ABSTRACT
“Diversity” is one of those ordinary words that on passing into public discourse become freighted with meanings and overtones conflating the descriptive and the normative. Unlike alienation, diversity is represented as a social condition deemed desirable, to be encouraged to the extent of promoting policies extending it throughout American society. While its literal meaning is purely descriptive, “cultural pluralism” and, more ambiguously and uncertainly, “cultural relativism,” both of them ideas with a long history of favorable connotations in the intellectual world, have been invoked to justify it. “Diversity” in this respect resembles other words, whether referring to approved or deplored phenomena that have diffused from academic and intellectual parlance to the wider public. The celebration of diversity was seen as a response to the alleged increasing diversification of American society the reality of which is still regularly asserted today.
