A Quote by Courtney A. Kemp
I am tired of people using 'diverse' to mean 'of color.' That's not what that word means. 'Diversity' means people of all different races, all together - like a New York City subway.
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Diversity is such an interesting word. I feel like when people hear the word 'diversity,' they think that it means only people of color, when in reality, diversity is all-inclusive; it means everyone.
I mean, being provincial is a privilege in a way. Also people in New York think everybody interacts because they all take the subway. "Oh, I see all these different people! All these different walks of life on the subway." Well, they're not coming to your dinner party. Certainly, in small-town Nebraska, everyone indeed did mix together.
We use the word 'urban' to mean black or Latino, but that's not what the word means. It actually means 'from the city.' I'm not from the city. I'm from the suburbs of Connecticut. I grew up with mostly all white people.
What it boils down to is that when you say the word Las Vegas it means something. You could say New York City and it doesn't really mean anything. When you say a word like Bangkok, in my mind it means something. There's not a lot of cities where the world literally brings a picture to your mind.
New York is so diverse. When you're on the street or in the subway, you're experiencing more of the diversity of New York.
When I'm in the city, I like to go to different events and get introduced to different people. That's what New York is all about. There is great diversity, and there are people from all over the world who have done amazing things. That's my favorite thing to do: meet new people.
People are realizing that telecommuting doesn't mean you have to be in New York City five days a week. It means that if you have to stay home for a period of time, having a nice little backyard is not a bad way to do it.
The subway in New York is a great social experiment; there are so many races and ways of life sitting together on each car.
The greatest inspiration I draw upon is, is this city (New York) and riding the subway and watching people and I find that's kind of like the best, the best acting teacher. You know, I wonder, like people who have huge celebrity, sometimes I feel bad, should this be one of their methods 'cause I don't know how they can observe life anymore, because they become the observed. So, I, I appreciate that New York can still do that.
New York is a great city. There is no question of that. It's such a diverse city. I've walked down the city and heard four or five different languages simultaneously. I think that's beautiful.
Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.
No company can say our country is great because of our diversity. They can say it but has nothing to do with it, literally nothing to do with it, how diverse you are. "Well, it just means that we don't discriminate. It means that we value all people." Fine and dandy. But unless your company makes something or has a service and you have an atmosphere where people working for you can become the best they can be, it doesn't matter what your workforce looks like, dummkopf.
New York means many different things to me. It certainly means cheesecake, more species of cheesecake than I ever knew existed: rum, orange, hazelnut, chocolate marble, Italian, Boston, and of course, New York.
The word "federalism" you might think that means federalism trumps everything; federalism means federal domination. It does not mean that. It means the exact opposite, in fact. It means the states are sovereign and the federal government cannot tell 'em what to do in so many different ways.
The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.
For me, if a company is really committed to diversity, that means everything. That means gender diversity, that means sexual orientation for me, that means race, ethnicity.
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