Not a great year for diversity

     Kavitha Rajagopalan is the author of “Muslims of Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West.”

2010 was the year of diversity - or was it?

The new sitcom "Outsourced," with a cast straight out of Bollywood, brought the much-reviled Indian call center to American living rooms as just another wacky workplace. More women than ever ran for political office in the midterm elections. And, of course, every television appearance by the president brings diversity to the fore.

But even with this greater visibility, women, immigrants and African-Americans struggled or lost important economic and political ground this year.

For the first time in 32 years, the number of women in Congress will decline. On the upside for diversity, three states elected women as governors, and two of these - South Carolina's Nikki Haley and New Mexico's Susana Martinez - are minority women from immigrant families.

Both new governors-elect are Republicans who have taken tough stances on immigration - a trend in 2010. Through the year, immigrants' freedoms were scaled back through political defeats, legalized racial profiling, mass deportations and what seemed to be a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment.

Some 392,000 undocumented immigrants were deported in the 12 months through September, but only about half had criminal backgrounds. And even before the eleventh-hour Senate defeat of the bipartisan Dream Act - which would have offered undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children a path to legalization through college or military service - some successful midterm candidates ran on a promise to repeal the right to public education to unauthorized immigrants. Many immigration experts believe there's no hope for a wholesale reform of the nation's broken immigration system in the coming year.

There was progress and there were setbacks for legal immigrants as well. There was the crowning of a Muslim Arab-American as Miss America for the first time. On the other hand, some 35 planned mosques and Islamic centers across the country have met with resistance from their communities in the past two years, much of which was explicitly couched in fear of Islam. And Park51, the Islamic community center planned for two blocks away from the World Trade Center, became the center of a frenzied national debate that at its heart seems to be about whether the visibility of Muslims should be considered an affront.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans who incorrectly believe the president is Muslim rose in 2010, according to a Pew Research poll in the spring.

By far the largest percentage of immigrant Muslim Americans are South Asian, a group whose visibility as entertainers and jokesters skyrocketed in 2010. A record number of South Asian characters have made it to prime time, on such shows as "Community," "Glee," "The Good Wife," "The Office," "Parks and Recreation," "Royal Pains" and, of course, "Outsourced." Both "Community's" Abed Nadir and "Parks and Recreation's" Tom Haverford are Muslim characters. In one episode, Tom explains that he changed his name from Darwish Sabir Ismael Gani because "brown guys with funny-sounding Muslim names don't make it really far in politics."

With the exception, of course, of Barack Obama. But if the Obama presidency has not quelled anti-Muslim sentiment, neither has it signaled good fortune for black America. While unemployment hangs around 9.8 percent for the nation, for blacks it is around 16 percent.

Progress is just another way to describe the march of time. The movement toward greater equality met with opposition in 2010, but move it still did. In 2011, we may just find there's no going back.