In public health, we talk a fair bit about diversity. This conversation is consistent with the broader goals of our field. Our mission is to serve populations with many different backgrounds and perspectives. Engaging with a range of groups—with all of us as different people united in our shared humanity—means celebrating the diversity we reflect, and working to ensure this engagement is fully inclusive. I have written previously about diversity, including in The Healthiest Goldfish. At perhaps the most basic level, a commitment to diversity calls on us to ensure that the public health community is a welcoming space for people of many races, religions, nationalities, and expressions of gender/sexual identity. This strikes me as a necessary condition for our efforts, worth pursuing, always, as a key priority.
But diversity does not just mean diversity of identity. It also means diversity of opinion. A benefit to having communities of people with different backgrounds and identities is that each person has a unique perspective they can bring to bear on the conversations that happen in these spaces. These perspectives can sharpen our collective thinking, helping us to do what we do better. It is important to note that diversity of identity is often closely linked to diversity of opinion, but one does not invariably follow the other. The deciding factor is whether or not we value viewpoint diversity enough to encourage it the same way we encourage diversity of identity.
Read the full post on The Healthiest Goldfish.