Diversity is a code word used by the left where the US right use 'poor' - both mean black.
As an American who has lived in the US for my entire 65 years (except for a number of trips abroad, including several to the UK), I can assure you that diversity as used in the US is not a code word for "poor" or "black". Diversity in this context simply means a diverse group of people, and there are many ways in which groups of people can be diverse. For example, here is the Merriam-Webster dictionary's
definition of diversity:
: the condition of having or being composed of differing elements
: variety; especially
: the inclusion of different types of people (such as people of different races or cultures) in a group or organization : programs intended to promote diversity in schools
Again, from Merriam-Webster:
Examples of diversity in a Sentence
- Another factor in Burns' rise has been the strength and depth of Xerox's commitment to diversity. One-third of Xerox's 3,819 executives are women and 22% are minorities. —Nanette Byrnes et al., Business Week, 8 June 2009
This is a simple case where the proportion of women in a workforce is seen as one measure of diversity.
A scientific approach to this subject can be found in
Scientific American, in the article entitled
How Diversity Makes Us Smarter. From the summary:
Decades of research by organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers show that socially diverse groups (that is, those with a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation) are more innovative than homogeneous groups.
So race is one element of diversity in this context, but even race is not limited to black and white. The article itself goes even further, describing diversity in terms of members of different political parties, for example. So diversity itself has a diversity of meanings and applications.
If you mean black say black.
Fair enough. But diversity doesn't mean black. At least not in the US, where this directive was issued.
Diversity is used to manipulate situations just as much as right wing terms.
Many words can be used to manipulate situations. That does not mean that they don't have a legitimate use.
I have never had a reason to use it in my science.
I'm sure that most scientists would agree with you. This does not mean that it has no place in science, as
@Valentijn has pointed out in more detail. Also, very importantly, the diversity of a population of scientists has a big effect on the diversity of the populations they study. Is it just a coincidence that a profession that consists largely of white males ends up studying mostly white males? I don't think so. But has been pointed out in this thread, focusing on white males is just bad medicine.
The directive comes from people who don't know good medicine from bad, as evidenced by their banning terms such as "evidence-based" and "science-based". They have shown no great interest in advancing medicine, or any of the sciences, for that matter. It appears that their use of "diversity" is the standard usage that is described in the
Scientific American article. Presumably, this is meant to discourage focusing on diversity in the CDC itself. Doing so can only be detrimental to the CDC's mission for the reasons I have described above. But it should be clear by now, even just by reading the original
Washington Post article about the banning of these terms, that the CDC's mission, as well as the rest of medicine and science in general, is not a big concern of this Administration. This is not just my opinion; this is evident from the countless words and actions about all subjects scientific from a huge number of Administration figures themselves.
