When Diversity Emerges From Forced Conformity

Photo by Aimable Mugabo

Eighty of us in one room, one open bay. The air reeks of unfamiliar, and youthful, bodies and nerves. In my previous essay I wrote, in part, about how the military erases diversity through forced conformity. But in this piece, I want to tell a story of how it also expanded my capacity to hold differences. That feels like a paradox: the same place that confined me also widened my world.

In bootcamp, there was no choice about who stood beside you, who snored next to you, or whose sweat mixed with yours during push-ups. We were all just trying to make it through—teenagers, twenty-somethings, a few in their thirties—thrown together under fluorescent lights and shouted commands. 

Walking into the mess hall for the first time, my curiosity drew me to food I’d never encountered before (this is not a hyperbolic statement). I had my first cottage cheese, okra, and first grits. There were arguments about which saying is correct between pop, soda, and coke. A fellow recruit from California, few bunks down, had a tick of yelling out “fucking A.” I was their first too—their first Asian friend, their first glimpse into an immigrant world.

Before all that, my world had been smaller. I spent my teenage years in a quiet Korean enclave outside Baltimore, surrounded by families who ran delis, liquor stores, and chicken wing carryouts in the inner city. We lived thirty minutes from downtown but worlds apart from it. At home, everyone spoke Korean. We consumed Korean culture long before K-pop or K-dramas entered the American psyche; at school, I was one of the kids from the cheapest apartments in an otherwise polished suburban district, trading rent for access to one of the best public school systems in the country. On weekends, I helped my mom at her carryout in the inner city, sliding chicken boxes and crumpled bills through a hole in a fake bulletproof wall. Setting aside the quiet extraction of money from Black communities in Baltimore, life in the suburb felt ordered, predictable, and seemingly innocent—a quintessential life of a Korean 1.5-generation family straining to apprehend the American Dream.

The borders of that bubble held firm until the Navy tore them open.

My world expanded beyond the tiny place, space, and time which I’d known before enlistment. I became a Sailor who could recite ten general orders, fold clothes into perfect rectangles, and stencil uniforms with care. Those rituals built discipline, but they also changed how I saw people. It’s hard to stay prejudiced while scrubbing a toilet beside someone just as exhausted as you.

• • •

Leaving the military after eleven years meant leaving that enforced closeness behind. In civilian life post-military, I learned a new skill: curating. It became easy to choose what to keep and what to avoid—friends, jobs, beliefs, social media content, even discomfort. No contracts or UCMJ rules tied me to anyone. “Fit” became the word that ruled everything. Fit for the job. Fit for the social circle. Fit for the culture. I don’t think I’d heard it at all until college. It was what people really meant when they asked, Can you belong without friction?

It’s effortless now to surround myself with people like me and ignore the rest. Easy to stay within conversations that confirm rather than challenge. In uniform, you didn’t get to choose who you bunked with or marched beside. You lived diversity; you didn’t brand it. Life in the military operated on scale, not personalization. That scale forced exposure—to accents, foods, jokes, and tempers—that still shapes how I move through the world.

Civilian freedom once overwhelmed me. Too many options, too few obligations. That freedom sometimes turned into drifting. Over time, I found balance, and a strange gratitude for what discomfort had taught me. Being forced to share space with people I didn’t choose taught me how to stay put when things felt strange. I learned to eat what I didn’t like, listen to what I didn’t understand, and see worth in what I once dismissed. Exposure is rarely pleasant, but often clarifying.

That’s why, at times, the civilian version of “embracing diversity” feels off to me. In college, it came through clubs and research projects with idyllic missions to change the world for good. *Companies often call for diversity and inclusion as moral or strategic imperatives, yet the structures they build reward sameness in language, demeanor, and thought. What passes for inclusion often becomes assimilation—difference made palatable through shared codes. It isn’t pure homogenization so much as homophily: people gathering around comfort and likeness, a curated version of diversity that feels safe.

It strikes me that the military and civilian worlds invert each other. The military pulls together people who differ by race, region, and background, then flattens them into uniformity to function. Civilian institutions, especially universities and corporations, start with people who already share class, education, and values, then decorate that sameness with visible difference. One system creates order from difference; the other achieves order through selection.

Maybe there’s a quiet gift of military years: I see more in people now. I can find something human in the unfamiliar. The military taught me to endure differences until it became normal, sometimes even beautiful. Civilian life taught me how easily differences can be filtered out.

Bootcamp forced me to mingle and struggle with strangers, who found me strange, in a strange space. Over time, the strangeness became familiar through my eleven years in uniform. In civilian life, I’m taught to design it away. I still wonder which one makes me more free.

*A bit of organizational sociology:

• Institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983): organizations converge toward similar structures and values to maintain legitimacy.

• Symbolic compliance (Meyer & Rowan, 1977): they adopt moral or progressive language (like “diversity”) to appear modern while preserving internal conformity.

• Cultural reproduction (Bourdieu): dominant tastes, speech, and behaviors become the hidden criteria for belonging, even under inclusive banners.