The thing about diversity

by William Kentridge

I was working on a local paper and a colleague and I decided to write a feature about how difficult it was to get around our cobbled town centre in a wheelchair.
Neither of us are wheelchair users but we borrowed one, I sat in it, she pushed and we wandered around trying to get into places. I was young and naive, if well-meaning.
Later, I met a much older colleague of the editor, a man in a wheelchair, on another job.  He took me to one side. He'd seen our feature. It was a good idea, he said, kindly. But why didn't you use someone who was a genuine wheelchair user?
I've never forgotten this gentle tap on the wrists.
So when there's yet another row about diversity, caused by an opinionated person who makes a living from being in the public eye, I remember that man's subtlety. I wouldn't ever have agreed with his politics but however far apart we were on Thatcher (yes, it was those years), he knew what he was talking about when it came to access. He lived it.
My friends know I'm partial to a good rant, to playing devil's advocate from time to time, to challenging established norms or ways of thinking. There's a lot I don't understand in current diversity debates and I find it frustrating, because I used to. It's awful to feel like an old fart who's been left at the bus stop but even in the old days, it was complicated, it's just that I knew the debates and the boundaries.
Take a local government race equality officers conference in Birmingham decades ago.  All afternoon there's infighting - men v women, women v women, African v Caribbean. The potential for disagreement seems infinite and it's the same at any conference, regardless of subject.
This is when I begin to understand diversity is as complex as humankind. In the bar that night I meet a woman I know from the music scene. What are you doing here? she asks and I ask the same. She says she's with the band, assuming I know which band.
I collect an iron from reception and get in the lift. There's a man cushioned by minders. Alice Cooper. So that's the band she meant. In the same hotel, here is this man who was once at the vanguard of rock and roll, who gave us the chant, 'School's out for ever', and local authority officers who are now at the vanguard of equal opportunities law.
How do these stories mesh, the wheelchair, Alice Cooper and race equality? They are meshed by degrees of separation or familiarity, by the way we all cross over, all the time.

by William Kentridge

It is tempting, yes, to jump on the diversity bandwagon.
I have undoubtedly been guilty of it since the crass mistake of my 20s. Most recently I have complained about ageism and it was only a couple of weeks later that I realised, embarrassed, it was a shout as I tried to shoehorn myself into a place of complaint.
It was the shout of privilege and it was saying, don't forget about me.
The thing about diversity is perhaps to ask more questions, to listen and be slower to express an opinion.
It is to be less afraid of being seen as an oppressor and, in fact, to assume that to someone, somewhere, I and you and they, are and always will be, an oppressor. Then, perhaps, we can talk about.......