Recently, I received an invitation from a well-known community organization in
I am not at all against the worthy efforts of this respected organization, but I was concerned to see that the Spanish translation that came with the original invitation in English was poorly done, because the organization lacks the funds to hire a professional translator.
Am I the only one that sees as a huge contradiction to talk about diversity and not even having enough resources to produce a decent translation?
There is, however, a bigger problem. The invitation made clear the reason for the meeting is the “historical demographic change” that happened on Election Day 2008.
In other words, according to this organization, now that the country elected a president whose ancestors are not all of them White, this is a good time to promote diversity and inclusiveness in all levels of community organizations.
My question is, Why now and not before? Only now that the President-elect is from a minority group is OK to talk about this issue?
Now it is too late, and not only because of the result of the elections, but because of the demographic changed that led to that result.
What’s the point of now saying, “Let’s all be inclusive” when 30 percent people living in the United States do not speak English at home and when almost 70 percent of children under 10 are Hispanic or from other minorities?
It is suspicious that suddenly “it is time to promote diversity,” now that minorities in general have shown their political power (the minority vote was key in the recent elections) and economic power (minorities are the group opening more businesses and more international businesses in the
These efforts should have begun years ago, when minorities were really just a minor segment of the population. Now that they can’t avoid us anymore they want us to join them? Do they really expect us to take them seriously and think they are acting with sincerity?
What this organization and many other similar organizations fail to recognize is that we are not going to accept their invitation to “diversity,” not even if their doors area widely open, because the invitation came too late: we already have and have had for many years our own civic, religious, and educational organizations.
This is the time for us (“minorities”) to show we are not going to make the same mistake of waiting until the last moment to invite people from different ethnicities and groups to join our organizations.
After all, in just a few more years, we will no longer be a “minority” and we cannot repeat the same wrong pattern of exclusion that was applied to us during so many years and that now some organizations suddenly want to reverse.