Diversity and Discrimination
多様性と差別

Diversity is not in the number of faces shown in a group photograph. It is in the time before the photograph is taken. A company page may show people with different backgrounds smiling beside one another. A school brochure may show students of different genders, nationalities, and ages. A museum statement may call the building open to everyone. Yet the photograph does not show the cost of getting there, the language of the application, the time of the meeting, the documents required at the entrance, the childcare that had to be arranged, or the people who gave up before they appeared in the frame.

Diversity is often spoken about as if it were a generous attitude toward people who are different. The word now appears on company pages, school policies, museum statements, festival guidelines, and event announcements. It is easy to agree with, which is why it can also become vague. Before kindness, representation, or creativity, there is a more concrete question: who is assumed by the design of a room, a screen, a price, a language, a schedule, a law, or an archive.

This text starts from that slower point. Diversity is not treated here as a completed moral achievement, but as a set of conditions that allow different bodies, histories, languages, incomes, disabilities, speeds, and degrees of confidence to remain in the same field without being forced into one shape. Gathering people in one place and allowing them to stay there as themselves are not the same thing.

The discussion will eventually return to art and music, but not because this is a problem for creators alone. Works, performances, exhibitions, workshops, schools, platforms, workplaces, borders, and public memory all depend on what happens before participation becomes visible. If an entrance is narrow enough, entire lives, jobs, movements, memories, and forms of expression may never appear as missing.

From here, the text moves through majority and minority, sexism, structural discrimination, accessibility, DEI, AI bias, racism, labor and movement, eugenics, public memory, and the responsibility of expression. These topics may look separate, but each one touches the conditions that exist before learning, work, movement, memory, or expression can begin.

A useful first example is not a festival, a company policy, or an exhibition, but a child walking to school. The painting placed here returns the question of diversity to the entrance of education. The American illustrator Norman Rockwell made The Problem We All Live With in 1964. At the center of the image is Ruby Bridges, an African American child who became one of the symbolic figures of school desegregation in the American South. She was six years old when she walked to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on November 14, 1960. Federal marshals accompanied her.

She was not performing a symbolic act in a museum. She was trying to go to school. What should have been an ordinary walk became a public scene because the school itself had been organized as a place where a particular child was not supposed to appear. If diversity begins only after a class, a concert, or an exhibition starts, it arrives too late. The problem has already appeared at the door.

This story is not important only because it belongs to the history of the United States. It shows that an institution may say school, knowledge, childhood, or citizenship while silently deciding which body those words were made for. A door can be open in an architectural sense and still be closed by custom, fear, law, and violence. Diversity therefore has to be read not only inside the room, but also in the path that leads to it.

Education distributes knowledge, but it also decides what will be called standard. A school may teach one national history as if it were the natural outline of the world, one language as if it were the grammar of thought itself, and one model of success as if it were the only shape intelligence can take. Other memories, forms of speech, and ways of knowing are then treated as supplementary or exceptional.

Organizations do not need to announce exclusion in order to exclude. They may schedule meetings late at night, reward only those who can speak quickly, call unpaid preparation passion, assume a healthy body, or treat the performance of confidence learned in childhood as ability. The place looks neutral, but it gradually selects who can remain without becoming exhausted.

Creative settings show the same mechanism in a smaller form. The loudest person speaks first. Experienced participants already know the software shortcuts. Those who cannot stay late leave before the important informal conversation begins. Someone who needs written instructions is treated as slow. No one may intend to discriminate, yet the room gradually selects the bodies and temperaments that can survive its speed.

For creators, diversity is not a theme attached to a completed work. It is closer to tuning the room before the performance. Who can buy equipment, return safely after a late show, read the form, or say that a workshop is too loud, too fast, or too long? If creativity is supposed to grow from difference, difference has to survive the room before it can become form.

Majority and minority are not fixed moral categories. They are positions made by numbers, institutions, history, visibility, and power. A person may belong to the majority in one setting and the minority in another. Still, when the majority position becomes the invisible default, minorities are often asked to explain themselves before they are allowed to participate.

The Dinner Party, a large scale installation by the American feminist artist Judy Chicago, makes this problem visible through a table. The work is arranged as a triangular ceremonial banquet with thirty nine place settings for important women in history, while another 999 names are inscribed on the floor. It is not only a monument to women. It is a work about the mechanism by which names are seated at the table of history or left outside the room.

The history of art is not simply a sequence of talented individuals. It is also a history of who was recorded, who was taught, whose archive survived, whose work could be stored, whose name was attached to the work, and whose labor remained anonymous. A minority is not always excluded by direct violence. Sometimes it is excluded by failing to be remembered.

Race, religion, gender, disability, age, nationality, language, economic condition, and migration status have repeatedly been used as grounds for exclusion. The Holocaust, apartheid in South Africa, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Rohingya crisis show that the persecution of minorities is not a closed chapter. It returns whenever a society treats one group as the natural owner of the public sphere.

Assimilation policy and colonial administration often speak through the language of order, education, civilization, and efficiency. From the side of the ruling group, domination is described as contribution. From the side of the ruled, it may mean losing language, land, memory, religion, family structure, and bodily safety.

Art history and music history are not outside this movement. Many changes in twentieth century art, music, design, and thought were shaped by people forced to move through war, antisemitism, colonial violence, and political persecution. Modernism was not produced only by free individuals inventing new styles. It also contains the memory of broken institutions, forced movement, and cultural reconstruction in another place.

When a majority mistakes its own habit for universality, culture becomes poorer. When minority positions can speak without being absorbed into the grammar of the majority, culture regains complexity.

After thinking about majority and minority as positions made by memory and institutions, sexism can also be read less as a private attitude and more as a long arrangement of labor, care, property, and authority. Sexism should not be reduced to hostile attitudes toward women. It has organized property, inheritance, family, labor, education, citizenship, and the distribution of care. It is more accurate to locate it in institutional history than to say vaguely that it has existed since the beginning of humanity.

The modern workplace did not appear as a neutral space. It was often built on the assumption that someone else would handle childbirth, childcare, elder care, housework, emotional support, and recovery. Once that unpaid work is treated as natural, the paid labor market can look meritocratic while depending on an invisible gendered foundation.

Gender equality cannot be told as a simple story of progress. UN Women states that no country has reached full legal equality for women and girls, and it also warns that backlash threatens gains already achieved. Rights do not become stable because they are written down once. Budgets, courts, schools, religious pressure, media systems, platform moderation, and labor policy keep rewriting them.

Typical forms of sexism include wage gaps, unequal promotion, the uneven burden of care, restricted access to education, sexual harassment, gender based violence, and political underrepresentation. But if these are treated only as separate issues, the structure becomes hard to see. A society can praise equality while assigning interruption, fear, care, risk, and explanation to particular bodies.

In art and music, sexism does not appear only in the number of exhibitions, bookings, publications, or festival slots. It also appears in who is called a genius and who is called difficult. Who is expected to smooth the atmosphere? Who is treated as an assistant without authorship? Whose anger is interpreted as lack of professionalism? Even in fields that speak of freedom, sexism remains when only a narrow kind of person is allowed to be intense, solitary, obsessive, or uncompromising.

In a studio or rehearsal room this can be very small at first. Someone brings the cables, someone keeps the schedule, someone smooths the atmosphere, someone writes down the decisions, and someone else is later remembered as the author of the idea. The problem is not only that a woman is excluded from the stage. It is also that the work required to make the stage function is often separated from authorship and treated as natural support.

A room can exclude even when no one inside it thinks of themselves as exclusionary. Structural discrimination is difficult to notice because it often works without a visible villain. Nobody has to say that someone should be removed. The room, schedule, evaluation system, network, software, and inherited habit may already be doing the work.

Privilege is not only a personal advantage that someone consciously uses. It is also the ability to move without explanation. To enter a gallery without being watched. To speak in a meeting without representing an entire group. To make a mistake and have it treated as a mistake, not as evidence that people like you do not belong there.

A person who enters a gallery without being watched may never notice that the entrance is doing work. A person who is asked why they are there notices it immediately. The same door produces different institutions depending on the body that passes through it. Structural discrimination often hides in this difference between passing and explaining.

This is why the word reverse discrimination often appears when a correction is attempted. People who have not noticed the assistance given to them by the existing structure may experience any adjustment as loss. But not every loss of automatic advantage is discrimination. Sometimes it is simply the first time a system has become visible to those who benefited from its invisibility.

In creative fields, structural discrimination can appear as who can afford unpaid internships, who can move to a city, who can stay after midnight, who can fail for several years, who can network casually, and who has parents, partners, or institutions that absorb risk. Talent is real, but it rarely travels alone. It moves with rent, health, transport, time, language, and permission.

To think structurally is not to erase individual responsibility. It is to stop pretending that individual effort begins from the same ground. Once the ground is uneven, fairness cannot be measured only by the height of the jump.

After structural discrimination is understood as a matter of entrances, timetables, bodies, and invisible rules, accessibility can no longer be treated as a kind addition. Stairs, captions, application forms, lighting, sound volume, rest spaces, and the permission to leave and return all decide who can meet a work before the work itself begins.

Imagine that someone sees an announcement for a lecture or a live performance and wants to go. The page has beautiful images but no clear access information. The form cannot be read properly by a screen reader. The video has no captions. The venue says nothing about elevators or quiet space. At that point the person has not yet encountered the work, but the work has already refused an encounter.

For creators this should not be treated as administrative detail. A score decides when a performer enters and when a sound stops. In the same way a website, a ticket form, a timetable, a light level, a sound level, and the permission to leave and return decide who can be part of the event. Accessibility is another layer of composition.

In Japan, the revised Act for Eliminating Discrimination against Persons with Disabilities made reasonable accommodation by private businesses a legal obligation from April 2024. In Europe, the European Accessibility Act started to apply in June 2025. These changes matter because they move accessibility away from optional goodwill and toward the conditions of participation.

Digital technology can open doors, but it can also create new locks. A website may look beautiful and still be unreadable. A ticket system may be efficient and still exclude someone who cannot use a specific payment method. An AI interview system may look neutral and still misunderstand speech, eye contact, hesitation, fatigue, or atypical communication.

Neurodiversity also requires attention to rhythm. Some people are exhausted by constant sound, bright light, vague instructions, rapid conversation, long social performance, or rules that are never written down. A quiet room, written instructions, flexible breaks, slower pacing, predictable schedules, and permission to leave are not decorative care. They are part of the score of the event.

If a work, lecture, exhibition, or live performance claims openness while the entrance, form, sound volume, lighting, language, and timetable quietly select the audience, then openness remains only an image. Who can arrive, read, hear, rest, ask, refuse, and return? This is also a question of form.

Consider a grant application, a university admission page, or a hiring form. The requirements may look neutral: portfolio, statement, recommendation, previous record, English presentation, mobility history. Yet before those items appear on the screen, someone has already had time, equipment, documentation, mentors, safety, and language training.

The word DEI often appears when institutions try to speak about these uneven conditions. It can sound administrative and sometimes becomes a convenient label that hides the actual work. The work itself is more concrete: who receives preparation, who receives trust, who is assumed to be promising, who can explain their experience in the language the institution recognizes, and who has already been made legible before the selection begins.

In 2026, diversity policy is also attacked through the language of meritocracy, reverse discrimination, religious freedom, free speech, national unity, and efficiency. This backlash is part of the present definition of equality, not a side issue. In the United States, executive action in 2025 described federal DEI programs as wasteful and discriminatory and directed agencies to dismantle related programs. The example matters because it makes the conflict visible, but the question is not confined to American politics.

Diversity measures can collide with admissions, hiring standards, budgets, religious values, public opinion, and administrative simplification in any society. The question is not whether the word DEI itself should be protected like a brand. The more difficult question is whether institutions are calling accumulated advantage neutral.

In art, this conflict often appears quietly. Applications require portfolios, English statements, exhibition records, recommendations, and the ability to travel. These items look neutral because they can be listed on a page. Yet each one may contain a history: whether someone had time to make work, whether documentation was possible, whether a mentor was available, whether travel was safe, whether the language of seriousness was learned early enough.

Meritocracy is necessary when it prevents arbitrary favoritism. But when it refuses to look at the conditions that produce measurable merit, where does it become ideology? A portfolio and an examination can measure real ability, but they can also preserve the circumstances that made some abilities easier to display. The problem begins when the measurement forgets its own frame.

A person submits an application, uploads a track, posts an image, or sends a portfolio to a platform. Nothing dramatic happens. No one shouts. No one says that the work is forbidden. It simply receives a lower score, is ranked below similar submissions, is not recommended, is filtered early, or remains unread. The selection that once appeared as institutional procedure now appears as software behavior.

AI can make discrimination harder to see because it appears not as insult or anger but as scores, rankings, recommendations, screening results, and moderation decisions. A person may not be directly rejected. They may simply become less visible or be treated as hard for the system to understand.

A well known corporate case is useful for understanding this. Amazon, the American technology company that also operates large scale cloud and e commerce platforms, once experimented with an AI recruiting system. Reuters reported in 2018 that the company had abandoned the tool after it showed bias against women. The machine did not need to hate anyone. It learned from past hiring patterns and treated that history as a model for future selection.

This is close to what happens on platforms for music and images. A track is not rejected. It is simply not recommended. A work is not censored. It is simply not surfaced. A scene is not erased. It becomes too small to be measured. In such a situation visibility is no longer only a matter of taste or quality. It is shaped by systems that learn what culture has already chosen to keep visible.

The EU AI Act, which entered into force on 1 August 2024 and brings many provisions into application on 2 August 2026, treats some AI systems in areas such as employment, education, and access to essential services as high risk. The law matters, but the artistic problem is wider. AI does not only decide who gets hired or rejected. It also helps decide what is seen, archived, recommended, copied, and remembered.

A playlist recommendation, a search result, a thumbnail ranking, a grant form screened by software, a platform moderation rule, or a generative model trained on past culture can all change the conditions of visibility. Discrimination no longer needs to appear as a direct refusal at the door. It may appear as an interface that never brings someone to the door at all.

The problem of generative AI is not only whose works were used for training. It is also whose works were never archived enough to be used. Voices that were not recorded, languages that were not searchable, bodies that were not photographed, music that was not distributed, local scenes that were never documented, and failures that did not become data will disappear again inside the model. AI reconstructs the past, but the past was never preserved equally.

For creators, the question is not whether technology is good or bad. A sampler, a preset, a Max patch, or a model can become a material through selection, placement, editing, and context. But if the dataset and interface silently decide what counts as culture, then artistic judgment begins after a selection has already been made elsewhere.

After looking at institutions and software, it is necessary to return to the longer history of racial hierarchy and labor. Racism is one of the most destructive forms of discrimination in modern history, yet not every form of discrimination can be reduced to racism. Here racism is treated not as an isolated subject but as a mechanism for reading exploitation, ranking, and dehumanization.

Colonial rule and industrialization depended heavily on slavery. Racism was strengthened because it helped justify economic systems built on forced labor, extraction, and cheap bodies. The benefits were not confined to Europe. Fast fashion, food production, mineral supply chains, and global logistics still connect ordinary consumption to unequal labor conditions far away from the consumer.

It is easy to imagine slavery as a past institution because history textbooks often place it in a distant century. Yet the cheap shirt, the food on the table, the mineral inside a phone, and the delivery that arrives too quickly can all be connected to conditions that the buyer never sees. Low price can become a screen that hides who could not move, who could not refuse a contract, who could not read the language of the agreement, or who carried a debt before work even began.

The International Labour Organization estimates that in 2021, 50 million people were living in modern slavery, including 28 million in forced labor and 22 million in forced marriage. These are estimates, but they remind us that slavery as a legal institution may have ended while slavery as a reality has not disappeared.

Japan also has to be read inside this history. The Technical Intern Training Program has repeatedly been criticized for wage violations, restrictions on transfer, excessive dependence on employers, and debt created before migration. In 2024, labor standards violations were found at 73.2 percent of inspected technical intern trainee workplaces and 76.4 percent of inspected specified skilled worker workplaces. The system is scheduled to be replaced by the Employment for Skill Development System, but a change of name will not solve exploitation if mobility, consultation, language access, debt, and employer power remain unchanged.

Can we really say that our clothes, food, devices, delivery services, and cultural consumption are free from structures that use weaker bodies for profit? Diversity begins when the invisible cost of comfort becomes visible. It begins when people are not consumed as material, labor, symbols, or aesthetic flavor, but recognized as subjects with memory and rights.

Racism and labor exploitation lead directly to the question of movement. Contemporary discrimination cannot be understood only as a domestic relation between people who already share the same territory. War, climate crisis, border control, refugee recognition, residence status, language access, and labor markets decide who can move, who is trapped, who is welcomed, and who is accepted only as labor.

According to UNHCR, by the end of 2024 there were 123.2 million forcibly displaced people in the world as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, and events seriously disturbing public order. This is a humanitarian statistic, but it is also a description of a world in which the right to remain, the right to leave, and the right to be recognized are unevenly distributed.

Migrants and refugees are often described through usefulness. Labor shortage, population decline, security risk, cultural friction, and administrative burden may sound like practical categories, yet they decide whether a person is seen as a worker, a threat, a victim, a number, or a neighbor. A border is not only a line on a map. It is a sorting system connected to language, skin, passport, class, religion, and employment.

The contradiction is visible in many cities. A neighborhood may feel attractive because of music, food, languages, small shops, places of prayer, signs written in several scripts, and rhythms of life carried by migrants. At the same time, the same city may consume that culture as atmosphere while pushing those same bodies back into overcrowded housing, unstable work, police checks, difficult school systems, and insecure residence status. Is that acceptance of diversity, or only the consumption of diversity?

For artistic practice, movement is not only a theme to be represented. It changes form itself. When people move, rhythms, food, rituals, slang, design, gestures, and ways of performing also move. Receiving cultural energy and protecting the bodies that carry it are not the same thing, and that contradiction has to be heard inside the work as well.

Eugenics may be one of the most dangerous ideas produced by modernity. It did not arise only from ignorance. It borrowed the language of science, efficiency, national strength, public health, inheritance, productivity, and optimization. That is why it can return wearing contemporary words.

Eugenics judges human value by biological, genetic, intellectual, bodily, or productive criteria, then imagines that reproduction and survival should be managed according to those criteria. In the twentieth century, this logic was tied to forced sterilization, racial hygiene, disability discrimination, colonial administration, and genocide.

Japan also has a history that cannot be placed outside this discussion. Under the former Eugenic Protection Law, many people underwent sterilization and related procedures because of illness or disability. The 2025 White Paper on Persons with Disabilities describes the government's response to this history and the compensation framework adopted after years of litigation and testimony. This is not only a matter of past policy. It shows how easily a society can turn the language of health, burden, and normality into a technique for controlling bodies.

It is too easy to say that eugenics ended with the defeat of fascism. The doctrine was discredited, but its grammar can survive. When society speaks only in terms of productivity, burden, optimization, ranking, selection, and cost, it begins to produce an atmosphere in which some lives look less worth protecting.

The COVID 19 pandemic made the problem visible again through discussions of triage and medical scarcity. Triage in emergency medicine is not automatically eugenics. But when age, disability, social usefulness, or productivity becomes a shortcut for deciding whose life matters, the logic moves dangerously close to it.

Racehorse breeding, crop improvement, and Pokémon egg selection cannot be used as models for human life. Human beings have rights, histories, dependencies, weakness, and value that cannot be reduced to performance. Art should know this well. Many works that changed culture were not efficient, profitable, healthy, majoritarian, or immediately useful. Protecting diversity also means protecting forms of existence that cannot be justified by productivity.

If eugenics shows how societies have tried to manage bodies, public memory shows how societies manage what will be remembered after bodies are gone. Recording history and honoring a historical figure are different acts. Keeping an object in a museum and placing it at the center of a public square are also different. The question is not simply whether the past should be erased or preserved. The question is where, with what context, and with whose pain the past is made visible.

Law is careful about judging the past through rules written later. Public memory is another matter. A statue, a museum wall label, a textbook, a search result, or a platform screen is always choosing which memory remains visible and which pain becomes background noise. The removal of monuments after Black Lives Matter, including monuments to the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus, who sailed under the Spanish crown and became one of the symbolic figures of European colonization of the Americas, is not simply the erasure of history. It can also be read as a struggle over who has the right to edit the memory of public space.

This distinction matters because debates about discrimination, monuments, exhibitions, boycotts, and cancellation often collapse several questions into one. A work may have historical value and still need critical framing. A monument may preserve memory for one group while repeating humiliation for another. A museum can show violence without celebrating it, but only if the display structure does not turn violence into spectacle again.

Museum ethics also concerns how an object arrived where it is. Provenance research verifies ownership, but it also rereads histories of colonial rule, looting, war, sale, donation, and silence. To preserve a work is not the same as legitimizing possession without question.

A short museum caption can change the way an object is seen. The same sculpture may appear as beauty, loot, evidence, inheritance, commodity, or wound depending on whether the label says who made it, who removed it, who sold it, who donated it, and who has been asking for its return. The object itself has not changed, but the frame around it has begun to speak.

This is why provenance is not a bureaucratic appendix to art history. It is a method for listening to the silence around an object. A work can be preserved and still require restitution. It can be exhibited and still require a change in language. It can be admired and still require an account of the violence that made admiration possible.

Freedom of expression is not a license to make discrimination harmless by calling it art. At the same time, a culture that tries to remove every dangerous expression may create another kind of institutional silence. Art is not a place for safe answers only. But using another person’s pain as material does not automatically become critique.

The task is not to purify expression. Purity often becomes another form of control. The task is to make the conditions of expression visible. Who speaks? Who is spoken about? Who gains? Who is exposed to danger? Who can refuse? After the exhibition, performance, publication, or post is over, who carries the result?

Diversity is not a badge proving ethical correctness. It is closer to a set of conditions that determine who can learn, work, move, create, fail, be misunderstood, recover, and remain visible. Those conditions are made by platforms and borders, by labor contracts and access standards, by public funding and archives, by forms, school gates, museum captions, and recommendation systems.

Discrimination is easiest to miss when it does not look like hatred. A standard body, a language readily trusted, a strong passport, an unquestioned family model, an uninterrupted career, a sustainable pace of work, and evidence institutions can easily recognize all appear as ordinary background. The more neutral a system claims to be, the more carefully its low frequencies have to be heard.

The scenes in this text are not separate moral examples. A child walking to school under federal protection, a missing seat at the historical table, an applicant filtered by a hiring model, a visitor stopped by a form, a culture welcomed as urban atmosphere while the people who carry it remain insecure, and a work displayed without explaining how it arrived in the museum all point to the same anterior space.

Before a work, there is a venue. Before the venue, there is a road. Before the road, there are time, money, language, safety, documents, and the body that has to pass through them. If someone is stopped there, freedom of expression cannot be discussed only inside the work.

The ethics of a work does not end inside the work. It also belongs to the conditions under which the work appears, circulates, is interpreted, and acts on other bodies. Art history and music history have moved when excluded bodies, displaced memories, minor languages, damaged technologies, and sounds once treated as illegitimate entered the field. Noise becomes music. Error becomes method. What had been placed at the margin can shake the center, but this never happens automatically.

Difference has to survive long enough to become form. That survival is supported not by inspiration alone, but by budgets, access, safety, archives, time, and people willing to keep listening before they understand. To think about discrimination is therefore not only to acquire a correct attitude. It is to examine the world before expression begins. Diversity is a technique for refusing to place that examination outside production.

This essay may still contain omissions, blind spots, or careless wording. If you notice an error or a missing perspective, please use the form below.