I am pleased that St. Norbert College has a Human Dignity statement that understands the positive role that human diversity plays and the obligation that we have to honor the inherent sacred dignity and immeasurable value of every human being. He or she who cuts himself or herself off from diversity cuts himself or herself off from the fecundity of life, from the permutations of human possibility, from the infinite variety of human and divine handiwork.
Diversity is the stuff of life.
Margaret Mead, the mother of modern anthropology, declared that to cut one's self off from diversity is to cut one's self off from the human family. To draw a boundary around a single group and to declare that it is humankind, or the best of humankind, is a kind of ethnocentrism, a kind of racism, a kind of human isolationism. Humans now mirror God. The diversity of humans provide different facets on the human mirror to reflect back the face of god through different hued skins, through different languages, through different ways of valuing, through different systems of culture, etc. To cut one's self off from diversity is to cut one's self off from God and God's possibilities.