Timidity can hurt diversity

Diversity itself is a diverse phenomenon.

It presents choices and opportunities, but also challenges and risks. Monday, while I was enjoying one aspect of it at the Northwest Folklife Festival, a new report, endorsed by several major adoption-advocacy groups, warned of the difficulties children of color face when they are placed in white homes.

It's easier to appreciate a different group's music than to see the world through another's eyes.

One day at the festival, I listened to two white guys from Canada playing their own blend of jazz and blues. Penticton, B.C., their hometown, isn't New Orleans, but a little bit of that city lives in those two performers.

Most folks were displaying some part of the culture they were born into, but lots of people were showing off adopted passions.

On one stage, an Irish dance group included at least a couple of Asian Americans. The tap-dancing group that followed was a mix of black and white kids. I've read tap may have started as a mix of Irish and African dance in New York.

That kind of cultural mixing makes me smile. It's one of the characteristics I love about my country.

Every year, the festival highlights one particular culture. This year's focus on urban Indians delved into a less joyous treatment of diversity. There was a discussion of the federal government's efforts in the early 1950s to move Indians from reservations to cities.

America was trying to force Native Americans to assimilate at the same time that it was keeping most black Americans segregated — opposite ways of managing diversity, both damaging to the people being managed.

Later, when I read the adoption advocacy report, I briefly thought about Indian children who were taken from their parents beginning in the late 1800s and sent to boarding schools to be reared in white culture.

We've come a ways since then. Indeed, the report said children in interracial adoptions benefit from placement with people who cherish them.

The trouble is that because some agencies are afraid to deal with race and culture, they aren't preparing white parents for the special challenges their children will face.

Mixed-race children can relate to that. Barack Obama wrote about coming to terms with race in his memoir "Dreams from My Father."

He said he had questions about race and identity he didn't think his white mother and grandparents could answer, and feelings about blackness he didn't think they would understand.

His dilemma had nothing to do with their love and everything to do with how being seen as different shapes a person's experience of the world.

We don't talk about that enough. In fact, a federal law allows social workers to be sued if they don't pretend to be colorblind.

So we can celebrate music and food, but we censor discussions about the ways race shapes people's lives. That hurts children, parents and society, which is why the report urges repeal of that law.

Wrestling openly with the complex issues diversity raises would make us all stronger.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.