Unity In Difference

Last Wednesday, I approached my editor at The Boston Globe and asked for the rest of the week off to attend Unity '94, a minority journalism conference featuring seminars, exhibits and a job fair.

Normally, I explained, I would have given him more than one day's notice. But although I had known about this convention for months, I had felt no desire to attend until the night before, when I realized how many people were going.

"I decided I was feeling like a minority," I said.

When I made that statement, I meant it as an expression of identification with the Hispanic culture. Even though I am very proud of my Cuban heritage, I don't often voice my feelings about my culture, as I consider that side of myself essentially private.

Because I don't often participate in activities which revolve around ethnicity, my statement was also an assertion of my mood as I prepared to attend the conference--a resolve to spend a few days focusing on my ethnicity and exploring those feelings at length.

Everyone within earshot laughed when they heard my explanation, but they were reacting to what they were feeling, not to what I was trying to tell them..

While I was using the word minority in its cultural and political sense, I unwittingly used a phrasing with a double meaning. My colleagues, then, took the world in its mathematical sense.

Many reporters who are not ethnic minorities were indeed feeling like numerical minorities as they saw their colleagues leave one after the other for Atlanta, Ga.

It is a testament to the success of the conference that it could leave nonminorities wishing they too could attend the event, that it could actually go beyond bringing minorities out of the margins and actually out them in the spotlight.

And it is a testament to the journalistic community that the conference could happen at all.

The event was held jointly by four minority groups--the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Native American Journalists Association--and took more than five years to plan.

It enjoyed great national recognition, attracting not only recruiters but also the top editors of many prestigious newspapers seeking to diversify their newsrooms.

But though Unity--The Conference was indeed a success, I realized being in Atlanta that Unity--The Social State is still a long way off.

At the convention, I often came across the phrase "Unity through Diversity." Many people at the conference expressed their commitment to this ideal, or at the very least to this slogan.

But, in fact, I would have been hardpressed to create any sort of united feeling at the conference. Each ethnic group held its own separate social events. The different ethnic groups even charged different admission, making it cheaper to attend the conference for some ethnicities than for others.

Lunch, the only time of the day when all the different ethnic groups were gathered in an enclosed space, was tense. Different speakers were applauded by different contingents, depending on their ethnicity and politics.

Not even President Clinton's closed-circuit address to our conference commanded the attention of the entire group. Clinton's one remark which drew substantial attention, according to the convention publication, was referring to all those in attendance as "non-white."

But the controversy generated by this remark was not the usual one, based on the fact that Hispanics often consider themselves white. Rather, people were annoyed that the President had referred to us all as part of one category.

Some unity.

Iunderstand that some minorities have reason to feel they have been marginalized or oppressed by society at large. Because of this, I also understand why some don't believe in large unions where under-represented interests can easily get lost.

But people cannot thrive in tiny, segregated groups, subdividing every time they discover differences within them.

There is enough commonality in the experience of all ethnic minority groups to foster our unity right now.

And minority groups should support each other and work to join each other--as well as people who are not today considered minorities--in a society that does not necessitate any group's subjugating its interests, beliefs or lifestyles.