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Country would do well to abandon 'diversity'

April 13, 2003 1:08 am

OSTON--A pair of cases currently before the Supreme Court has put a spotlight on the concept of "diversity." The University of Michigan contends that diversity is such a good thing that the effort to achieve it ought to override our constitutional prohibition on racial privileges.

Many college presidents, business leaders, and even military figures publicly support the University of Michigan's position. But is diversity really so high a principle that we should abandon the ideal of treating people as individuals according to neutral and fair standards? And how did we get into this fix?

The word "diversity" is everywhere these days. Americans seem obsessed with it, from the kindergarten teacher who sees a multicultural metaphor in every box of crayons to the business exec running from sales meetings to "diversity awareness workshops."

Diversity greets us on Hallmark Cards' Common Threads Collection. On Sunday mornings our pastors and preachers commend diversity as an almost holy thing. But it is also a secular wonder, exhibited by museums, paraded at halftimes, and lip synced in the teenage titillations of MTV. In Sarasota, Fla., the Boy Scout Troop 84 and Girl Scout Group 2064 host an annual "Diversity Awareness Weekend."

Indeed, you have to look hard to find any corner of American life where diversity is not the buzzword. The funeral industry? Hardly. One of the announced "highlights" of the upcoming Missouri Funeral Directors Association meeting in June is a presentation by fourth-generation funeral director Edith Churchman on "Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Variation in Death, Dying, and Grieving."

How about professional sports? Surely here is the proverbial level playing field where talent trumps racial, ethnic, and cultural identity. Sorry. In case you haven't been following the sports pages, the NFL owners have a diversity committee, whose chairman Dan Rooney has been ragging the Detroit Lions for not interviewing a minority for the job of head coach that went to Steve Mariucci.

Well then, how about the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq? United We Stand, right? Our preoccupation with diversity would seem singularly out of place in this context. Alas, it is to be found even here. Think of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta refusing to allow profiling for possible terrorists in the nation's airports because to do so would be an act of "hate and discrimination."

Or consider Nicholas DeGenova, a Columbia University anthropology professor, author of articles on gangster rap and Mexican Chicago, a man who makes his living promoting diversity. At an antiwar teach-in on March 26, he told the crowd that as far as the war in Iraq is concerned, "I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus."

Of course, neither Secretary Mineta's foolishness nor professor DeGenova's murderous anti-Americanism speak for diversity as a whole. Any idea that encompasses sentiments ranging from the soft relativism of an Episcopalian sermon to the preening self-congratulations of a soft-drink company, and provides inspiration to both Boy Scout Troop 84 and DeGenova, covers both a lot of ground and a lot of very different sentiments. So what does diversity mean?

It means pretty much what Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell said it meant when he launched the word on its current career on June 28, 1978. That's the day he gave his opinion in the Bakke case, proposing that racial preferences in college admissions would be acceptable if they helped to create a greater "diversity of viewpoints" in the classroom. No other justice agreed with Powell, but, in the following years, higher education gradually took up the idea that its best chance of getting away with racial discrimination in favor of (mostly) black students would be to cite Powell's views on diversity.

From this acorn of racial preferences in college admissions grew the mighty oak of diversity today. In its fullest form, diversity is the idea that America is made up of competing groups; that our history as a nation is essentially a story of one group (i.e. white males) oppressing all the other groups; and that a better society can be had by honoring those groups that were oppressed and henceforth distributing to their members their fair share of all good things.

The diversity in diversity is, bluntly, the diversity of victim groups. Originally the term looked almost exclusively at African-Americans, but its logic was irresistible. Diversity became the rhetoric of choice of any bunch of people able to set themselves up as inheritors of a historical grievance.

Diversity, which began as Powell's euphemism for racial stereotyping, never lost its double-sidedness. It was from the beginning both a weapon and a seduction. On one hand, it could be used as a legalistic cudgel with which to beat anyone who threatened the spoils of identity politics. On the other hand, it promised a gentle world of tolerance, mutual respect, and the pleasures of mutual enrichment from contact with people unlike one's self.

The sweet version of diversity became the school curriculum and Sunday-go-to-church theme. The brutal version was left to the professional race intimidators, backroom politicians, government bureaucrats, and hard-nosed careerists in the universities. This dual-track strategy has been successful beyond the wildest dreams of the leftists who invented it. For millions of Americans, diversity stands for tolerance, inclusiveness, and open-minded acceptance of other cultures. They are convinced that to be in favor of diversity is to be in favor of fellowship and goodwill.

But they are mistaken. To be in favor of diversity really is to be in favor of group rights. It means giving up on the equality of individuals before the law to have, instead, the perpetual scramble of organized ethnic cohorts for bigger pieces of the pie. It means forsaking the freedom to decide for yourself who you are and how much you want to be defined by your ethnic heritage, and instead to turn this decision over to the diversicrats who will decide for you.

Consider the situation of Honduran-born Miguel Angel Estrada, whose appointment to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is opposed by various self-proclaimed Hispanic leaders. Because he is a conservative, they don't consider Estrada to be a "real" Hispanic.

Contrary to its rhetoric, diversity is not about respecting differences. It's about imposing ideological conformity. Diversity inevitably demeans other people by treating them as reflections of group identity rather than as distinctive individuals. Diversity whispers that it will bring us together, but then it only drives us apart. Its basic dynamic is to stoke resentment on one side and disappointment on the other, and when people complain, it offers to salve their wounds with--what else?--more diversity.

America today is essentially a fair society that strives to reward people justly and to open opportunities. We are, by a wide margin, among the most tolerant and open-minded people in the world, and we have a long history of being receptive to the real diversity of humanity. Perhaps the biggest obstacle we now face to overcoming the dwindling legacy of our old history of racial injustice is the lure of diversity itself--its false promise of an era of good feeling coupled with its plain reality of diminishing our common culture and our shared humanity.

PETER WOOD is an associate professor of anthropology at Boston University.