Phil Tagami Wants To Know What It Means For A Developer To Embrace Diversity? Shame On You, Phil. You know the answer!

(Tagami with Mayoral Longshot Candidate Ignacio De La Fuente and Charlotte Laws. Yeah, Phil's supporting the longshot.)

I saw this at the New Home Builders News Blog and almost choked:

"Phil Tagami, a developer who restored the Rotunda Building and is working to rehabilitate the dilapidated Fox Theater in downtown Oakland, said he and others want to hear specifically what it means for a development to embrace diversity.."

For as long as I've known Phil -- and that's since 1991 -- he's always had a very weird, unfortunate view of the matter of race and diversity. We've had a lot of arguments about this. Sometimes I thought he seemed to be picking fights with anyone who called for it. Now, in my little playground that's this blog and away from the more rough-and-tumble matters of SBS, I get to adress this issue of diversity and developers and Phil and Oakland.

Phil, listen up! Diversity is simply making the choice to find and work with people of color and Women. Period. You know this, having convinced your business partner to hire my step-brother-and-law Ralph Grant's firm Grant and Smith as your accountant.

That's diversity. You hired him because he was the best and it was a nice plus that he's black and his firm is too.

Diversity is not complicated. It called for picking up the phone and making a call to someone you would not generally talk to. It called for changing your clique so that it's composition is a nice melting pot of people. It's good to do this, if one to surround yourself with different points of view.

It also has interesting advantages.

Spike Lee's movie "Inside Man" is not only an intense and loving portrail of New York City, but of urban diversity itself. When Denzel Washington needs to find someone who can recognize a voice in a foreign language, all he has to do is pick from the onlookers around him, such is the diversity of New York.

That's true for Oakland, too.

You can build large structures in Oakland and without a lilly-white work force. It's not only undesirable, it's just plain weird in this day and age.

Get with the program, Phil!