This may sound paradoxical, but I believe that the contemporary emphasis on "celebrating diversity" actually leads us to dehumanize those who are different from ourselves and makes it easier for us to ignore their suffering.
We are moved to want to help others primarily by a feeling of empathy, the ability to feel what others are feeling when they hurt. It's much easier to persuade oneself, or one's associates, to help hungry, orphaned children in the third world if we have empathy for them than if we don't.
We have empathy for people primarily because we are able to project our responses to life's challenges onto them. We assume that the way we feel when we are insulted, when we've lost a loved one, when we are threatened, when we suffer, is very much the same as others feel in similar situations. This intuition, however, is based on the assumption we hold that others are "put together" pretty much just like us - that we all think alike, feel alike, and see life much the same way.
Since the 1960s, however, there has been an effort on the part of some to eradicate this confidence that we are all very much alike. We've been told that if we are a man we don't know what it's like to be a woman, if we're white we don't know what it's like to be black, if we're economically comfortable we don't know what it's like to be poor. We're told that others are fundamentally different from us, they see the world differently, they don't share our perspectives, values, or feelings about things, and so on.
Very well, but the problem is that from here it is but a short step to thinking that the other doesn't really feel the way I feel, doesn't really respond to the blows that life delivers the way I do.
When we start to think this way, our empathy for the other begins to evaporate and our sympathy begins to diminish. It becomes easier to turn our back on his suffering because, we rationalize, his suffering is not what we would experience were we in similar circumstances. When we reach the point where it becomes easier to minimize the other's pain in our own mind then we have essentially dehumanized him.
So far from celebrating the things that make us different we need to affirm over and over the things that make us alike. We need to celebrate not our differences but our commonalities. We should focus on strengthening the bonds of empathy that we should feel for all of God's creatures but which are weakened by the social balkanization that results from emphasizing our differences. Cultural variety is colorful and enriching. Dividing people into "us" and "them," however, is corrosive to our ability to experience empathy.
RLC
