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You thought diversity was about differences in gender, race or religion? Think again.
The trainers felt like they deserved combat pay. They'd just spent a day in a big-city police department, talking to zoo cops about racial prejudice. And the cops weren't buying a word of it. Their experiences so solidly reinforced the negative stereotypes the trainers were trying to dispel, that when the trainers pointed out that criminals make up only a small percentage of the people of any race, their words fell on deaf ears. The officers were particularly sour on the topic because of a recently implemented-and very unpopular-affirmative action promotions policy. The situation was a tinderbox.
It was one of the toughest projects that the diversity trainers of Pope and Associates in Cincinnati have ever faced. "Our trainers came away feeling like they'd been knocked around for a day," says company president Patricia Pope.
Would their experience have been any different that day if they had been talking to the police officers about, say, their attitudes toward people with dif ferent educational backgrounds or incomes? Or if the discussion had focused on differing work styles or Myers-Briggs personality types? It's likely that the atmosphere would have been, at the very least, less intense. But then if Pope and Associates had provided that kind of program to the police officers, it wouldn't have been diversity training.
Or would it?
It all depends on how you define "diversity." Not everyone agrees on what the definition ought to be. Webster's defines diversity as "the condition of being different or having differences:' Applied to human relations, that can cover a lot of territory.
"Diversity of thought, diversity of style, diversity of birth order. I've even heard of one called `diversity of being,' though I don't know what that means," Pope says. Amid all these competing definitions, she fears that "traditional" diversity concerns like race, gender, age and disability will get lost.
Stretching the Taffy
Of course, even the traditional definition of diversity as a term referring to "protected" groups has proven to be elastic. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited...