Inventing diversity

What is the difference between making sure you cover everything that is going on, as Rick Rodriguez said and being inclusive in order to report truthfully as Sharon Bramlett-Solomon stated?

"Get broad in terms of culture; reflect the reality." Is it reality if we have to go out of our way to find it?

On the one hand, I understand how you need to report everything so that you get a wider range of readers and a more realistic sense of what is going on in the world.

But on the other hand, do you actually go out of your way to find the one white guy on the basketball team when the other players on the team are all black?

Or do you throw away your picture of the woman in the soup kitchen line because she's wearing a hijab and wait for the white woman because you don't want to perpetuate a stereotype of the kinds of people that go to a soup kitchen?

I have issue with that. As I said in class, and I will pick on Puerto Ricans again, if 25 Puerto Ricans are in the news for rape, murder and drug dealing and 2 white guys, is that the fault of the media that no Puerto Rican put himself in a position to be represented in a positive light? Do I just go and report the 2 white guys and cut the 25 Ricans?

On the flip side, if I post a list of the most successful CEOs and they're 93% white, does that mean I'm slanting the media?

I just feel that if you go out of your way to look for that obscure picture to be sure you're showing everything and everyone, you're fabricating diversity that isn't even there.

And maybe, just maybe, if we stop coddling people so much and make an effort to present the raw truth for what it is and stop worrying about PC, what we say or how we say it, then it could be possible for these people who don't like the way they're being shown in the media to do something about it.

Guess what I'm going to say the next time someone says, "Hey, there aren't really any positive role models in the Puerto Rican Community!"

I will be able to say, "sure there are, and here's my story."

And perhaps that will inspire others to say, "I don't like how Puerto Ricans are perceived, let me do something about it!"

Perhaps instead of teaching our kids to go out and find obscurity in the name of diversity, we should teach them to analyze diversity in the news and evaluate the impact it has on their own self-image or view of the world.

Melissa Cordova
Eli Whitney Technical High School
Hamden, Conn.