The Beginning: Moving Diversity Strategies beyond Structural Interventions

Understanding the relationship between action and reflection as referenced by Dr. Moltmann is critical to intellectual growth. I often tell the story to my students of how Dr. Alvarez and I met and the perceptions that would emerge when she and I would walk into an organization and/or academic environment. We first met in England at an organizational discourse conference. What drew us to begin talking to one another as quickly as we did was our being the only people of color in the room. Although Dr. Alvarez is a French citizen, born, raised, and educated in France, her family originated from Haiti. Consequently, our skin colors are of similar hues—which typically is one’s first identifier of difference. One of our common denominators, or microcultures, was that both of us are trained in the fields of organizational behavior and organization development. Yet, color and educational orientation were largely our only points of commonality when we first met. Noticing, acknowledging, and learning from the reactions of people when we would be together formed, as Moltmann describes, our action-reflective learning processes, which were germane to our research on diversity.