Cultural diversity is one of those phrases we hear so often that we rarely stop to ask what it means. The answer turns out to be older, stranger and far more hopeful than the slogans suggest.

Walk down almost any main street in New Jersey and you can hear it before you can name it. Spanish drifting out of a bakery, Haitian Creole at the barbershop, Gujarati in the grocery aisle, Portuguese over the counter of a churrasqueira in the Ironbound. This is cultural diversity in its everyday clothes, and it can seem like a purely modern condition, a product of jet travel and open borders. In fact it is one of the oldest facts of human life. Cultures have been meeting, borrowing and blending for as long as people have moved, and people have always moved. What follows is an attempt to define the term plainly, to trace how the mixing actually happened, to see why art has so often been the meeting place, and to be honest about the arguments, because a subject this rich deserves better than platitudes.

What cultural diversity actually means

At its simplest, cultural diversity means the presence of many distinct ways of being human within one world, one country or one town. A culture is the whole inherited toolkit a community uses to make sense of life, its language and religion, its food and music, its manners, jokes, festivals and ideas about what a good life looks like. Diversity is what happens when more than one of these toolkits exists side by side. UNESCO puts it in grander language, describing cultural diversity as the common heritage of humanity, as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature. The comparison is worth pausing on. An ecosystem with one species is not really an ecosystem at all, and a world with one culture would be similarly brittle, a monoculture in the agricultural sense, vulnerable to every blight.

Two clarifications keep the definition honest. First, cultural diversity is not merely a head count of ethnicities. A city can contain fifty nationalities who never speak to one another, and that is variety without exchange, a filing cabinet rather than a conversation. Diversity begins to matter when the toolkits are actually opened, compared and shared. Second, cultures are not sealed containers with fixed contents. Every living culture is already a blend of earlier meetings, which is why the search for a perfectly pure tradition, in any country, always ends in disappointment. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has spent much of his career making this point, arguing that cultural purity is an oxymoron and that we are all, whether we know it or not, already cosmopolitan.

How the mixing happened

The proof is in the historical record, and it starts on the road. The network of caravan routes we now call the Silk Road linked China to the Mediterranean for well over a thousand years, and silk was almost the least of what traveled. Buddhism moved from India into China along these routes, carried by merchants and monks. Paper moved west, reaching the Islamic world by the eighth century and Europe centuries later, and without it there is no printed book, no Reformation, no newspaper. Musical instruments, chess, glassmaking, medicine and mathematics all made the same journey in one direction or the other. The oasis cities along the way, places like Samarkand and Kashgar, became laboratories of coexistence where a trader might hear four languages before breakfast.

The Mediterranean tells a similar story in a smaller basin. In medieval Toledo, after the city passed from Muslim to Christian rule, teams of Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars worked together to translate Arabic and Greek learning into Latin, and it was through those translations that Europe recovered Aristotle. In Norman Sicily, a Christian king kept Arabic-speaking administrators and geographers at court, and the churches of Palermo still wear Byzantine mosaics under Arab-inflected ceilings. Then came the Atlantic world, where the mixing was often brutal rather than voluntary. The transatlantic slave trade tore millions of Africans from their homes, yet even under bondage those men and women remade culture in the Americas, weaving African rhythm, memory and belief into new creole languages, new religions and new musics, from vodou and konpa in Haiti to samba in Brazil to the blues and jazz of the United States. And in our own era the great port cities, London and Toronto, Lagos and New York, carry the process forward at unprecedented speed, with the borough of Queens alone home to speakers of several hundred languages.

Art as the great translator

If migration and trade supplied the raw contact between cultures, art has usually been the place where contact turned into understanding. Music offers the clearest example, because it needs no translation at all. Jazz was born when African rhythmic traditions met European harmony and instruments in the port city of New Orleans, and it went on to conquer the world so thoroughly that it now belongs to everyone. Reggae traveled from Kingston to London and reshaped British pop. Afrobeats moves today from Lagos playlists to stadium stages on every continent, and Korean pop fills arenas in New Jersey with fans singing phonetically in a language most of them are still learning. Each of these is a fusion, and each fusion made the music larger, not smaller.

The table works the same way. There were no tomatoes in Italy, no chilies in India and no coffee in Vienna until trade and empire carried them there, and it is hard to find anyone who wishes those exchanges undone. Curry became one of Britain’s national dishes; ramen grew out of Chinese wheat noodles adapted by Japanese cooks and then adopted by the world. Literature crosses the bridge more slowly, through the patient labor of translators, but the effect is profound. When Gabriel García Márquez appeared in English, or Chinua Achebe reached readers far beyond Nigeria, or Edwidge Danticat brought Haitian memory into American letters, whole worlds became visible to strangers. Cinema now does this at scale. Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films were remade as Hollywood westerns, and when Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Academy Award for best picture in 2020, the director gently reminded his audience that a one-inch barrier of subtitles stood between them and a universe of films. Art, in short, is how cultures visit each other without a passport.

The world writes it down

For most of history this mixing simply happened, unplanned and unprotected. Only recently did the nations of the world decide that cultural diversity was something worth defending on paper. The landmark document is the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, adopted in Paris on 20 October 2005 and in force since March 2007, now ratified by more than 150 countries. Behind its bureaucratic title sits a simple and rather radical idea, that cultural goods are not ordinary merchandise. A film, a song or a book carries identity and meaning as well as a price tag, and so governments have a legitimate right to nurture their own cultural expressions, funding local cinema, protecting minority-language publishing, supporting artists, even when pure market logic would let a single global entertainment industry flatten everything in its path.

The 2005 Convention built on an earlier UNESCO declaration of 2001 and grew out of a real anxiety, shared by countries as different as France, Canada and Senegal, that globalization might homogenize the world’s imagination. Its answer was not to build walls but to keep many gardens growing. The convention affirms the equal dignity of all cultures, calls for genuine exchange between them, and pays particular attention to the creative industries of developing countries, so that the traffic in stories and songs does not all flow in one direction. It is an imperfect instrument, as all treaties are, but it stands as the closest thing humanity has to a formal promise that the chorus will not be reduced to a single voice.

Richer, not thinner

Here an honest writer has to slow down, because not everyone experiences diversity as enrichment, and the anxieties deserve a fair hearing. One fear is dilution, the worry that when everything mixes, every tradition loses its distinctiveness and the world converges on a beige sameness. The historical record suggests the opposite. Mixing tends to multiply forms rather than merge them, which is why the meeting of African and European music produced not one hybrid but hundreds, jazz and gospel, son and salsa, reggae and rara, each with its own fierce identity. Cultures are not paint, which grays when stirred. They are closer to languages, which grow by borrowing and coin new words at every border.

The harder debate concerns appropriation, and it should not be waved away. There is a real difference between exchange and extraction. When a fashion house copies sacred Indigenous designs for a runway season without credit or consent, or when artists from a dominant culture profit from forms that the originating community was mocked or punished for practicing, the borrowing rides on an imbalance of power, and the offense is real. Yet the answer cannot be to forbid influence altogether, because influence is how culture works, and a world in which only Italians may cook pasta, itself shaped by Chinese noodles and New World tomatoes, is a world with no culture left in it. The workable line most artists and scholars draw runs through respect. Learn the tradition deeply, credit its bearers, share the rewards, and accept that some things, particularly the sacred, are not raw material. Appreciation asks permission and pays its debts. Appropriation takes the melody and forgets the people who wrote it.

Diversity at the corner of the street

All of which sounds abstract until you remember where you live. New Jersey is, by several measures, among the most diverse states in America, and cities like Jersey City regularly rank near the top of national diversity indexes. Within a short drive you can pass through the Peruvian blocks of Paterson, the Indian shops along Oak Tree Road in Edison and Iselin, the Cuban main street of Union City, the Portuguese and Brazilian Ironbound in Newark, and the Haitian neighborhoods of East Orange, Irvington and Elizabeth, where Kreyòl conversation, konpa music and griot with pikliz are simply part of the local weather. None of this required a treaty. It required ordinary people carrying their toolkits across the water and opening them here.

That is the final and best argument for cultural diversity, that it is not a policy but a daily pleasure and a daily education. Every festival you wander into, every dish you try for the first time, every song in a language you do not speak that moves you anyway, is the Silk Road continuing by other means. Many voices do not drown each other out. Listened to together, they make the only kind of harmony worth having, the kind that needs more than one note. The rest of us have merely to do what travelers at the fairs and caravanserais have always done, which is to show up curious, listen well and say thank you in as many languages as we can manage.