More than meets

They needed a new photo to update the nursery school brochure. I was proofreading it, and the designer had put in as a placeholder one she already had, of her own daughter and three friends sitting on a rock by the lake on one of the previous year's field trips. It was a beautiful picture of four lovely children.

But it needed to be replaced, because it wasn't diverse enough.

Our school is diverse. We have kids from many countries, cultures, and backgrounds. But at first glance, this photo was of two boys and two girls, two blond, two brunette, all Caucasian. If only we could have told the whole story.

In fact, between those four children, there were two European parents, two black parents, one Armenian-Canadian parent, and a lesbian-parent couple, as well as a smattering of native-to-this-city genes, because people who grow up here often love it so much that they stay right where they were planted.

So the lovely picture had to be replaced with something more conventionally diverse - a white kid, a black kid, an Asian kid, and perhaps an Indian one; we have all those to hand, easily. Of course, it was not so easy to get the appropriately-melanined kids to sit, look at the camera, smile, be photogenic, all at once, on command, but it was managed.

I suppose all I want to say here is that diversity is more than what you see in front of you. Don't go making assumptions.