Illustration by Katharine Li
Throughout the age of Twitter, our beliefs and allegiances have come to label us more more visibly than in any other time. Anyone with an internet connection and a political bent must wade through a bog of ideological identifiers and reductive hashtags to formulate a descriptive persona. Will you share that #BlackLivesMatter post? Will you “angry react” to that Breitbart.com article your uncle posted? The sum of these ostensibly insignificant decisions becomes a public record of one’s beliefs, a sort of political branding.
In such a culture, our differences seem stark and unavoidable; they create friction and preclude peaceful indifference. In last week’s issue of The Choate News, Joshua Gonzalez ’17 eloquently suggested that we ought to embrace intellectual diversity as a solution to our increasingly visible disparities of thought. Gonzalez lamented that the Choate community and minority communities have “[rejected] freedom of thought” by silencing conservative voices, like Gonzalez’s.
In several of my previous articles, I’ve articulated my disdain for the kinds of personal attacks Gonzalez mentions and my disbelief in the widespread repression some believe to occurring at Choate. However, I’d now like to extend my analysis of this phenomenon by arguing against the primacy some have placed on diversity of thought.
I reject the sanctification of so-called intellectual diversity on two grounds. First, I don’t believe that diversity of thought creates the “trust” and “unity” for which some hope. And, second, I think that diversity of thought can create deleterious effects in certain communities. Both of these critiques are rooted in the reality that many disadvantaged individuals experience differences of opinion as differences of power.
A community can only achieve unity when each of its members are equally enfranchised and empowered. Such a community would not be compromised if its constituents failed to reach consensus on whether the Iran deal sufficiently neutralized the Iranian nuclear program. However, such a community could not coexist with contention over whether black lives matter or over whether every woman should have full reproductive autonomy. In both of these circumstances, community members with differing beliefs would contend with ideas starkly opposed to their own. However, in the latter circumstance only, marginalized individuals would have to combat ideas that support systems and institutions designed to disadvantage them. This condition amounts to constantly justifying one’s existence and constantly grappling with one’s oppression. All of this is to say that the tolerance of every differing opinion can corrupt a community by disenfranchising some of its constituents.
Beyond its disuniting quality, diversity of opinion can be caustic and destructive in certain communities, particularly minority communities. This assertion clashes directly with those criticisms of the black and brown community for stifling conservative opinions. In his article, Gonzalez lauds people of color like Zoe Saldana and Thomas Sowell who, he asserts, are “brave enough to (step) out of the norm” by voicing conservative opinions. These opinions, however, hurt minorities by calling into question the basic principles around which marginalized people organized. Zoe Saldana, for example, once asserted that “there is no such thing as people of color.” This kind of heresy creates discord and undermines people of color who, unlike Saldana, spend their lives fighting for social justice. The predominant strategy of oppressors, from slave masters to segregators, has been to exploit divisions like these within the black and brown community to inhibit coalition building and organized resistance. Thomas Sowell, the other example offered last week, described the Glass Ceiling as “the fable of the emperor’s new clothes, but a fable for adults.” Similar to Saldana’s comment, this counterfactual argument, supported by perverted evidence, propagates the sexism that has divided the black and brown community in their efforts to achieve equity.
Without doubt, diversity of thought is an admirable ideal that often succeeds in practice. Somewhat ironically, writing this article is a small act of thanks for the diversity of opinion that allowed me to respond to Joshua Gonzalez’s article. However, not all opinions work to benefit the spaces in which they reverberate. Some opinions attack human dignity, disband united progress, or enable functioning systems of oppression. However, not everyone experiences these opinions the same way. As Yale lecturer Briallen Hopper asserts, “it is a privilege to be able to view all political issues in indistinguishable shades of gray.” Those who are blessed with this privilege ought not to demonize those who reject or seek protection from destructive, malignant beliefs. Rather, those who are fortunate enough not to experience politics as an exercise in survival disavow their fantasies of complete intellectual diversity and focus on dismantling opinions that exacerbate the world’s injustice.
