Equity spans all sorts of activities besides race and class. For another example. My wife, of Indian origins, is a Hindu. There have been more than enough work events, usually involving food, that she has gone to where she is pressured to attend, but the food is inevitably meat-centered. She is more forgiving of that than I am (I have gotten to be militant about both food and bicycling infrastructure because otherwise, the prevailing paradigm misses the point). One is left with the notion that the people running the events want diversity, but lack the cultural sensitivity to know when they are being exclusive to their own identity and culture. Try being a Hindu (or a Muslim, or a vegetarian) and going to a company party where the managers order nothing but barbequed pig. “Oh,just scrape off the meat”. Yeah, sure…..

Likewise, when cities persist in concentrating on transportation diversity in the politically powerful gentrified areas, they too miss the point–we leave a lot of people heading for the exits rather than staying for the tunes.

I was a kid in the Inner City of Buffalo, N.Y. Before the Kensington Expressway was built, it was easy for us to walk to school. Once that huge ditch was blasted into the ground, there was a giant moat between our neighborhood and our school (School #39, now called the Martin Luther King Multicultural Institute) and it was tough to walk to school. Yet another example of cultural imperialism or cultural hegemony, sacrificing the neighborhoods of the inner city to the convenience of the more economically powerful ‘burbs.

Well, like most of the honkies in that neighborhood, my parents eventually joined the white flight to the ‘burbs. But that lesson of sacrifice and subsequent neglect imposed on the Inner City wasn’t lost on me entirely–I saw similar inequity in Honolulu for the same reasons. We have a lot to un-do and re-do. How do we learn to listen, create diversified solutions (equity), and share our resources, not to mention play other people’s music?