Diversity, our conference theme, is a watered down, misguided ideal. Its most immediate ancestor, the more robust action, embraced certain spe cific goals and for a while even flirted with quotas to mark real progress (busi nesses, after all, get ahead by setting quotas). For political and practical reasons (outright opposition to positive discrimination, difficulty in successful imple mentation), affirmative action morphed into diversity. One positive result: success can more easily be claimed. An organization's diverse mix may include offspring of Kenyan politicians or of Pakistani physicians, but that is fine. Lingering far in the background, behind both and affirma tive action, lies a remote and now mostly discredited ancestor, fraternity. Conservatives, fearing state-imposed philanthropic mandates, reject it as un warranted social engineering. Liberals, recognizing its religious roots (not to mention the term's inherent sexism), hardly dare speak its name. So we are left with diversity, both more readily attainable and consistent with two widely embraced social goods, tolerance and multiculturalism. The triumvirate, diver sity, tolerance, multiculturalism, comes up short, however, when looked at from the perspective of fraternity, final partner in another triumvirate, that of the eigh teenth century, matching fraternity with liberty and equality. A nation solicitous of diversity risks turning into a silo society. In such a society, multiculturalism translates practically into islands of mostly isolated communities, punctuated by some interaction in the public and occupational realms. Tolerance, for its part, tends to emphasize the negative. It's a leave-them-alone kind of virtue. It does not encourage genuine affiliation or even active dialogue. It may, indeed, be quite compatible with the insular group life of identity politics rather than with an integrative mongrel model of mixing, blending, and changing. The pejorative tone associated with the word mongrel is unfortunate. My substitute, drawn from Caribbean authors, albeit with differences, will be the term creolization.1 A society in which fraternity remained a guiding value