I often credit the many marginalised individuals I have had the privilege of coaching for deeply informing my EDI approach, but my personal experience of diversity and inclusion started much earlier.
In this article, I take you on a trip down memory lane in the suburbs of Paris, to meet some of the wonderful humans who shaped my early years.
I look at my first school photo: this bunch of 5-year-olds would be my friends for the next decade or so.
Their names alone tell a story: Dimitri, Conceição, Rachel, Pierre, Maribel, Farid, Sandrine, Nadia, Antonio…
To us, having mixed backgrounds was natural. The colour of our skin, the languages we spoke at home, the clothes we wore, were part of our everyday. We knew our differences (nobody was blind to them); they simply didn’t matter.
Our walk-up block of flats was just as diverse: a German lady lived on the ground floor, an Italian couple on the second, a Portuguese family on the top floor; an Israeli one here, a Caribbean one there… All with their distinct music and the mouth-watering smell of their cooking.
Big events included: the first communion of my childminder’s kids; the feast at the Moroccan restaurant when the owner celebrated his son’s Khitan; the wedding of my mixed-heritage cousins, where we did the limbo and danced the soca.
But diversity in my childhood wasn’t just cultural and religious. It was also about varying physical and cognitive abilities.
Our next-door neighbours were both profoundly deaf, and I learnt quickly how to get their attention – knocking on the door was pointless, but their home had a light connected to the doorbell. I knew to face them when we chatted. I understood their unusual speech. And I knew that, when something was really important, I needed to write it down, fast and clear.
In the next stairs, a young girl had had a brain tumour as an infant, she was blind. We kids knew to play gently with her; we were unphased by her hollow eye sockets when she was too young for prosthetics; we understood when she touched our faces to ‘read’ us. And we were truly heartbroken when the cancer came back to claim her at barely 6 years old.
At school, the special needs section supported children with significant physical impairment. Most vivid in my memory are 2 boys, best friends – one an albino, the other a major burn victim, the contrast in their appearances so striking. I understood what it meant to never be able to hide your differences, long before I could put words to it, and long before I understood the full medical implications of their respective conditions.
At the bus stop, regular as clockwork, we’d meet a man with Down syndrome on his way to the day care centre. He seemed very independent, if totally regimented. It was hard to give him an age. It turns out he was in his 50s, and a grave concern for his ageing mother who made his independence possible, and who worried about his future after she passed.
And at home, my grandfather was a leg amputee. I remember the profound effects of his disability: the loss of freedom; the excruciating phantom pain and the daily treatment for pressure sores; the dark mood; the strain on my mother and her guilt when looking after him on our home was no longer an option.
I knew first-hand that disability is complex and has far-reaching implications on individuals and families.
The socio-economic backgrounds and family circumstances in my neighbourhood were equally diverse.
Some of my school friends lived in big ‘posh’ houses; others lived in council flats.
Yet having a garden didn’t protect anyone from alcoholism. And domestic violence was no respecter of bank accounts.
Some families with too much month at the end of the money were easy to spot with their Weasley-style hand-me-downs, but you would never have guessed that the single mother of these high-achieving, always impeccable children was also struggling to make ends meet.
I learnt that, while some differences were obvious at first glance, others were not. And that judging a book by its cover was bound to be wrong.
And I understood early that appearances were no indicators of ethics or morals.
When Solange came by, clad in her skin-tight leopard print pants, revealing top and red stiletto heels, the mums tutted and the dads salivated. Yet we pre-teen girls knew we could trust this bombshell and presumed sex worker with a heart of gold far more that several predatory men who were ‘upstanding members of the community’.
In time, I would look back at my childhood experiences and recognise that acceptance and belonging, while extensive then, were far from universal.
Alongside my child-like openness to the ‘other’, I recall casual racism and common-place sexism, and a solid dose of ‘we’re tolerant, but…’.
I didn’t find out that my cousin was gay until he died of AIDS in the late 1990s. and there was no vocabulary or framework for my trans friend’s experience or for my own bisexual coming-of-age.
The same person was victimised at every community fete, the designated ‘village idiot’, and everybody laughed.
Neurodiversity was summed up as difficult kids in class and weird adults.
And while my first school photo shows a multi-ethnic microcosm, my last high school picture is far less diverse.
My world then may have been more open-minded than most, but it was no inclusive utopia. And it would take me years to decondition from the biases and prejudices I acquired in those early years.
Still, I look back fondly at this wonderful cast of characters from my childhood.
Long before I acquired the vocabulary of inclusion, I was fortunate enough to experience what a truly diverse and mostly integrated community looked like.
Many others would come along to shape my thinking about EDI. But it all started with them: my neighbours, my school friends, my family.
So when people ask when I became interested in EDI, I reply like Obelix, my fellow Gaul: ‘I fell into it when I was little!’.
