The Hydra Headed Diversity Monster - Road to the Middle Class

MAYBE IT WOULD help if the United States Supreme Court would make up its mind one way or another. And maybe it will in the next few years. Unfortunately, right now, diversity is metastasizing like cancer, as articles in NRO by Thomas Sowell and Frederick M. Hess make only too clear.

It’s an irony, if you like, that back in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that it was unjust for a little black girl to be bussed across town instead of attending the school near her home. Now the highly advanced educationists of the twenty-first century are doing the same as the segregationists of the Old South. They are bussing little kids around in accordance with their race theories. Writes Thomas Sowell:

The racial dogmas have changed since 1954 but they are still dogmas. And flesh-and-blood children are still being sacrificed on the altar to those dogmas.

In the Solid South, the dogma was that little white children shouldn’t be soiled with black children in their class. Now the dogma is racial “diversity,” that children benefit from a critical mass of racial diversity in their class.

What are those “compelling” benefits of “diversity”? They are as invisible as the proverbial emperor’s new clothes. Yet everyone has to pretend to believe in those benefits, as they pretended to admire the naked emperor’s wardrobe.

The trouble is that diversity is digging deep roots in the educational bureaucracy. In Washington State, where voters passed a law forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, diversity is big business.

In 2004, Washington State University created an office of the “vice president for equity and diversity” that has an annual budget of $3 million and a full-time staff of 55.
...
Washington State’s equal-employment office (called the Center for Human Rights) coordinates with faculty committees to encourage minority hiring.

To show how big all this is, there is now a National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.

Well, call it what you will, diversity or a racial spoils system, it isn’t going to improve relations between the races. What encourages amity between the races is the knowledge that race will not be a factor in hiring and promotion, that people will be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character.

The only good thing is that the people of the United States of America hate racial preferences, even if their lords and master love them.

And why wouldn’t they? When you run a government bureaucracy it is too much like hard work to be held accountable for the quality of your hires. Much better to be required to hire women and minorities according to quotas or diversity criteria. Then, so long as you keep your quotas up, nobody can blame you if your little fiefdom doesn’t actually do anything useful.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.