Diversity it ain't

They tell us that our purpose is to promote diversity, to add our own perspectives and stories to the Williams mix, to expose the preppy white investment bankers-to-beto a multicoloured world of customs and cultures foreign to their eyes and ears. We, the ambassadors, ostensibly enrich the experience with our accents and tastes and dress and attitudes. Surely, we do. Yet, diversity isn't the winner at the end of the day.

It is not a constantly shifting score that accompanies the performance of campus diversity, a mutating theme that is never repeated. The structure is rather a theme and variations, an idea is introduced that we elaborate in our own idiosyncratic ways, yet never losing the thread that binds us together.

It is unusual that our cliques and communities are of entirely disparate bunches; instead we congregate by shared interests or classes or viewpoints. A party with origins in Zimbabwe and Botswana and Bulgaria and Brooklyn is together because of the shared foreignness, residents of Malaysia and Massachusetts and Mississipi and Maine share a taste for swords and science.

The cultural celebrations of Indians and Chinese, Africans and Latinos are a riotous revelry displaying disparate skills, sounds, sights - yet again they depend on a crew having in common some interests and traditions be they Batà or boo-lang-sai. Rare it is that a lone representative stands up to proclaim uniqueness.

Ultimately, diverse or not, the festival of the foreign amidst the feringgi is much less a showcase of mutual disparity. At its heart, it's really a multicultural demonstration that our similarities are far less than superficiality implies.