Diversity Without Divisiveness (DWD) is available for shipping starting on Nov. 11
Including You in the DWD/DEI Conversation!
If you read DWD, Minna and I would love to hear from you! Your insights, questions, and feedback will be invaluable in making future volumes of the book as useful as possible and creating a richer dialogue around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in education.
Send us email at dwdincludingyou@gmail.com to:
share your thoughts and experiences inspired by the book, ask questions about DEI practices in K-12 education, and
contribute to the refinement of best DEI practices.
We’ll post periodic responses to your contributions, fostering an interactive space for learning and growth. We look forward to your input.
How Do We Get Out
of This?
The Klein Bottle, a powerful metaphor for race - and all reductive and harmful identity constructs
Philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, encouraged us to see how our constructs, compelling though they may be, can become prisons. In this spirit he wrote, "What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle."
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A fly-bottle lures the unsuspecting fly towards a sweet substance within. Once inside the bottle, the fly is unable to navigate back out. It traps itself as a result of its inability to resist an enticement.
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The construct of race is like a fly-bottle on steroids. It's like a Klein Bottle, a topological shape described by the German mathematician, Felix Klein in 1882. Like a Mobius strip, a Klein Bottle is one continuous surface without an inside or outside. Like race, it is an impossible idea, one that can't actually be navigated, but one that we nonetheless traverse endlessly in circles, unaware that we have trapped ourselves.
