Diversity— it is a word we seniors have been trained to fall in love with during our college application process. It is a word that can be found all over Phillips Academy. It’s in the Blue Book, the school’s mission statement, and the backbones of many clubs and organizations like AF-LAT-AM and CAMD. It is a word incarnated in the students, faculty, residence halls, and sports teams. But as Mr. Chris Abani, Mr. Michael Fowlin, and others pointed out on MLK Day, diversity is more than skin-deep. Diversity means a mix of more than just black and white. Philosophies, opinions, religions, objectives, talents, for a few examples, are also diverse here. We often tend to think that those aforementioned examples can be automatically categorized by race or ethnicity. As I have seen in my own experience here, different people in racial/ethnic terms often have the same ideas and similar people can disagree. A few nights ago, six girls kept me company in my room. Jane, Mercy, Akosua, Jill, Stuart, Kiara, and I conversed until 4 am. “Tisk, tisk,” you might say, unless you knew how significant our conversations, not chats, actually were. “Whites,” “Blacks,” and “Asians” came to agree that Reverend Al Sharpton was actually holding his race back by dwelling on the oppression of blacks that occurred generations ago, as many other contemporary black leaders do. Curiosity sparked about each other’s upbringings and soon everyone was starting to see a new side of people whom they thought that they had known. Was it beneficial to be raised with a religion? We all came to agree that if nothing spiritual was produced, a religious childhood provided at least some good training in discipline. Others said they were glad to have been raised without a strict religion because it gave them the freedom to search and choose a religion for themselves. But as I said before, people who would not have been labeled as similar in racial or ethnic terms found things in common with each other. Maybe we were ahead of time since these conversations occurred before MLK Day but conversations like this one occur all the time in Stimson. In its “politically correct” sense, diversity brings to mind colors and quotas. Many people get lost at that point when thinking about the word because they don’t see beyond those very simplified meanings. Everyone should realize that diversity of philosophies, opinions, religions, objectives, and talents is vital to our American democratic system. John Stuart Mill, a British philosopher, believed that a diverse society allows for all ideas to be exposed and that only the best and truest ideas remain. At its best, the United States is such a society. PA is the United States at its best in this regard. We make exposure of diversity happen everyday. When we leave this place, it is our inherent responsibility to spread that understanding and desire to cultivate diversity.
