Are you of diversity?
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Language Log reader Jan Dawson saw the preposition phrase of diversity in this passage, and knew immediately what it meant:
"Any practitioner of diversity will tell you that you can't bring in a few token people and get a real diversity of viewpoint," said Pamela Harris, the executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at the Georgetown Law Center. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/us/politics/11women.html)
It seemed fairly clear to Jan (and I think she's right) that of diversity here means something like "belonging to one of the formerly excluded groups associated with references to diversity such as women, Hispanics, African Americans, etc." — it's analogous to the common meaning of the phrase of color in phrases like person of color.
To be more technical, of diversity is not the complement of the noun practitioner (though practitioner does take complements, as in practitioner of dental surgery); practitioner in this context means "law practitioner", i.e., "lawyer" (the complement is implicit), and of diversity is a modifier. Pamela Harris means "practitioner (of law) who is a member of one of the formerly excluded groups associated with references to diversity such as women, Hispanics, African Americans, etc.".
I have to confess that I find this usage not just novel (though it is established: person of diversity already gets more than 700 Google hits), but actually ghastly.
Don't be shocked. I am allowed to have esthetic reactions to new phrasal coinages. What Language Log rails against is not the mere having of emotional reactions to linguistic change, but the attempt to force those reactions on others as authoritarian rules, and the practice of making false empirical claims about what is grammatical and what is not. I am not saying there is anything ill-formed or illogical about the phrase that Jan points out. It will probably catch on, and become an ordinary unremarkable part of the English language within a few decades. I'm not telling you that you shouldn't use phrases like person of diversity. I'm just saying its combination of syntactic unusualness and mealy-mouthedness makes me shudder. That's purely a fact about me, and it's of virtually no consequence; I didn't like the phrase person of color either.
I'm not even saying there is no role or motivation for a phrase like person of diversity. It is apparently intended to pick out people who are not white European or Jewish males. What white European and Jewish males have in common is that they are taken to be people who don't need diversity-enhancement programs to increase their representation in the professions or access to education or wealth because they are already perfectly capable of getting good professional jobs and good educations and chances for wealth and already do too far too well in these domains.
But to say that white European or Jewish males will be barred from some job or actively dispreferred for it sounds raw and ugly in its exclusionariness: one could hardly defend it against a charge of racial and gender discrimination. A positive word or phrase is needed for the class of people who are thought to merit help from diversity-enhancement programs. Hence the coining of a phrase to denote such people. It makes perfect sense. Especially to someone like me who has never been an opponent of affirmative action or diversity enhancement programs.
But I won't be using the phrase, because for reasons I would find it hard to specify clearly it is repulsive to me. My choice. It's not binding on you.
hsgudnason said,
May 13, 2010 @ 6:33 am
When I first read the phrase, I understood it in exactly the same way as "a practioner of dental surgery." Public and private businesses in the U.S. offer–for various reasons–diversity (or diversity-training) workshops, and I'd think that the people who conduct them might well call themselves practioners of diversity. The phrase could also apply to HR employees (whatever their diversity status) who actively work to increase diversity in a particular company.
My comment says nothing about your esthetic reaction, merely about your interpretation of the phrase.
Faldone said,
May 13, 2010 @ 6:47 am
I agree with hsgudnason, who said it far better than I could have, on the meaning of of diversity. When I hear the phrase people of color I always wonder when the term for women will become people of gender.
Russell said,
May 13, 2010 @ 6:50 am
I think you're completely missing the intended meaning of the speaker. I read it as something like ""Any practitioner of diversity [in hiring] will tell you that you can't …." Meaning anyone who attempts to practice diversity in hiring, not somebody who belongs to those excluded gruops. That meaning was pretty clear to me in context, though, yeh, it was ugly.
Elizabeth Braun said,
May 13, 2010 @ 7:07 am
I can't comment on what the original speaker meant, but I'm not keen on the expression myself. The fact that there have been 3 or so interpretations of the meanning already show that it's ambiguous to say the least. I won't be using it either. I prefer to just say plainly what I mean. I'm a foreign woman living in Taiwan. If that makes me 'diversity', then so be it, but I prefer the plainer, much clearer statement!!=)
peter said,
May 13, 2010 @ 7:20 am
My immediate interpretation was, and it remains after reading the full post, the same as that of the other commentators
One problem with your interpretation, GKP, is the ontological status of the second "you" in the sentence: Just who is this you? If "practitioners of diversity" is the same as "persons of color" or "persons from an ethnic minority", then this second "you" is surely such a person. Why would a person from an ethnic minority be "bringing in" people? Surely, persons from ethnic minorities are (sadly, still) usually the brung-in, not the bringers.
Barbara Partee said,
May 13, 2010 @ 7:41 am
I'm with the first commenter as to first-reaction interpretation; I didn't know what it would mean to be a practitioner in the field of diversity but only saw that interpretation until I read what Geoff wrote. But after looking at the source of the quote, I agree with Geoff and his correspondent about the more likely interpretation, largely because of the context.
@Peter – I have no trouble with generic 'you' shifting from one occurrence to another — I think that's common. E.g.: "Anyone my age will tell you that he should have seen it coming: you reap what you sow." (First 'you' – people relevantly like the addressee; 2nd and 3rd 'you' – people relevantly like him (or him and all of us))
Rachael said,
May 13, 2010 @ 7:56 am
I agree with the first few commenters too. My initial interpretation, and my interpretation after looking at the article, is that it means someone working in the "diversity industry".
Tablesaw said,
May 13, 2010 @ 7:57 am
I agree with hgudnason about the Harris quote, and offer a similar quote from 2005:
On the other hand, for a clearer example of Pullum is peeving about, here's the American Bar association:
Robert Cumming said,
May 13, 2010 @ 8:00 am
Is there a transatlantic divide in (reactions to) this sort of construction? I imagine that the US context has its own reasons for being first to invent this sort of term, and I wonder if British English might actually have come up with something more pleasing to GKP's sensibilities.
Mel Nicholson said,
May 13, 2010 @ 8:00 am
Scroll or search about 60% down on this corporate babble to the phrase "person of diversity" and you'll get an unambiguous example of the lexical item GKP is objecting to.
The qualifier "diversity" is used exactly as described in that case. Start with a mandate to be diverse (meaning variation within a group) and start a search for the excluded parties. Ask the person why they are conducting these actions, and they answer "We are looking for diversity." It doesn't take long to juxtapose hearing "looking for diversity" with seeing "looking for formerly excluded people" to lead to the mental connection "formerly excluded people" equals "diversity."
I'm not denying the ambiguity of the one example, but there are numerous unambiguous examples out there.
anatsuno said,
May 13, 2010 @ 8:04 am
I haunt places where talk of diversity (and how it should be encouraged) is common, and I use the phrase 'people of color' without any reluctance, but like Russel, it appeared obvious to me there that the sentence meant 'anyone who wants to practice diversity', that is to say, who desires to enhance the diversity of people present in whatever endeavor is being discussed.
I'm not saying there isn't a usage already out there to say 'people of diversity', but I've never met it in the activist areas I see from the fringe. I've seen 'chromatic people', I've seen 'POC' and a few other neologisms or abbreviations, but I never encountered 'people of diversity' as though it was a common origin so far.
marie-lucie said,
May 13, 2010 @ 8:30 am
Like several other commenters, I had never encountered "practitioner of diversity" before, but given the context of the quoted I interpreted it as "human resources person looking for diversity in hiring people", whose point was that "practicing diversity" does not mean just hiring token representatives of different underrepresented groups.
As for "woman/women of color" (for some reason the modifying phrase seems restricted to women), the reason it sounds strange in English is that it is a word for word translation of French: "homme/femme/gens de couleur" refer to non-white persons, especially those of an intermediate brown rather than very dark skin colour, as the latter would be "Noir(e)(s)" (those are physical descriptions, not social or legal categories). The right translation would be "colo(u)red man/woman/people", if that expression had not already been used long ago as a US euphemism for "persons of full or partial African ancestry", and in South Africa for "persons of mixed race", both of which implied a specific social or even legal status.
Mel Nicholson said,
May 13, 2010 @ 8:37 am
At the risk of going off-topic for the log, strong reactions to terms that come up addressing racism are common, so much so that most discussion groups dedicated to analyzing, addressing, or otherwise discussing racism have coined the term "the tone argument" to refer to a way-too-common tactic of derailing the discussion. The derailer will talk about terms and politeness to shift blame for his or her own discomfort onto the person pointing the uncomfortable truth.
The tone argument can't be accommodated. Begrudging members of the discussion aren't really objecting to the words, but to the very idea that they need to do something about the unfair advantages or even that those unfair advantages exist.
Even though the attempts are in vain, people in those discussions will and do try to accommodate the inconsolable. Trying to say something when someone is trying to squelch the idea is inherently broken. They end up coining increasingly opaque terms, which is where monstrosities like this really come from.
The annoying part of all that is that by arguing for the plainer terms instead of the obfuscated ones, that just adds to the distraction from the core argument.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying discussion of the terms nor GKP's reaction are at all out of bounds nor objectionable. This is the Language Log, so the discussion of terms is core to the purpose of this forum. "The tone argument" is about squelching people in other forums by changing the topic from the subject matter to the expression thereof.
peter said,
May 13, 2010 @ 8:40 am
If "syntactic unusualness" was a criterion for rejecting new words and terms, then the Language Log Police Department would be very busy indeed. And I disagree that the term "people of diversity" is "mealy-mouthed": on the contrary, it describes precisely and directly a distinct concept.
For, what is one to logically and simply call those people who are the target of diversity-recruitment practices, other than "people of diversity"? The term "ethnic minorities" would exclude women, since in many countries females are a slight majority of the population. And in some countries (eg, South Africa, India), diversity practices are targeted at the majority of the population, not a minority. The term "people of color" would exclude those people (eg, many women, people with physical disabilities) who are not non-white. "People of diversity" seems to fill a niche (ie, it provides a distinct term for distinct concept otherwise lacking a word or term), and seems perfectly aesthetically fine to me.
Mr. Shiny & New said,
May 13, 2010 @ 9:15 am
I disliked this term the moment I read it. For one, I also read it as a practitioner who practices in diversity (whatever that is). But as well, I find the label somewhat unpleasant. If you are a non-white male you are "diversity"?
Perhaps because I live in Toronto, where caucasians are soon going to be a minority, my viewpoint isn't shared by most English speakers. But I feel that the software company whose staff is entirely of Chinese descent is no more diverse than the law office where all the employees are white males. Diversity is an emergent property of a group and not an attribute of a single member. "[Person] of Diversity" is a contradiction.
Dougal Stanton said,
May 13, 2010 @ 9:30 am
Interestingly, many do attempt to justify this usage, person of X, on empirical grounds. The argument goes that this focuses the speaker/listener on the person and not the X, though I've yet to convince anyone to show me the evidence for this. The conversation generally stops short at "…according to my professor".
Is this just a language-based argument without support?
Morgan said,
May 13, 2010 @ 10:12 am
For what it's worth, I'm still having trouble parsing the phrase. My instinct is to read it as "person who practices diversity" (whatever that means), but my experience tells me that the intended meaning almost certainly is "practitioner who falls into one of the groups designated by law or policy as 'diverse'".
"Person of color" doesn't cause nearly as much trouble, which is strange, because they are parallel constructions – POC means "person with the characteristic of having color", and POD means "practitioner with with characteristic of having diversity".
Maybe it's the concept of an individual "having diversity" that trips me up? Or maybe my experience with "practitioner" just makes me prefer the "of x" construction as a complement rather than a modifier.
Funny how odd it makes me feel.
Ellen said,
May 13, 2010 @ 10:17 am
I think this is one a phrase where to interpret it we need more context than just the quote. The interpretation that Jan Dawson and Geoffrey K. Pullum make requires the understanding that we "practitioners" means "practitioners of law". Russell's alternative interpretation requires the understanding (either from assumption or context) that the "practitioners" here are people doing hiring.
Though my first reading was the same as the first commenter, "person who practices diversity", I can see that it may indeed be so that, in context, it would be clear that the interpretation of Jan Dawson and Geoffrey K. Pullum is correct. And I'm inclined to take their word for it rather than look into it further.
Ellen said,
May 13, 2010 @ 10:19 am
Morgan, I think the difference is in the word "practitioner" rather than "person".
Joe said,
May 13, 2010 @ 10:39 am
If it is a vote, I go for "person who practices diversity in hiring." I have to say that "practitoner" generally has a much more restrictive meaning than "someone who practices X," however. Has anyone heard the word used in the more general sense?
Daniel Nye Griffiths said,
May 13, 2010 @ 10:45 am
We have Heads of Diversity in the United Kingdom, although they are not a common role so far, which is the term in its use as a business function – that is, a business function dedicated to increasing diversity and awareness of issues relating to diversity in a workforce. I don't think we have the idea of a "person of diversity", meaning a person representing a non-majority element of a diverse workforce or population. However, we've also never really used "person of colo(u)r".
The nearest equivalent, from my experience of the language of diversity, is probably BME (as in "BME lawyers"), standing for "black and minority ethnic", that is Black British or belonging to other smaller ethnic minority groups in the United Kingdom – business language, however, tends to favour circumlocutions such as "employees belonging to minority ethnic and cultural groups". Not beautiful terminology, but rarely used with poetic intent.
Ellen said,
May 13, 2010 @ 10:50 am
Dougal Stanton, I think whether "Person of X" is justified depends on what the alternative is. I think it's often good to use the word "person". Like, for example, saying "a person with autism" rather than "an autistic". But "person of X" verses "X person" really depends on the words. I don't think either is better as a general principle. "Colored person" and "person of color" seem equal to me. But "person of diversity" doesn't really have an "X person" alternative.
IrrationalPoint said,
May 13, 2010 @ 10:56 am
A number of racial justice activists (and some philosopher I can think of — check out Sally Haslanger's and Elizabeth Spelman's work on race) have remarked on the insidiousness of terms like "person of color" and "non-White", because it means that there's no unmarked word in common use for talking about certain racial groups in a way that isn't White-centric: everyone has "a colour" that affects they are "read" and treated in social interactions.
Faldone said
Which is exactly right. It's not just Black people who have "a color" (whatever we take that to mean), nor is it only women who have "a gender" (see previous parenthetical remark). Talking about "people of colour" means we're doing something pretty dodge with markedness.
(Having said that, it's perhaps worth pointing out that in addition to the "non-White" meaning of "people of colour", there's also a more overtly political one, used in certain circles. As far as I can tell, "radical woman of color politics" is closely related to radical Black feminism and womanism, and in that context, it's not clear that it straightforwardly just means "non-White", but I'm not sure that I know enough about it, so could be wrong on that.)
"Of diversity" has much the same markedness problem, but the choice of word is clearly from the "equality and diversity" vocabulary.
GKP said:
Is that what's being said? I've yet to come across an "equality and diversity" program that actually did say this.
There's certainly very good arguments for saying that "people of diversity" suggests that diversity is a characteristic only of marked identities, and having that attitude towards Black people, women, and other underprivileged groups makes them more disadvantaged, not less. But it sounds like what you're saying is "'people of diversity' doesn't include White men, and therefore discriminates against White men" — is that what you're saying? If so, it seems to me that the people harmed by the exclusion of White men is not White men at all — it's everyone who isn't a White man, precisely because they are all being considered Other, and White men are being considered Normal (White men don't seem to need a special label — it's everyone else who needs the special "of diversity" label).
–IP
Henning Makholm said,
May 13, 2010 @ 11:23 am
If "practitioner of diversity" in this context is supposed to mean "non-white practitioner", we're left wondering what it is that the practitioner practices. You cannot just be a practitioner in a vacuum; there has to be some contextual indication of the field that you're a practitioner in. And in this example "of diversity" offers itself immediately as a possible answer, and one that makes perfect semantic sense in this sentence.
[(myl) The prepositional phrase "of diversity" might very well be a complement of practitioner in this case. But there's plenty of "contextual indication of the field", since the person quoted is identified as "executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at the Georgetown Law Center".
And as the OED explains, with citations going back to the 16th century, practitioner can be used to mean "A person engaged in the practice of medicine; a physician, surgeon, pharmacist, etc." (e.g. "1543 T. PHAER in tr. J. Goeurot Regiment of Lyfe ii. f. xviv, An other singuler medicyne..a thing experte of all the good practicioners.") or "A person engaged in the practice of law; a lawyer" (e.g. "1598 R. BARCKLEY Disc. Felicitie of Man V. 386 Sollicitors..the skumme gatherers of sutes,..with all that rabblement of practitioners, who deuour the substance of poore men.")
This is by no means an obsolete or archaic usage — the OED gives "2004 U.S. News & World Rep. 12 July 36/3 Everyone from solo practitioners to white-shoe law firms is offering help", and a quick search of recent news turns up e.g. "Previously, she was a solo practitioner in Las Vegas, Nevada from 1995 to 1998, and an associate attorney with the Kirk-Hughes and Lozano law firm in Las Vegas from 1994 to 1995."
And tablesaw (above) submitted a real-world example of "lawyer of diversity" used to mean "lawyer who is a member of some group designated as relevant to diversity. So to refer to a lawyer from an under-represented group as a "practitioner of diversity" would be normal, whether or not it's what was meant on this occasion.]
It sounds quite plausible that "of diversity" might be used to mean "from a minority group" in other contexts, but this example does not convince me that it is one.
J. W. Brewer said,
May 13, 2010 @ 11:34 am
I wonder if GKP and his source misanalyzed the phrase because they hadn't noticed the recent development of what might be called the professionalization of diversity, i.e., various businesses and other institutions have full-time functionaries with the title "Chief Diversity Officer," you can make a steady living as a "diversity consultant" giving seminars and whatnot to institutions that do not have full-time in-house diversity resources, etc. I'm not sure if these people all say "practitioner of diversity" when asked what they do for a living, but they could. (I'm talking about US usage; not sure what lexicon is used for discussing the same things in other Anglophone countries.)
Separately, perhaps one of the reasons people have cynical reactions about this sort of language can be seen by the quote in question, which spoke directly of seeking "diversity of viewpoint." Whether the net diversity of viewpoints on this particular nine-member institution will be enhanced by adding the fourth member (out of nine) who grew up in New York City and the fifth or sixth member who attended Harvard Law School (Justice Ginsburg spent two years enrolled there, but ultimately received her law degree from Columbia, thus the imprecision), because after all you're shifting the male:female ration from 7:2 to 6:3 depends quite a bit on contestable assumptions about what sort of genetic endowments and/or life experiences do and do not affect "viewpoint" to which degree.
Jen Dawson said,
May 13, 2010 @ 11:51 am
I'm the one who sent this in. I agree that the meaning is not 100% clear, but I still believe "of diversity" here is indicating that the practitioner is somehow herself diverse (gender, race, sexual orientation, etc). In the legal field, "practitioner" on its own is used to simply mean lawyer (as in "solo practitioner"). It seems more likely that this woman – who is a part of the legal community – is discussing what lawyers believe rather than what diversity consultants believe.
To me, this usage is interesting because it's odd to conceive of one person standing alone as "diverse."
John Cowan said,
May 13, 2010 @ 11:59 am
I join my voice to hsgudnason and the throng.
Ellen: For whatever reason, person of color was never tarred with the same brush (I use the metaphor advisedly) as colored person. In 1930, colored person was the polite term, as in Robert Conklin Bruce's "The colored people of the United States desire to have the word Negro capitalized, and their wishes should be respected" (as indeed happened shortly thereafter). By 1975, colored person (and Negro) were seen as condescending, and were replaced by black person, which in turn has been partly replaced by African American.
The choices offered by the U.S. Census paint an interesting picture. Before 1950, the question was "Color or race", leaving the response up to the respondent. In 1950 and 1960, the choice "Negro" was offered; in 1970, "Negro or Black"; in 1980 and 1990, "Black or Negro"; in 2000 and 2010, "Black, African Am., or Negro". The last term aroused some mild derision in 2010: "Does anyone call themselves that any more?"
All of which goes to show that label-shifting does not change societal attitudes.
Blake Stacey said,
May 13, 2010 @ 12:04 pm
Count me as one more person who first read the phrase in this way. I would probably read person of diversity as "member of an ethnic group underrepresented in the area we're talking about, whose inclusion would increase that area's diversity". (It still sounds rather silly, though: aren't we all examples of the diversity of the human species?) Practitioner of diversity parses more like planner or facilitator of diversity, that is, one who makes arrangements to cause a group to become more diverse.
I'm still a bit befuddled as to how coloured person is seen as a racist term, while person of colour is socially OK. History, I suppose, but I still puzzle over it. To me, person of X makes X sound like an essential, defining quality; Xed person makes X a noticeable, perhaps significant attribute, but not a defining one. (Think of spiced versus of spice, or painted versus of paint.) This might not be an implication which people who use person of colour intend. The change is subtle, but I find it pushes in the wrong direction: from having a heritage in which one can take pride, towards being a permanently ostracized individual who is at best "separate but equal".
But that's just how I hear things; people can call themselves what they like.
...just don't call me late for dinner! said,
May 13, 2010 @ 12:07 pm
I'm going to start referring to white male lawyers as "practitioners of homogeneity"
Blake Stacey said,
May 13, 2010 @ 12:08 pm
Afterthought:
Actually, if the context in which I saw person of diversity were not about issues of race or ethnicity, I might take it as a rather inept way of saying "person of multiple interests, skills, facets of personality, etc."
Kenny V said,
May 13, 2010 @ 12:25 pm
I too thought it meant someone who tries to hire diverse employees, but I was persuaded by Dr. Pullum's interpretation.
My main objection is that, being multi-racial myself, I consider myself to be a person of diversity, and I don't think someone who's just black or just asian or whatever can be said to be "of diversity"
Nijma said,
May 13, 2010 @ 12:43 pm
"Diversity" as an agency policy/practice has to do with the idea of "representative bureaucracy" from J. Donald Kingsley's 1944 book about the British government. Kingsley's view was that a public institution should be made responsive to the citizenry by making sure it "mirrors the dominant forces in society".
Kingsley was talking about social class, but in the U.S., the Hudson Institute's 1987 report Workforce 2000 applied the concept to age, gender, race, and ethnicity, noting that the labor force was no longer predominantly young, white, and male. Policy makers differentiate between EEO, affirmative action, and managing diversity.
You don't have to be young, white, and male to believe "you can't bring in a few token people and get a real diversity of viewpoint". That's the premise of a whole industry of consultants, videos and books. And there are plenty of white males who do value a diverse workplace.
IrrationalPoint said,
May 13, 2010 @ 12:49 pm
Just to add that I also read "practitioner of diversity" to mean something like "a Human Resources person in charge of diversity programs" rather than "a practitioner of law who is a woman, Black, disabled, queer, etc".
However, I'm not really sure that's the central point. Regardless of whether "of diversity" indicates the individual's demographics or not, it's quite clear that "equality and diversity" programs concern themselves primarily with institutional practices that disproportionately affect women, certain racial groups, disabled people, queer/LGBT people, and other groups who are traditionally underprivileged or underrepresented in certain spheres. That is, there's something about "diversity" that does mean "not White dude", more or less as GKP suggested.
–IP
Daniel said,
May 13, 2010 @ 1:10 pm
@ Henning Makholm (and others commenting on a similar tack)
"You cannot just be a practitioner in a vacuum; there has to be some contextual indication of the field that you're a practitioner in."
Obviously, that is correct. Fortunately, the article linked above offers plenty of contextual indication that the practitioners referred to are diverse populations in the field of law–specifically, women in the Supreme Court.
This blog is always good about linking back to referenced material to provide full disclosure and provoke intelligent discussion, but most commenters never seem to take the three minutes necessary to confirm the results and instead seem content to hypothesize inanely.
If you missed it, here's the article again:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/us/politics/11women.html
Mr Punch said,
May 13, 2010 @ 1:18 pm
The "practitioner of diversity" phrase is certainly ambiguous, with issues arising from both "practitioner" and "diversity." "Person of color" is a long established term equivalent (but perhaps preferable) to "colored person" or "Negro" but there's a serious problem with its more extended use (apart from excluding white women, in diversity discussions). The problem is that most "persons of color" worldwide are Asians, many of whom (billions, I'd guess) really object to being lumped in with blacks — I've heard the term "people of color" referred to as an example of American cultural imperialism.
Boris said,
May 13, 2010 @ 1:38 pm
We are of Bajor
IrrationalPoint said,
May 13, 2010 @ 1:50 pm
Mr Punch:
Indeed, I've heard this argument too. Although it's somewhat problematic because it suggests that Asian people, Black people, and Americans are non-intersecting groups. But the sentiment ("we're not all culturally or ethnically the same, and it's seriously uncool/racist to say that we are, and to think of us purely in relation to Whiteness") is more or less what I meant about White-centricity.
–IP
Mark Liberman said,
May 13, 2010 @ 2:23 pm
It's interesting that "persons of diversity" remains rare (510 Google hits) compared to "persons of disability" (71,400).
Joe said,
May 13, 2010 @ 2:31 pm
@Daniel.
Wow! I don't agree with Henning Makholm's reasoning (and I see MYL has supplied the relevant info from the OED), but can you explain what exactly in the original context clarifies which of the possible meanings is the correct one? (I did look the article up, and I just looked it up again, and I see nothing in it that would make it clear what "practitioners" refers to. Moreover, it certainly cannot refer to women on the Supreme Court, because I doubt anyone would say, "ask any X" if X consisted of only two people). I'm perfectly willing to accept that it *could* refer to lawyers who are members of historically under-represented groups, and it does seem odd to me to use "practitioner" in the sense of "person practicing diversity hiring." Still, I just googled the phrase, "practitioner of diversity," and the first hit was "The Olympic Law Group is a firm believer and practitioner of Diversity both within the firm and in it's professional practice."
Tony H. said,
May 13, 2010 @ 2:50 pm
Not to hijack the thread or anything, but oh dear – "not white European or Jewish males" – how to parse this? Applying DeMorgan and various attempts at distributive rearrangement helps only a little, as the next sentence has "What white European and Jewish males have in common", which still leaves me unclear on which kind of males are "of diversity", and which are on the signup list for sensitivity training.
blahedo said,
May 13, 2010 @ 3:22 pm
I agree with many of the comments so far, but I haven't seen anyone raise what I see as the core issue semantically: "person of diversity" seems to be co-opting a concept that meaningfully applies only to groups, to apply to a single individual. I've heard "multicultural" used similarly, as in "a multicultural youth", meaning (in that particular case) "a black youth" or (more generally) "a non-white youth".
It's like "stoplight peppers"—when you only have one, it's a "red pepper" (or green or yellow); the descriptor doesn't fit right unless applied to a group including all the required members.
That said, I can understand the ever-evolving need for neutral terms, so I suspect the need will trump the prior semantics, and push the meaning in that direction; it'll probably seem a lot less odd to my ear in a few more years.
Carl said,
May 13, 2010 @ 4:56 pm
Based solely on the quoted material, I can only read it as hsgudnason does, as a person whose hiring practices promote diversity. If it does in fact mean what Geoff is peeving about, I agree that it's ghastly.
marie-lucie said,
May 13, 2010 @ 5:46 pm
I read the article, and I would be more inclined to entertain "practitioner of diversity" as meaning "a professional from a non-traditionally hired ethnic group" were it not for the words "bring in" and "get". The author of the quote is talking about bringing in certain people and getting their viewpoints. This suggest that she is speaking from the point of view of one (of many others, as indicated by "any practitioner") engaged in selecting people from various groups in order to get viewpoints which might reflect the values and preoccupations of those groups. But her conclusion is that just having a member of such a group on board does not mean that that person's viewpoint will be different from that of the more traditional majority group: for instance, that having one more woman on the Supreme Court will mean that her viewpoint will be different from that of the rest of the group. I see nothing in the quote to mean that the author is talking about herself as a person targeted by efforts at increasing diversity (even if she is one) rather than as one of a number of persons professionally involved with the field of "diversity hiring", who have come to the same conclusion. Why not ask her?
Jerry Friedman said,
May 13, 2010 @ 6:11 pm
I've been on my employer's Diversity Committee for eight years, and I'm occasionally referred to as not "diverse", being a white European and Jewish male. (For most of that time, I've been the only "non-diverse" person on the committee, which I think means I bring much-needed diversity to it.)
@blahedo: Jen Dawson and Morgan also brought up the problem with a singular person of diversity. That's my esthetic objection to the term, or to diverse person. My esthetic objection to person of color is that white is a color, more or less as Faldone and IrrationalPoint said. (Faldone is expecting person of gender for women, but the sex has already been used with that meaning.)
If we're still voting, I still think it's more likely to be "person who practices diversity". And yes, Daniel, I read the article before coming to that conclusion, and before reading your post, but thanks for checking.
Liz said,
May 13, 2010 @ 6:13 pm
I was wondering, idly, if "practitioner of disability" might come up as a similarly horrible term, when I came to the post which offered "person of disability". What on earth….? Do people actually use that?
Ian said,
May 13, 2010 @ 8:58 pm
I wonder how fixed the definition of a "person of diversity" is? Does it actually refer to diversity, or is it a political term that refers strictly to people in a fixed set of categories (female, ethnic minority, disabled, etc.) regardless of context?
For example, at my workplace I observe the canteen staff are almost all female and the maintenance staff are almost all from ethnic minorities. Employing a white man in either role would increase the diversity, but would the "people of diversity" still be the women and ethnic minorities?
Julie said,
May 13, 2010 @ 9:05 pm
Hmm….According to the IRS, I am a "practitioner," and am to call the (rather worthless) "practitioner priority line" to solve problems. My point being, of course, that there are many kinds of practitioners, and within any industry, I would expect the word to be specific to that industry.
That said, I too, would interpret "practitioner of diversity" to mean someone whose occupation is to implement diversity. Because one person can't be diverse, and "of diversity" is a phrase that I cannot apply to a person, but could apply to a practice. "We practice diversity in hiring." "We brought in a diversity practitioner."
"Person of color," is a stupid, not-quite-English phrase, but at least a person can have a color. The phrase "colored people" has a pretty ugly history in AmE, which I can understand the desire to avoid, although I wish they had come up with a more euphonious alternative.
"Persons of disability" just sounds like an error. It should be "People with disabilities," of course. Which sounds less condescending than the "of" version, anyway. That's assuming that the people in question actually find "disabled people" condescending.
q said,
May 13, 2010 @ 9:09 pm
As a "practitioner," it's pretty clear to me that Professor Harris is talking about a non-white male heterosexual lawyer when she says "practitioner of diversity." ("Diversity" in the legal world refers to more than just race, though often race is the focus because women and homosexuals are usually well represented among law students and associates, if not partners.) She clearly means "lawyer" when she refers to "practitioner," so it cannot be someone who "practices" diversity. And if she meant someone who makes hiring decisions, she most likely would've said "hiring committee" or "hiring partner" or some such.
By the way, the legal world is obsessed with "diversity" in ways I never would've imagined back when I was an engineer.
Also, the slang term for a person of diversity that gets to the heart of the controversy is an URM (under-represented minority). This basically refers to the fact that non-whites and Asians have an advantage with regards to law school (and undergraduate) entry. While an Asian is a minority, he or she is not under-represented so does not get a boost in scores.
Neal Goldfarb said,
May 13, 2010 @ 11:19 pm
@myl:
I don't think it's surprising. Unlike color or disability, diversity isn't easily construed as an attribute of an individual. Indeed, in its conventional meaning, diversity is by definition a characteristic of a group, not of an individual. So for lots of people (most people?), diversity wouldn't really fit into the person of [ATTRIBUTE] template.
Postscript:
The above is what I was going to write when I started this comment. Then I googled diverse person.
55,500 hits.
OTOH, that's less than 0.7% of the number of hits for disabled person. And some of the examples of diverse person use the phrase in a sense different than the one that's being discussed in this thread:
Language change in action.
Tom said,
May 14, 2010 @ 1:05 am
I'm a little surprised to see that (unless I missed it), nobody's given the reason why I avoid the term "person of color" which is that it depends upon a distinction with "colorless" Caucasians that (1) offensively imagines whiteness as the natural order of things, the norm from which "people of color" are variously removed, and (2) is, for anyone willing to use their eyes, visibly wrong: As Forster put it in _A Passage to India_, "The remark that did him most harm at the club was a silly aside to the effect that the so-called white races are really pinko-grey. He only said this to be cheery, he did not realise that 'white' has no more to do with a colour than 'God save the King' with a god, and that it is the height of impropriety to consider what it does connote. The pinko-grey male whom he addressed was subtly scandalised; his sense of insecurity was awoken, and he communicated it to the rest of the herd."
lucia said,
May 14, 2010 @ 8:06 am
After diversity meetings at, a bunch of us would often gab about the rhetoric. We women started referring or ourselves as "people of hip".
Seth Grimes said,
May 14, 2010 @ 9:29 am
"White European or Jewish males"?
I believe you're missing a comma after "white." Assuming you are —
So you do believe that males who are white, American, and non-Jewish (among other groupings allowed by your exclusion above) add to diversity?
Of course, what you mean is white males who are of European or Jewish origin, in which case why do you find it necessary to distinguish people like me — Jewish males whose near-antecedents emigrated from Europe in the last 130 years and whose ancestors before that lived in Europe for many hundreds of years — from other males whose ancestors also emigrated from Europe? You believe that Jews whose families lived in Europe for many hundreds of years were not Europeans. That's a pernicious attitude that has caused unfathomable trouble, and I hope it's not really yours.
Ellen K. said,
May 14, 2010 @ 9:51 am
I don't think there's a missing comma. Rather, "white European" means "of white European ancestry".
marie-lucie said,
May 14, 2010 @ 9:52 am
Some time ago I was at a reception in a friend's home. Among the guests was a teenage boy from Africa who was spending a year with a local family. Somehow at one point he said: "You call yourselves white, but you are not really white, you are rather …" – as he searched for a word, I looked around for something of the relevant colour. Behind me were bookshelves made of some light natural wood, so I put my hand on a shelf: even though I was not tanned, my hands were definitely darker than the wood, which nobody would have called "white" like snow or lilies. But I am not a pale person. As a mixed race girl once told me: "You don't look really white, you are more like … Italian!"
April K said,
May 14, 2010 @ 4:42 pm
Not being a lawyer, in the original quote I immediately interpreted the phrase to mean someone whose job is to monitor diversity, in hiring or some other field. Even so, I find it an odd construction.
It is aesthetically less pleasing to my ears to use Person of Diversity as a way to refer to a person from one of a number of minority groups. Here in South Texas most persons are color are distinctly brown and they've been dating and inter-marrying with us Anglos (a term as common as "white") since before we were part of the U.S.
If we must have a phrase that encompases all minorities – and there are situations where such a phrase is useful and conveninent – would Person of Minority not be more accurate? This would cover blacks, asians, hispanics, women, gays, and potentially any other people who aren't "priveledged white males" (who, I might add, are quickly becoming a non-majority majority).
At the risk of getting way off topic, consider this notion.
Taken at face value, Person of Diversity would seem to more clearly apply to multi-racial and multi-ethnic people. It's utility would be questionable, however, because people don't come with labels on their forehead. Is that man African-American or part Samoan (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), or part-Italian (Vin Diesel)? Would Keanu Reeves be white or a person of diversity? (He's Chinese/Hawaiian/English.)
I guess my point is I while I realize the human need and utility of such labels, things like Person of Diversity verge on the absurd.
marie-lucie said,
May 14, 2010 @ 5:42 pm
For "person of minority". wouldn't "minority person" be more felicitous?
W. Kiernan said,
May 15, 2010 @ 3:16 pm
Mr. Shiny and New: "[Person] of Diversity" is a contradiction.
Except maybe, like April K suggests, in the sense of persons such as our President, being by birth part black, part white… no single category is big enough, he contains multitudes!
Anyway, regarding the original quote by Pamela Harris at Georgetown University, if you want to know what she meant by the phrase "practitioner of diversity" Professor Harris herself would be the best person to ask. I sent her the following email, though I'd be surprised if she isn't too busy to answer:
A one-sentence quote from you in the New York Times:
"Any practitioner of diversity will tell you that you can’t bring in a few token people and get a real diversity of viewpoint,"
became the subject of a post on a linguistics blog:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2319#more-2319
They are arguing as to the meaning of the phrase "practitioner of diversity." Some say it means "a person who would add diversity to a group" and others read it as "a personnel director whose job is to hire people with diverse backgrounds." There's quite a difference between those two meanings, and since the quote makes sense with either interpretation, we aren't sure.
The best way to answer this question is to ask you. Sorry to bother you with such a trivial request, but if it's not too much trouble, could you please tell me or them what you meant by that phrase? Thanks!
W. Kiernan said,
May 16, 2010 @ 10:01 pm
Hey, Professor Harris actually replied to my email! That's pretty cool. She says, and I quote:
How funny; this is the first time this has happened to me. I most definitely had in mind the second meaning — someone whose job is to hire (or admit or otherwise bring on board) diverse candidates. I never would have dreamed of using the term to convey the first meaning. Thanks. Pam
David Cantor said,
May 18, 2010 @ 6:14 am
I was extremely bothered by the reference to "White European or Jewish males." Jews have suffered intense discrimination for millenia. As a white Jewish male, I have always felt part of a minority group. Yes, there are many Jewish professionals, but that is despite the very real barriers, not because they don't exist.
Anonymous Yid said,
May 21, 2010 @ 2:32 am
we jews don't tend to get included in diversity initiatives, mostly, i think, because in america, at least, we already dominate the industries that tend to have such initiatives in numbers far outweighing our relative population share.
the same thing often happens to (east) asians–there's no need for affirmative action for american-born chinese in, say, the california state university system, so they don't get any, despite their obvious technical status as "minorities" in this country.