What is Critical Diversity Literacy?

Critical diversity literacy is an analytical for engaging difference

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Diversity is a difficult concept to define and is often reduced to a simplistic celebration of difference or acknowledgement of various ‘isms’.

Critical diversity literacy questions assumptions about diversity, especially where these assumptions may cause disparity and harassment. It is a mode of analysis aimed at producing greater societal equality.

Black Coconut practices critical diversity literacy to uncover the multi-layered operation of diversity in and around organisations. As a tool it helps us to understand and critically problem solve about diversity threats, possibilities and dynamics.

Critical diversity literacy was developed by Professor Melissa Steyn, Director of the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies. Professor Steyn lists the ten criteria that underpin critical diversity literacy as follows:

  1. An understanding of the role of power in constructing differences that make a difference.

  2. A recognition of the unequal symbolic and material value of different social locations. This includes acknowledging hegemonic positionalities and concomitant identities, such as whiteness, heterosexuality, masculinity, cisgender, ablebodiedness, middleclassness, etc. and how these dominant orders position those in non-hegemonic spaces.

  3. Analytic skill at unpacking how these systems of oppression intersect, interlock, co-construct and constitute each other, and how they are reproduced, resisted and reframed.

  4. A definition of oppressive systems such as racism as current social problems and (not only) a historical legacy.

  5. An understanding that social identities are learned and are an outcome of social practices.

  6. The possession of a diversity grammar and a vocabulary that facilitates a discussion of privilege and oppression.

  7. The ability to translate (see through) and interpret coded hegemonic practices.

  8. An analysis of the ways that diversity hierarchies and institutionalized oppressions are inflected through specific social contexts and material arrangements.

  9. An understanding of the role of emotions, including our own emotional investment, in all of the criteria.

  10. An engagement with issues of the transformation of these oppressive systems towards deepening social justice at all levels of social organisation.