e inquiry into multi-ethnicity factors in.
And essentially a misdirected effort. As noted earlier, the ethnic mix of the United States is rich enough for any organizational entity - government, educational, corporate - to draw upon for inspiration without looking abroad. Rather than simply a tool for keeping the peace, multi-ethnic diversity training can tap into a valuable human resource. The purpose of this paper, ultimately, will be to examine and identify methods of such training that can be applied to the corporate organizational environment.
Reflecting the social trends of society as a whole introduced above, the educational establishment's approach to issues of multi-ethnic diversity training has been similarly misdirected in the past decade.
Original studies and programs were by necessity simpler: in order to break down the legal barriers of segregation, scholars sought to support the trend by placating an anxious public with research into the similarities of all peoples. It was also a necessary direction for scholarly research; centuries of "anthropological" study had pronounced non-Caucasian races inferior on the basis, quite often, of their differences. That these earlier studies were flawed by a number of factors - not the least being the inherent racism of social scientists refusing to acknowledge validity in any but the Euro-Centric perspective - does not change the fact that by the 1950s there was a large body of scholarly work existing to refute the concept of the equality of humans. Hence, scholarly research in the 1960s had the moral duty of combatting the past.
By the mid-1970s, however, research had opened up the academic world to the concept of equality - it was time to find where humankind was equal but different. Multi-ethnic diversity training programs offered minority perspectives on the American culture. The catchphrase grown from this period is "multiculturalism."
Unfortunately, the aca...