Diversity: a thorn in my freaking side

I'm not sure where Mrs. Bart picked this up, although "at some event where Texas Instruments was present and passing out stuff" would be a decent guess. The upshot is that it's been sitting in our closet for quite some time, and I get to look at it every day:


My first thought was, holy crap, is that Hiro Nakamura from 'Heroes'? This must have been taken before he blew up and was still taking odd modeling jobs.

Usually when I see this little card, I just get annoyed. The reason? Diversity. It's a thorn in my freaking side.

I have nothing against diversity per se. I do have a problem with quota-based postcard-style diversity. "Let's show one of each," the photographer thinks. You see this all the time on promotional materials for schools (ranging from Pre-K to graduate school).

They take this to an extreme in Singapore. The demographics there break down as follows: 75.2% of the population are of Chinese extraction, 13.6% are Malays, 8.8% are Indians, and 2.4% are Eurasian and other. To go with this, there are 4 official languages: English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil. In school you're encouraged (possibly required - I'm not sure) to learn your "ethnic" language. And on virtually every depiction of a group of people, you want to have one of each - a white / Eurasian, an Indian, a Malay, and a Chinese. I got this image off of the Singapore Statistics web site:


I assume the dude in the green shirt is Malay.

This is from the Singapore Ministry of Information Racial Harmony website:


There is a ton of crazy crap on that website that I encourage you to browse through.

Anyways, back to Texas Instruments. I look at the card and think, if you're trying to communicate that you're a company that strives for diversity, that's great. However, you're way overdoing it. Because if you're anything like me, then every time you've been to a technology company you find yourself in a sea of women and black folks. Blacks may be only 13% of the US population, but Lord knows that tech firms are all at least 50% black. Some are more.

I'm guessing that black chick on the right is telecommuting. That's why there's a series of 1s and 0s going from her laptop to the other people.

You know what the picture is missing? The bitter old white guy who's been at the company 40 years but has been clueless about the new technology for the last 20. I guess you don't want that guy on your recruiting material, even if every new employee is going to have to deal with him or his ilk day in and day out. Maybe they cover that on the tour.

I figure we can either get realistic about diversity and show workplaces (and schools, and cities, etc.) as they really are, or we can go Singapore-style and break all pictures down 50/50 by gender, and then include one of each race or ethnic group. We'd have quite a time deciding just which races and ethnic groups always needed to be represented. "Yes, I know you've got blacks, but you need to make sure that you can tell one of them is Dominican." "Are those Mexicans, Salvadorans, or Columbians? It's so important for me to know!" Ugh.

Incidentally, we're assuming that this kind of broad-spectrum diversity is the ideal situation. What if you're a Chinese-descended person in Singapore looking for a job, and diversity was actually the goal? "Sorry, but before we hire you we need another Eurasian and three more Indians. We've got to balance." Maybe having our schools and workplaces reflect the population as a whole would be the true measure of diversity, or more importantly, the lack of discrimination.

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