Ignite Talk: Hacking Diversity, Part 1 – How Do We Define Culture?

The thing that people forget to understand is that the idea that culture will be nebulous, and can be something hard to define is actually a good thing. It’s a huge benefit for America. We are not homogenous and we aren’t supposed to be homogenous. We weren’t founded in an homogenous way, and we are supposed to be diverse and reflective of that in our media and our culture. And those of us who are arts and culture makers need to reflect that. If not, we just have incomplete sketches of who we are. And when we go to look back, and we wonder about things – like “What was Nirvana’s impact on the queer community?” – we can’t get that type of information, because we never thought to record it.

So the idea becomes how do we talk about our differences, and yet still talk about our culture?

How do we make room for every single person to speak?

And again, those of us who are in this room have access to some of the highest levels of media. We are the culture creators, even if we don’t have as direct of an impact as others do, we are still part of this field.

And one of the things I notice a lot when we talk about diversity, when we talk about these ideals, is that “I don’t have the time. I can’t work this other thing into the story. I can’t figure out how to make this diversity angle work.” As if diversity is this handcuff around you, instead of something that’s actually a benefit, instead of something that’s actually freeing. Because if we were to look at the world, through all of these different prisms, we would realize that the onus is off of us to provide the one definitive experience that will define out culutre, and instead we can start to talk to each other. We can start to understand each other. We can acknowledge that we are carriers of information. And we can acknowledge that every time we leave out a story – though we can’t get to it right then – but if we acknowledge that it’s missing, and we each work a little bit extra each day to start weaving in new narratives, things that we haven’t seen, articles we haven’t thought of yet, we will truly become one nation, under a groove.

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*Was talking too fast. In the clip, I say insecticide. Corrected here for obvious reasons. Also, what they actually said is in the link, women, people of color, or gays, not specifically black folks.

**This was a misattribution. The writer who actually said it was Chimamanda Adichie, in her TED Talk.

Fun fact: The founding editor of Punk Planet, Dan Sinker, was in the audience. He is also the person behind the super popular @MayorEmanuel twitter feed.

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