'Diversity’ Not Diverse Enough
By Steve Villano, Cable Positive -- Multichannel News, 9/30/2007 8:00:00 PM
Last week was Diversity Week in the cable industry. If one statement crystallized how much more work needs to be done in that area, it was MTV president Christina Norman’s bold assertion that even MTV — long considered an industry leader in creating a more diverse workplace—was still “only rounding second base.”
For people with a disability — like HIV — and for gays and lesbians, sitting on second base would be a pretty lofty perch. Just getting on the playing field is frequently an issue. Throughout the two days of the NAMIC Conference, the terms “the disabled,” or “GLBT” (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) were rarely mentioned, if at all, as qualifications for the definition of “diversity.”
Of all the major speakers throughout the week, only ESPN/ABC Sports’ George Bodenheimer, who received the Kaitz Foundation’s corporate diversity award on behalf of his network, expressed an inclusive vision of diversity when he said that his network would continue to be sensitive to issues of “race, gender, orientation and disability.”
True, the preprinted 2007 calendar that NAMIC handed out at the end of its conference included one month (October) devoted to recognizing the disabled, and one month (June) to acknowledging the pride of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities. But it would be a bold step toward genuine diversity to do so during Diversity Week, when the multiethnicity in NAMIC’s good name is replaced with “more diversity.” Neither gays, lesbians, nor people with a disability — whether from HIV or the loss of an eye in Iraq — comprise an “ethnicity.”
The irony is that particularly in communities of color— black, Latino, Asian — being gay or being HIV-positive can be dangerous to one’s health. Black men would sooner have their families believe that they contracted HIV through intravenous drug use than through unprotected sex with other men, because the stigma toward being gay is, in some parts of the community, more hostile than the stigma toward being a drug user. Black and Latino churches — after decades of leading the nation to the high ground on civil and human rights matters — have, in some cases, become hotbeds of homophobia, driving gay men deeper into the closet, and keeping HIV-positive men and women of color away from getting the medical care they need until the disease is too far advanced. And in Asian/Pacific Islander communities across the nation — and the world — a culture of shame surrounding sexuality has pushed teen suicide to record levels.
No less a lifelong fighter for civil and human rights than NAACP chairman Julian Bond has recognized the urgency for traditional civil rights and diversity organizations to lock arms with GLBT groups, to halt hate together. In a recent full-page ad for the NAACP in Roll Call, an influential Capitol Hill publication, Bond insisted that the Hate Crimes Bill before Congress include “sexual orientation,” resisting the sinister strategy of some to split off historic civil-rights organizations from their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.
It’s long past time for the cable industry’s outstanding diversity organizations — and its top corporate leadership — to act on Bond’s message and leave no group that bears the scars of discrimination and exclusion behind. True commitment to diversity dictates nothing less.
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