Say you're doing a site visit for an association's national conference. The head of the conferences division who is taking you around the convention center points to banners and signage for a corporate meeting going on at the time, and explains how you could do the same with your promotions. Then she adds, “as long as there's no nudity.”

Hard to imagine, isn't it? But that's exactly what happened to Justin Nelson, president and co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce recently. “I was floored,” he says. “I asked if she said that to the corporate group whose banners we were looking at, and she said no. When I asked why she said it to me, she had no answer.” At least, not one she was willing to own up to.

Now that so many associations are jumping on the demographic trends outlined in the box on page 22, multiculturally friendly meetings are gaining prominence. But inclusivity is not easy because, no matter how strong your diversity committee is, it's made up of humans. And all humans discriminate, says Asheville, N.C.-based Patricia Digh, co-founder of The Circle Project, which uses art, story, and theater to help individuals build more inclusive communities. It's hard-wired into the human brain to be most comfortable around those who are most like you — and to make assumptions and judgments about those who aren't like you. It's OK to admit that.

What's not OK, she adds, is acting on these assumptions without first recognizing that they exist, and then educating yourself about whether they're based on reality or not. If you don't, you run the risk of yanking the welcome rug right out from under the very people you hope to attract.

The Perspective Deficit

“It's important to find out where your perspective deficit is so you can compensate for it,” says Greg Fine, CAE, director of communications and marketing with the Association Forum of Chicagoland, Chicago. But that can be difficult, because that deficit is just as likely to spring from the unconscious as from the conscious, according to LeRoy Thompson, managing director of Springfield, Va.-based Top Management Assistance, which provides diversity audits to all kinds of organizations. “Some people just don't want to deal with diversity-related problems, but often, people just haven't had enough exposure to the issues to think about the implications of the decisions they make.”

Writing About Inclusion

While minority groups aren't immune to having biases about other groups, many of the challenges come because “we're trying to do diversity work from a dominant culture perspective,” says Digh. That's because, anecdotally at least, the majority of nonminority association boards, executives, and meeting planners still are members of the dominant culture — white, heterosexual, middle-class, and Christian.

This majority orientation can lead associations to all kinds of assumptions that need to be examined, one of which is that everyone in a minority group is alike. “We tend to treat minority groups monolithically, not as a community of individuals as varied as we in the dominant culture are,” Digh adds.

Think about food, for example. Meetings regularly feature, say, a Hispanic-themed banquet, or an Asian luncheon. “But if I were going to do a buffet that celebrated white Americans, your first question would be, ‘Why would I do that?’” says Digh. After all, there is no white American cuisine; it's a cornucopia of Italian, French, German, etc., foods. And that's exactly the point, she says. Hispanic cuisine is not just tacos and burritos, but the food of all Spanish-speaking countries. Asian cuisine is not just fried rice and egg rolls, or sushi, but what people eat in the 62 Asian countries and dependencies, from Afghanistan to Yemen. “We need to allow the same level of specificity and texture and richness and variety for other groups of people as we do for our own group,” says Digh.

More food for thought: No meeting planner in her right mind would do a February Black History Month buffet with fried chicken and watermelon, because it's a stereotype that this is what blacks eat, and also, this stereotype has been used historically to portray African Americans in a bad light. But it can be trickier when the stereotype isn't laden with negative symbolism. For example, is offering Taco Bell-style burritos for a Mexican buffet minimizing the cuisine of Mexico to what white Americans think Mexicans eat, or would the people of Mexican descent in your group also consider it representative of that country? You may find out that it's perfectly fine, but you'll never know for sure if you don't ask.

Sometimes you may find you're just too close to a diversity-related problem to see it, much less deal with it. “My culture is normal to me, and I don't question it because I grew up with it. It's my blind spot,” says Digh. “Like in a car, the best way to see around a blind spot is to have someone else in the car with you. One of the questions I always ask is, ‘Who else should be at the table?’” This could be someone else in your organization who comes from a different background or who volunteers. Sometimes it makes sense to call in a professional in diversity issues who can keep the focus on what it takes to make the organization more productive, rather than create defensiveness, says Nelson.

“If you only have a few attendees of a certain culture, you don't necessarily have to change the agenda to accommodate them,” says Hala Durrah, founder and president, Fusion Event Management Services, Bowie, Md. “But if you have 50, 100, 200, you have to accommodate them.” And it shouldn't be difficult to find out just who's coming. Joan Eisenstodt of Eisenstodt and Associates, Washington, D.C., says, “Survey your audience. Most professional societies know from human resources statistics what their demographics are. Use the Internet, use your listservs. We have access to so much information these days. It's not like it's 1950.”