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What We Talk About When We Talk About Diversity
By Beverly Yhap, Founder of Cahoots Theatre Projects
I would be the first to acknowledge I’m a product of colonialism. I was a child in Trinidad in the sixties. I remember the Queen arriving to grant Trinidad & Tobago independence. It was a big deal for a small island wannabe nation. I was eight or nine, but I have this memory of a motor car with royalty inside. The last time I was in TT in 2001, I found the words to the national anthem forming a lump in my throat in spite of myself. I stubbornly identify myself as West Indian against the evidence I am inescapably Asian.
What does this personal preamble have to do with diversity? Perhaps because of my tenuous grasp at monoidentity — in the form of white-washed Canadian federalism championed by the two solitudes conundrum — I was slow to enter into the painstaking process of self-discovery whose watchword is diversity. Case in point: when I started Cahoots back in 1986, my first and only goal at the time was to create Canadian theatre “that stretched the boundaries of theatrical form,” whatever that was. It never occurred to me to situate myself — to consciously deconstruct and articulate my identity as a woman of colour — within the company.
If, as Laurie Anderson observes, language is a virus, the diversity bug was just incubating in ’86 and there were many different varieties. In 1990, Cahoots held a conference called Write About Now! for and about playwrights of visible minority. Djanet Sears urged us to be “pig-headed.” Lenore Keeshig-Tobias challenged the right of a white woman to chair a conference for writers who weren’t white. Arguments around authenticity, equity, majority and invisibility led to the adoption of people of colour as a more self-defining touchstone, less an applied checkbox label.
In the 90s the diversity epidemic took hold. Not just forums and discussions, but aggressive outreach — recruitment of qualified “coloreds” to diversify the ranks of predominantly white organizations — became de rigeur. Diversity became the flavour of the 90s to the extent that it spawned a backlash against political correctness. Credentials were tilted at, insecurities about tokenism played upon, and general queasiness about inclusion as cornerstone policy began to set in.
In the new millennium, it’s fashionable to look back on the squabbles of the past few decades with a kind of smug ascendancy. To see the struggles of the near past — the missteps, doubts, tongue-tied articulation — as unseemly, deeply uncool. As if to say aren’t we past all that diversity crap? Do I still need to identify myself with a hyphen? Isn’t Sandra Oh a star and isn’t that Obama dude in the States preaching unity anyway, so what’s all the fuss with diversity already?
Wouldn’t we all like diversity to go away. Wouldn’t we all like to be just folks going about our business without having to point out the obvious visual or aural disclaimers? Can’t we give race and ethnicity a rest? Aren’t we — like the beer commercial used to claim — all Canadian?
Or are some more Canadian than others? Does having a hyphen to your existence make you more or less Canadian? Does dropping the hyphen make you lighter and brighter? Does it make you more of a phony, a sell-out? Or are you just opting to opt out of a discourse few Canadians of pallor outside Québec really have to indulge in?
Come to that, do you have to be Canadian, or can you just live here and work, keep your head down and basically just be an immigrant? (Or, better yet —if the moniker fits —in the words of a recent Toronto City Councilor, a “hard-working Oriental.”)
Me, I kept my head down for years. I was good and colonized. But Write About Now! and the collapse of my marriage broke down the studied erasure. By 1991 I finally came to trust, to feel grounded enough in this country that I could claim real citizenship. And that meant being fully Canadian: hyphens, masks, fears, accents, colour and all.
For me, diversity isn’t a choice. It isn’t some credo I espouse because I have to or because it’s expected of me, or because if I don’t do it no one else will, or because other people need to hear it from me. Diversity isn’t clothing, it’s skin. It doesn’t come off or wash out or go out of fashion. It just is. And we can argue about it, talk it down, wish it away or begin to recognize just what we mean when we say it doesn’t matter, that diversity’s passé, that it only applies to people of colour. When we talk about diversity, let’s please really yes talk about diversity.
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