“The way to increase diversity at Burning Man is not to sell Burning Man, which actually violates a number of our principles—it commodifies Burning Man—but to build relationships. It is to create communities. It is to do what we do so as to let people decide for themselves if they want to do it with us. Creating communities with marginalized people, where we live, where they live, and doing the work we can do without expectation of reward or compensation.
At a practical level, this is in stark contrast to the way many of the efforts around diversity are currently conducted, which are attempts not to create community but to get the language in which we describe diversity issues right. The focus is on precision of language, not meaningful action. This may or may not be helpful in other contexts, such as academia, but it is fundamentally incompatible with Burning Man culture, wherein action is the fundamental unit of meaning…. Making correct language the determinant of success likewise relieves the individual of both the opportunity and the burden of participating in a way that is meaningful to them.”