All the Countries, or Why Diversity Works

Sujata Massey 

With Jeff Siger, Annamaria Alfieri and Wendall Thomas, Arizona 2023

If you are reading this column, you could have found it at a number of spots. 

You might be on my author website or by Goodreads or Amazon pages; however the OG location for this column is the Murder is Everywhere blog, which is a collaborative writing project of currently ten mystery authors, with at least half a dozen former contributors, including the late author Leighton Gage, its founder. Since the blogsite’s origination in 2008, I’d been an admirer. I was admitted into the ranks in 2012 when I started my Perveen Mistry series and began filing dispatches about my research adventures in India and my more prosaic life in Baltimore, Maryland. To date, this blogging group has included writers with personal backgrounds, or story settings, on all continents except Antarctica. We’ve shared commentary in countries including France, Greece, England, Ghana, South Africa, Singapore, Botswana, Finland, New Zealand, Scotland, Japan, Italy, Spain, and more. 

What we do at Murder is Everywhere has been on my mind because of the recent American uproar against the idea of diversity. “DEI” is the acronym that brings together three goals: diversity, equity and inclusion. DEI probably started as workplace jargon, but based on 2023 and 2025 Supreme Court Decisions, and Trump polices, it’s become a red flag. Citing DEI has become a reason to outlaw various programs or fire people from positions of authority. 

With Cara Black, Caro Ramsey, and Stan Trollip in Florida, 2018

I’m sure there are people who might believe I’m DEI all the way: an immigrant who got a green card as a young child, part of a family group anchored by with a scientist father. But as the government saw it, this foreign professor father could do his research at an American university and further the nation's well-being. Ah, the old ideas about diversity's benefits! Today, I've heard more than 2600 people have lost jobs because of supposed connections to DEI: and hundreds of thousands more--many of them African American--because of elimination of so many federal jobs. 

I lost my Northumbrian accent growing up in America, and when it was time to start college, I had scholarship offers based on high test scores and a stack of essays and extracurricular activities. I yearned to leave the Midwest and wound up in Baltimore, Maryland, where I still live. I started as a freshman at a women’s liberal arts school, Goucher College, transferring to the exciting, co-educational Johns Hopkins University my junior year. In the mid-1980s, the undergraduate population at Hopkins was only 35 percent female and (I’m guessing) fewer than ten percent students of color (a term not yet invented)I remember a question of both admissions forms about whether I had a parent who’d graduated from the institution. Kids who could claim legacy status had a few extra points in their favor. 

We all believed that there were tricks to the admission process. 

My husband Tony and I met at Hopkins, and we still joke about being the scholarship kids who got in because of our underrepresented home states--Louisiana and Minnesota. College admission materials often included statistics about state and international backgrounds of students. It’s a policy that probably results in more people back in the faraway states learning about the school from the student’s family; and it also made the campus more vibrant. I treasured listening to music introduced by a friend from Brazil, and hearing the accents of my buddies from small-town Tennessee and Manhattan and New Jersey. We heard about life in Johannesburg from a South African student who was wary about returning. One downside was a lack of African American students from public school backgrounds. It wasn’t until after 2012 that Hopkins started a robust scholarship program for all qualifying students from Baltimore City Public Schools that still continues.

With my husband Tony in Greece, 2025 

I graduated to work at a daily newspaper in Baltimore. Journalism jobs are notoriously hard to get, and in those days, most editors were white men. I was hired at the Baltimore Evening Sun, the now defunct sibling afternoon paper that competed with the morning paper named the Baltimore Sun. Probably the competition was just a good-natured one between the reporters, since the money all went into the same pot. During my time, the Evening Sun had a particularly strong bench of Maryland-raised, Black reporters. Many of these friends had undergone the paper's  four-year, paid summer internship program offered to University of Maryland journalism students who hailed from the newspapers' circulation area. The program was clearly in the newspaper’s interest, because it meant developing strong young reporters who already knew their way around and had social connections giving them access to sources that an out-of-state reporter might take years to cultivate. 

My route to the Evening Sun also came through an informal internship meant for Baltimore college students during the school year. I loved the work doing general assignment stories for the city desk and felt warmly welcomed by the energetic young reporters. When the internship year ended, I jumped at the the chance to come in and help on Sundays with a reporting job done mostly by phone: contacting the police and fire department to tabulate the weekend’s tragedies; and news broke, speeding to the scene to report on it. Ironically, I interviewed for a full-time job at the Raleigh News&Observer where I mentioned my police reporting background. The editor told me: "We don't have women reporting on police stories because the cops don't like talking to them." Even though it wasn't my life ambition to be a police reporter, I took the editor's statement as a sign not to take the job they offered. Instead I took a job at the Evening Sun, the happiest workplace of my life.  

I am sharing these personal experiences as my own brush with what can happen when under-represented people are welcomed in. Bringing the idea to a higher level, we see that Google and Apple and Amazon exploded into success due to using smart and capable IT workers from around the world, along with American citizens. It's not right that H1b visa workers are often paid less than an American worker for the same job; but we also have to acknowledge that these salaries are more than in the home country, and fewer Americans pursue math and computer science than do students in China, India, Russia and Germany. This means: fewer qualified people.

Currently, America has a growing challenge of unemployment. The Pew Research Center finds that in the 25- to 34-year-old bracket, 47% of college degree holders are women, while 37% are men. 

The reasons for this seem to be varied. For example, we’d carefully saved for our son’s college education, but he wasn’t particularly interested in going and also had the bad fortune of starting freshman year in 2020, the pandemic year. He lasted three semesters and only decided to return to studies this year. But this time around, his motivation is strong, and his brain is a few years further down the road in terms of development. 

Slightly more females than males work at part-time jobs during high school; and they are often tasked with care of family members as well. Does having ability to manage multiple roles lead to better focus in college? A lot of studies on video game interest show that boys are more attached to this pastime than girls. And everybody I know seems to have a relative or friend whose son who doesn’t work at a job but matures into adulthood stuck in the basement gaming. Why would anyone want to live like this? Does long-term gaming alter the brain’s pleasure centers that make it harder to feel satisfied by studying, or undertaking complex intellectual tasks? 

In the past, teenagers had very different paths. Parents expected their sons to apprentice, enter trade school or university during a time that some daughters unfortunately had circumscribed choices for higher learning. It may sound radical, but I’ll argue that some boys and young men could benefit from diversity programs. They too can be supported as students, workers and human beings, and in this sphere get genuine connection with people who don’t look like them. 

As I said at the start of this essay, there are different places to arrive at the essays published by Murder is Everywhere. Platform diversity helps writers connect with readers, just as a diversity of workers supports the world.