<p>I can understand batman’s frustration with the university advertising itself as extremely diverse, but there being a glut of white people and asians versus the latino, native-american, and black populations does not help diversity any, if we are going with the genetic/ethnic make up of the student body. That’s kind of a ‘liberal-PC’ watered down version. Have a group of 100 people, have 65 of them be white, 15 of them be black, and the rest the other various races, per percentages of our country’s racial makeup, and call it diversity, nevermind we belong to the same overarching culture and for the most part, people are pretty interchangeable at the end of the day. Boo if you want, just bear with me. </p>
<p>The lack of diversity at Cal has little if anything to do with the genetic/ethnic makeup of the student body and more to do with the globalization of culture and compartmentalization of identity into bland, easily digestable chunks. It’s kind of like Holy Cow! (Indian place in LA), Sushi Mac, or Panda Express, or any other number of chain franchises that specialize in ‘ethnic foods’ that recreate the dishes in a way that is easily palatable to the white-bread masses by cutting back on the spices and amping up the sugar basically.</p>
<p>In fact, I found students that added to real social and cultural diversity, either through quirkiness, unique interests, difference in culture or opinion, and/or stepped out of the expected, rather than being accepted by the majority of their peers were ostracized as weird and/or too difficult to get along with. The lack of diversity comes more from an ingrained cultural laziness and suspicion of the ‘other’, rather than any fault of the school. There is also a major culture of “What Can You Do For Me?” without expectation of reciprocity, not just at Cal, but in the culture in general. Saw it a lot in the fraternities, people would come buy and drink our booze, use our recreational aids, and eat our food, and never commit to joining or an actual friendship. Why? “Because Greeks were lame.” – well, if you think we are -that- lame, don’t come to our house and freeload off our crap. I’ll get off on a rant here in a second, so let’s get back to the topic at hand. </p>
<p>Basically, my thesis here is that in my experience, the student body is pretty fearful and intolerant of what they don’t understand. A lot of them come from pretty cloistered suburban, rural, and upscale urban areas where pretty & polished versions of complicated issues are spoon-fed to them and they do not know how to deal with differences when they are confronted with them, even if that difference is beneficial and mindblowingly awesome. It’s the natural instinct to retreat to what is familiar and ignore/mistreat the ‘other’ in hopes they will bend to our homogenized version of the world. Okay, I’ll get off my self-righteous soap box. Just saying that the racial make up has little to do with our lack of diversity, because I found a lot of people pretty interchangeable despite phenotypical differences, and the lack of diversity is born more from the overarching McStarbucks culture we have cultivated for ourselves. We have developed expectations of how things are going to be, we expect to go into these familiar institutions and have things be fundamentally the same everywhere we go, and when we are confronted with difference or unfamiliar situations, we tend to Tetstudo (turtle up) and hide. Just saying.</p>