By invitation, I give talks to student groups around the campus of North Carolina State University.  A couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation to students in our university-honors village. 

    It was one of those laid-back, get to know the professor kind of gatherings.  My job was to let the students in on my history as a research-scientist.  To do that I had to walk them through my life from my Navy experience on because it was in the Navy that my personal and scholarly interest in race-relations and diversity really came to life.

    I brought the gathered students up to date including my creation and teaching of my “Interpersonal Relationships and Race” course. Letting them in on my why I created the course, I said something along the lines that

     “…we have eliminated the immoral laws of racial segregation. What’s left now, our greatest challenge, is learning to interact with each other as equals. You see, we live in a time when contact with people who do not look like or even sound like us is unavoidable.  So we struggle with the neo-diversity question, who are the ‘we’ and who are among the ‘they’.  But as I tell my students, everybody on our campus is a ‘we;’ everyone in your classes is Wolfpack. Our challenge today is to accept and live in that reality.”

    After interacting with the students for about an hour and a half, I headed home.  That evening I got this email from one of the students who attended.  A freshman, she wrote:

     “I just wanted to thank you for sharing your experience and perspective on diversity with us at the Honors Colloquium. I attended a large public high school, where the bottom line was “diversity is good”. However, I’ve often asked myself what exactly is diversity? and why is it such a big issue? Your perspective and the whole idea of a “we” has given me a much deeper understanding of diversity and why it’s so difficult (especially for Americans) to find peace with it. It’s not necessarily about putting Chinese people, African Americans, Whites, etc. into a room together, it’s about developing understanding and acceptance. As you said, I think this interpersonal connection is a societal necessity that a lot of people do not understand and therefore do not strive for.”

    Turns out, we continue to do a lousy job of teaching young people about diversity and why it is important in America. We continue to offer only sound-bites, “…diversity is good.”  Having been given no substance, our most academically capable young people leave high school confused about diversity.  And too often those young people end up at colleges and universities where that confusion continues because there too they get nothing but “…diversity is good” sound-bites. 

     But what the email from that young woman tells me is that young people want substance; college students, at least, are looking for a real understanding.  That email and what I see happen to students in my class tells me that once students come to understand that the real challenge today is interpersonal, they feel better, calmer, and more prepared to live, go to class, and eventually work within a diverse community.

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