It occurs to me there is a difference between recognizing diversity and the institutionalization of it. I would propose, in the current iteration of “diversity, the former attribute is assimilative, the latter is segregationist.
There is also a difference between diversity of culture, something that is a product of environment, and diversity of race, which is a product of DNA.
I have never understood trying to populate any entity or organization to make it “look like America”, approaching such an activity by using a quota system. Anyone pushing that idea is counting on people believing skin color matters more than intellect and a history of performance.
Just because one is born white, black, brown, yellow or any other race does not immediately imbue one with some sort of special wisdom and because you have white skin, it does not mean you cannot understand other cultures. For example, no matter your skin color, poverty sucks. That is a common denominator. Being black and poor is no different than being white and poor.
I grew up poor in rural Mississippi, so is it possible I might understand more about what progressives call “the black experience” than say, a black American who went to Occidental College, graduated from Columbia and Harvard Law and became president?
I have also always found it curious that while the multi-racial president never missed an opportunity to identify himself as black and condemn “white nationalists”, it was the advantages of a wealthy white grandmother that sent him to the exclusive, private college prep Punahou School in Hawaii, combined with advantages created by western civilization and culture that put him on the path to becoming a two-term president of the most powerful nation on earth.
Elites (and those who presume they are) use the term “lived experience” to segregate people along racial lines, assuming that the same conditions are experienced differently by people of different races. When they do, what they are saying is that unless you have lived the same life as another person, primarily another minority, you should just sit down and STFU – but in reality “lived experience” is more cultural than intellectual - and has nothing to do with race.
This perspective becomes dangerously existential when postmodernism and its premise that there is no universal or objective truth is added to the mix. To assume any individual has a personal truth that is superior to objective truth is a fallacy that leads to absurdity. To assume one person’s “lived experience” grants them nobility or superiority over another is similarly absurd.
In just one more example of the contradictory nature of progressivism, they use the idea of “inclusion” and "diversity", to exclude and separate, creating exactly the opposite of the situations they claim to desire.