We cannot be fully human without Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Modern society is fractured. People in the 21st Century are separated from many of the practices and places that in the past provided community. Fractured societies produce fractured people. We buy food packaged in plastic produced at industrial scale, never meeting the farmer nor the workers in his fields. We subscribe to social media platforms that produce a poor facsimile for community, polluting feeds with ads we don't want to see, and people the algorithm insists we must be interested in.

For someone living in our age, to build and sustain human connections has become something that must be actively pursued, rather than an environment in which we once lived without supply chains or social media.

If you want to know where your food comes from, you must build a relationship with your local farmer at the farmer's market. You must join societies, places of activity, attend town halls, learn skills taught by peers and in community college courses. Make friends, visit, talk, interact somewhere other than a screen.

When we live in fractured societies in which our information is fed to us by social platforms and information ecosystems offering what's good for them, not necessarily what you need to know, there is the illusion of connectedness. But in this world, isolation is real. Individual isolation is good for the people with their hands on the levers of power and the Zuckerbergs who are their mouthpieces, but it is not good for the individuals who make up these societies.

Layered on this, the United States is at an inflection point in its history.

Even as this post is being written and published, the Republican Party is implementing policies eliminating DEI. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has been declared functionally verboten by the current administration. The acronym - and individuals who obtained relief under these policies - are being expunged from government websites and funding cancelled.

If someone in your family needs this funding because of illness or having been crippled in a car accident or any of the multiple ways in which we encounter suffering, your family will be affected. If you are a woman who was fired for having a baby - or passed over for promotion because you might have a baby - you are affected, and you will have even less redress in future. If you have a family member with a genetic condition too statistically small for pharma companies to make massive profits, you will be affected. If you are too old - which can be as young as 30 in some sectors - you will be affected. If you are retired, you will be affected. If you have a child who does not learn the same way as many of their classmates, your child's future is affected. All of these people will be affected, even if they are white. If you are any race other than white, you were affected, even prior to eliminating DEI. For white people - and I write this as a white male - targeting DEI does not make your lives safer. It just gathers you into a nice useful basket to exploit when your turn rolls around, and roll around it will. Removing DEI policies removes the safety measures you might have been able to call upon when white people are the next feedstock to burn. The equity you currently obtain will be unavailable by law when you are parsed by different criteria and are in turn needing equity or inclusion.

For readers who have got this far and who are either nodding - or fuming in anger - the aim of this post is not to score points. Regardless of who you voted for in this past election, as individuals, you live in this world today. Like the victims of the current administration today, the medieval villages of old in which everyone knew most of the other villagers first-hand still had to deal with the power imbalances of the local lord extorting rent for the 'protection' of his knights. But when the blacksmith's daughter was ill, anyone needing a shoe for their horse or a new knife or a hoe repaired would know. They would talk. They would help.

And for all of us living in this fractured world today, we might look further back in time.

The reason gardens and plants have a this long history of being associated with healing is because of how we as humans responded to the natural environment. It dates all the way back to our earliest experiences as hunter gatherers. Anyone who has watched a season of 'Alone' will quickly understand that rugged individuals don't survive long, and when they do, it is rare and often a result of luck. Community and collaboration in those small societies is baked into our genetic memory. Skills were passed on by teaching them person to person, and from generation to generation by oral tradition. If the child of a flint knapper was better suited at learning from the herbalist, they'd learn both skills sets and in time practice the one that helped their families and community most. How and where to search for berries, roots, mushrooms and plant material to sustain life was essential. They actually did this stuff, not watched it on YouTube and posted in the comments. Someone with memory skills would be taught the oral tradition of the community to carry forward. People with injuries unable to rove far in search of meat on the move would work on skins or knapping, making tools, or storing food, and watch the children.

DEI was practiced intrinsically in these communities, because only a community could survive and thrive, season to season, generation to generation. Not everyone was strong enough for the chase. DEI was intrinsically part of the socialization of the next generation as a lived experience. We lived in nature for millenia and what we learned and passed on in communities allowed us to arrive where we are today. Communities used diversity as a foundational platform to support themselves. Without inclusion, communities could not use all of the skills available to them in a hostile environment, and petered out. The most inequitable society is one that is extinct.

When we grow food and herbs in the garden, it reconnects us with our genetic memories. Doing is affirmative. When we talk first hand to the farmer at the farmers market, it reconnects us socially. When we make space for people injured in war or from casual, random violence, we affirm their humanity, and ours. When we know our neighbours well enough to know when they need help, we build community. When we argue at the county School Board meeting in support of education for children with learning disabilities - whether we have a child in school or not - we break the barriers of isolation that separate us from each other.

Only when we are connected to community, first hand, are we fully human. We cannot be fully human when isolated by doomscrolling or clickbait or hatespeech or language that masquerades as freedom or patriotism but separates groups with the equivalent of a modern-day Star of David. That speech and path leads to death camps and ovens. We cannot be fully human if we allow people who are 'other' to be trampled upon. When we are silent about that, we join those wearing the jackboots, even if we bring up the rear. But more fundamentally, we deny what it is that makes us, ourselves, individually human. It is a self-injury. If we are unable to be fully human, we lose the richness of what life means. We affirm our isolation.

DEI makes communities complete. All of the people being affected by these DEI denials of their existence - the old, those considered something other than white, scientists, those battling chronic ill health, the injured, women, people on the spectrum, and all of the rest who have been sidelined or facing hate - deny them, and what remains is no longer human. If we want to thrive, both individually and as communities, we need all of us. To thrive in this fractured world, we cannot accept the isolation that those who use othering seek to impose on us. We are all DEI, one way or another.

Find and build a community, and be fully human.

Header image: Sourced from Pexels, courtesy of Markus Winkler.