I am confused about the use and meaning of the word diversity. Those concepts: Idiot, subnormal, incapable, handicapped, mentally handicapped..., have been happily abolished and now when we classify we say diversity. It seems to me that the word surrounds, protects and shelters more the classifier than the classified.
A decade after the beginning of the introduction and adoption of the term, I am not able to measure whether "functional diversity" is more rhetoric and ambiguity than practicality for the group of people with disabilities. And I neither judge nor dispute the difficulty of the term, which brings together variety and difference: "We are the same but different", we say.
Thus, in this diversity in which we are all diverse: socially, culturally, by being (or defining or placing) white or black, poor or rich, "freaks" or "perrosflautas"..., I have the feeling that there are even more diverse diversities. The established social order remains the same, or almost the same, and points to the same with other words and terms. Let's coexist and include is the message, but "throw yourself over there" and let's continue separating and classifying more than normalizing, attending and equalizing.
A kind of posturing with the same prejudices, that does not transform, that does not bring new visions and knowledge, and that if it classifies... it excludes. Confusing diversity. The Piarist Fathers tried to explain it to me during boarding school and high school through the lesson of sets and subsets. They did not succeed with a few, many, so manifest diversity and so little abstraction led us to see each other's faces again before time, in September.
On the "encerado" -for the blackboard- and with the "clarión" -for the chalk- as my dear priest teachers used to say, they wrote and drew some united circles: "If A is contained in B and B is contained in C, then A is contained in C. Easy! but they added, I think to confuse us, a multitude of far-fetched examples -recited with premeditated parsimony- like this: "Then if A is the set of all men who are also contained in B, and those of B in C, then the "set" of all men, are "subsets" of the "set of all persons" (sic).
A.M. Sanvicente
