom of Saint Dymphna. After her death at the hands of her father in the seventh century, Geel became known as a destination for those with mental disability or mental health issues. Dymphna herself became the patron saint of mental health. Those who visited Geel were housed either in the hospital or, when that filled up, in the houses of welcoming community members. Centuries later, these practices continue today in a  community that finds it ordinary to welcome difference.

Anne Thériault, who identifies as a person with mental health issues, writes of her pilgrimage-like visit to Geel that she “dreamed of a place like Geel long before [she] knew it was real.” She ponders, “Managing the distress caused by mental illness is hard enough, and that difficulty increases exponentially when you have to exist in a world that fears and hates your illness. To fix all that, you would have to change society entirely, but that’s exactly what Geel has done.” She claims that Geel is “proof of how well we can love each other when we practise [sic] radical acceptance.” Even more, it is an example of what happens when we learn about, experience, and respect Diverse Perspectives.

Text Attributions

The first paragraph of this section contains material adapted from Heritages of Change by the same author.

Concepts to Consider

Diversity refers to the great variety of human characteristics, ways that we are unique even as we are all human and share more similarities than differences. These differences are an essential part of what enriches humanity.

Learning about different people can help us learn more about ourselves as often our own culture is invisible to us. We may have ideas about what is customary behavior and we may have negative reactions when someone does something different. To prevent or resolve conflicts that may occur in any social interaction, you should maintain an attitude of respect for others, be open minded and willing to compromise, and know how to work together calmly to resolve conflicts.

As you begin to explore how you are different from others in a respectful way, you begin to understand why you think and behave in certain ways based on your upbringing and past experiences and appreciate that this does not have to be the only way to approach life. Experiencing new ways of thinking, ideas, concepts and values leads to deeper and more complex thinking and creativity. Diversity on campus is beneficial for all students, not just those from ethnic or minority groups. Socially, students develop a more mature worldview and are better prepared for interacting with a diverse world in the future. Students who embrace opportunities to experience diversity have greater satisfaction with their college careers and take a personal responsibility both for broadening their own social world and for speaking out against prejudice and discrimination wherever encountered.

Differences among people may involve where a person was born and raised, the person’s family and cultural group, factual differences in personal identity, and chosen differences in significant beliefs. Some diversity is primarily cultural, other diversity may be biological, and some diversity is defined in personal terms. Diversity generally involves things that may significantly affect some people’s perceptions of others, not just any way people happen to be different.

When discussing diversity, it is often difficult to avoid seeming to generalize about different types of people and such generalizations can seem similar to dangerous stereotypes. The following descriptions are meant only to suggest that individuals are different from other individuals in many possible ways and that we can all learn things from people whose ideas, beliefs, attitudes, values, backgrounds, experiences, and behaviors are different from our own.

Types of Diversity

The following are various aspects of diversity. These are just some of the types of diversity you are likely to encounter on college campuses and in our society generally.

Diversity of race. Race refers to what we generally think of as biological differences and is often defined by what some think of as skin color. Such perceptions are often at least as much social as they are biological.

Diversity of ethnicity. Ethnicity is a cultural distinction that is different from race. An ethnic group is a group of people who share a common identity and a perceived cultural heritage that often involves shared ways of speaking and behaving, religion, traditions, and other traits. Race and ethnicity are sometimes interrelated but not automatically so.

Diversity of cultural background. Culture, like ethnicity, refers to shared characteristics, language, beliefs, behaviors, and identity. We are all influenced by our culture to some extent.

Diversity of educational background. Colleges do not use a cookie-cutter approach to admit only students with identical academic skills. Diversity of educational background helps ensure a free flow of ideas and challenges those who might become set in their ways.

Diversity of geography. People from different places often have a range of differences in ideas, attitudes, and behaviors.

Diversity of socioeconomic background. People’s identities are influenced by how they grow up, and part of that background often involves socioeconomic factors. Socioeconomic diversity can contribute a wide variety of ideas and attitudes.

Diversity of gender roles. Women have virtually all professional and social roles, including those once dominated by men, and men have taken on many roles, such as raising a child, that were formerly occupied mostly by women. These changing roles have brought diverse new ideas and attitudes to college campuses.

Diversity of age. While younger students attending college immediately after high school are generally within the same age range, older students returning to school bring a diversity of age. Because they often have broader life experiences, many older students bring different ideas and attitudes to the campus.

Diversity of sexual orientation. People who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, and two spirited make up a significant percentage of people. Exposure to this diversity helps others overcome stereotypes and become more accepting of human differences.

Diversity of religion. For many people, religion is not just a weekly practice but a larger spiritual force that infuses their lives. Religion helps shape different ways of thinking and behaving, and thus diversity of religion brings a wider benefit of diversity to college.

Diversity of political views. A diversity of political views helps broaden the level of discourse on campuses concerning current events and the roles of government and leadership at all levels. College students are frequently concerned about issues such as environmentalism and civil rights and can help bring about change.

Diversity of physical ability. Some students have athletic talents. Some students have physical disabilities. Physical differences among students bring yet another kind of diversity to colleges, a diversity that both widens opportunities for a college education and also helps all students better understand how people relate to the world in physical as well as intellectual ways.

Diversity of extracurricular abilities. Students participate in a wide variety of activities outside of class: clubs, activities, abilities in music and the arts, and so on. A student body with diverse interests and skills benefits all students by helping make the college experience full and enriching at all levels.

Text Attributions

This section contains material taken from “Chapter I.3: Successful students embrace a diverse community” from A Guide for Successful Students by Irene Stewart and Aaron Maisonville and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License license..

View: “The danger of a single story?”

Diverse Perspectives and Good, Necessary Trouble

A Gallup poll found, with data from 2021, that 7.1% of U.S. adults “self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual,” which is “double the percentage from 2012, when Gallup first measured it.” Further, about “21% of Generation Z Americans who have reached adulthood – those born between 1997 and 2003” identify as LGBTQ+ (Jones, 2022). In the 2021 Human Rights Campaign report “We Are Here: Understanding the Size of the LGBTQ+ Community,” which is based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, “more people in the United States may be openly identifying as LGBTQ+ than ever before; at least 20 million adults in the United States could be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people. Millions more could be another identity that is more expansive than these four terms.” These numbers simply reaffirm the fact that people who identify as LGBTQ+ are our neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens.

Yet, on June 8, 2023, in “LGBTQ+ Americans Under Attack,” the Human Rights Campaign declared, for the first time, a national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States. They track at least 525 state bills against the LGTBQ+ community, 220 of which are against the transgender community. The Anti-Defamation League’s 2023 report, “Hate in the Bay State: Extremism & Antisemitism in Massachusetts, 2021-2022,” reveals that Massachusetts “witnessed considerable anti-LGBTQ+ hate in 2022. Over the last year, extremists targeted LGBTQ+ events, particularly drag shows, throughout the state. Throughout 2022, Boston Children’s Hospital endured multiple waves of threats and harassment stemming from the hateful and false narratives surrounding gender-affirming care” (10). These “false narratives” are driven by misinformation and disinformation (see Information Literacy in chapter 4.1), which fuel baseless fears. For instance, there is a narrative that transgender athletes – pretty much always trans-women, rather than trans-men, which is a sexist outlook unto itself – have advantages in athletic competitions, although studies conclude that there is no evidence to suggest this is true (see Jones, Arcelus, Bouman, & Haycraft, 2017). There is evidence, however, that forcing people to compete in gender categories in which they do not identify is “distressing and may deter engagement in competitive sport altogether” (p.712).

Scholar Gabrielle Bychowski (2018) states, “More and more, we are learning that the human species is not now and has never been limited to two types of genders, two types of cultures, two types of brains, or two types of bodies.” Studying the perspectives of the LGBTQ+ community in order to gain better, more correct information and an understanding of the issues that affect them and sharing those perspectives through relevant civic channels to wider audiences, joining what the Human Rights Campaign recognizes as “countless heroes fighting back,” will help improve quality of life for everyone.

Explore LGBT Thought and Culture, an online resource documenting LGBTQ+ political and social movements, and the LGBT Magazine Archive.

Discussion 5.2

• If you have already taken a course with a primary focus on Diverse Perspectives, think about what you were asked to do and what you learned. If you have not already taken a Diverse Perspectives course, think about the types of courses you could take.
• In what ways did or might the idea(s) or example(s) discussed above apply in such a course?
• What other ideas or examples would you add to the discussion?