I know I'll hate myself in the morning for this.....
While I agree that we are all supposed to be "green":Neither male nor female, black nor white nor yellow nor red nor brown, straight nor gay, etc, the reality is that we aren't. Or more precisely, the people that we are trying to recruit aren't green.... yet. It is easy for us (especially white, anglo males) to talk in these terms, but "we" make up a huge (I don't know the stats, so won't even guess) proportion of the CF, and that would be intimidating to anybody wanting to join. For whatever reason (nature, nurture, fear, ignorance, etc), if I were to walk into a group of people that greatly outnumbered me, for whatever reason: gender, race, orientation, height, etc, I would likely feel uncomfortable, and less likely to feel included in that group, regardless of how the people of that group actually felt towards me. Now imagine thinking about joining that group for at least 3 years, and wondering if they would want you there.
I'm sure we have all experienced something along this lines (being the outsider), even if it were for a short period of time (walking into the wrong bar, encountering a group of people from a different ethnic group on the street after dark, walking into a classroom/office/party with a huge number of people of the opposite sex, etc).
All's that I can say for myself was that I was fairly scared of joining the military, and that was after spending 5 years in Army cadets. I didn't know what to expect (other than what I experienced from cadet camps, the movies, etc) and I didn't know how I would fit in, and I was in a group of people that looked 90% like me (we had 3 females in my recruit platoon, one Asian guy, one french guy (who made a wrong turn at Albequerque and ended up in Cornwallis and not St Jean), and other than that, white, anglo males). Now imagine being from the other 5-10% of what makes up the current CF population and looking in: I'm sure that they aren't feelin' the love, especially when "we" get hostile about the attempts made to try to recruit "them".
As long as "these" groups don't get any special bonuses, treatment, extra cheese on their pizza, etc just because The Man wants them in his CF, I don't particularly care. I do tend to get torqued whenever I see a disproportionate number of "minorities" (anybody that doesn't make up the majority of what is representative of the CF right now) getting their picture on the cover of CF publications, newspapers, etc, but I suppose growing up through the changes in the CF caused that (resentment that the attention is being drawn away from "my kind"). It's time to move on, and not be so put out by things that "we" have no control over. We are hurting for recruits (as I'm sure we have all noticed), so I think we need to be more inclusive, even if it makes "us" feel uncomfortable seeing Black History month, Asian Pride week, International Womans Day (that one REALLY made me made for a while), etc.
Al