Diversity Is Not Just the Differences You Like: Multicultural Leadership in the Age of Identity Politics

A long-time diversity activist, Patel reflects on his own past experiences and what he sees on campuses now to inspire young leaders to build positive pluralist coalitions.

We are in a molten era, a time of both danger and possibility, Eboo Patel writes in Diversity Is Not Just the Differences You Like. A renowned Muslim interfaith leader and diversity activist, a regular speaker on college campuses, and founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, Patel has been deeply involved with efforts to build bridges between diverse communities for almost twenty years. But the election of Donald Trump has created--or fanned--a national crisis, a hardening of positions and identities that can seem to be based on the annihilation of the other.

There has been no shortage of discussion about this crisis in recent years. There have been countless campaigns against racism and treatise-length critiques of identity politics; pleas for idealistic patriotism and justifications of MAGA nationalism; cautions about growing polarization and jeremiads about seizing the moment for revolution.

Looking carefully at the intricacies of the current campus crises around identity politics, cancel culture, and safe spaces versus free speech, Patel writes to inspire young activists to be the kind of leaders who can build something better and to help universities nurture them. Building something better, he writes, is always harder than burning something down, and diversity work is not just about engaging the differences you like. To be an effective multicultural leader in the world's first mass level diverse democracy in an era of identity politics means meeting that challenge.