By Selwyn Duke
Last week President Bush made headlines and stoked the fires of the emotionally charged debate about affirmative action when he publicly opposed racially discriminatory policies at the University of Michigan. The university has been holding white applicants to a higher standard than minorities for the purposes of increasing minority representation at the institution, thereby increasing its "diversity."
The President decried this practice of publicly-funded schools using de facto racial quotas when discriminating between students -- he, like most of us, wants people to be judged on their merits. And I think that most of us know the arguments: we don't hold children responsible for the sins and crimes of even their parents, so why would we hold them responsible for the actions of those who lived ages ago and to whom they are not at all related? The eighteen-year-olds of today aren't the authors of what occurred fifty years ago -- enough said.
The President did something else though, and it's something I take great exception to: he payed homage to the idea of diversity. Of course, most people do this quite mindlessly nowadays because they have been trained to believe that diversity is some magical quality that bestows some kind of greatness upon those who achieve it. Of course, no one ever explains what that greatness might be. But, nevertheless, we hear that modern mantra "Our strength lies in our diversity" parroted from sea to shining sea now. The problem is that our strength, our greatness and our success have nothing at all to do with diversity.
What made America great was that she was founded by people who had a grasp of governance that theretofore the world had never seen. Consequently, they bequeathed to us a Constitution and freedoms that allow and encourage people to spread their wings and reach for the stars -- it's called the American dream. And, I'm not going to delve too deeply into this here, but they took this approach because they were, by and large, God-fearing men who understood that each individual has certain unalienable rights, endowed by his Creator. Really, the great French philosopher, Alexis de Toqueville, expressed it best when he said that he found the source of America's greatness in her churches. Toqueville then went on to say "America is great because America is good, and if she ever ceases to be good she will cease to be great." Racial diversity is a physical fact -- it has no more to do with our greatness than the fact that some people have brown eyes and others blue.
But let's for a moment assume that the source of our greatness is diversity. What would that imply? Well, if all groups are equal in terms of innate ability then having diversity can't influence a society's greatness one whit. Whether a people is monoracial or multiracial its collective abilities will be the same, all other things being equal. Diversity can only enhance greatness if this is not the case -- if each group brings things to the table the others cannot. For instance, if white people are more gifted in nuclear physics, black people in medicine and people of Asian descent in electrical engineering then diversity certainly will strengthen a nation. If I made such claims, however, I'd be labeled a racist faster than you could say Jesse Jackson. And many of those doing the labeling would be the diversity-on-the-brain types, because most of them are the same people who tell us that you mustn't let such thoughts percolate into your consciousness. And therein lies their hypocrisy, because the idea that diversity strengthens us presupposes that such racial differences exist -- and a corollary of the idea that they don't exist is that diversity is irrelevant.
Focusing on diversity is really just another form of prejudice. After all, is enforcing racial heterogeneity really any better than enforcing racial homogeneity? They are both two sides of the same coin because in both instances the focus is on race, when it should be on merit. We didn't need quotas to ensure we'd have diversity in this world; it occurred naturally as some of us were born white, black, oriental, etc. And we don't need quotas in our institutions either -- diversity takes care of itself -- diversity happens. The bottom line is that striving for racial diversity may make some people feel better about themselves but it has about as much to do with greatness as hair color. A people's greatness is determined by the content of its collective character -- not the color of its collective skin. A rainbow may be beautiful, but it won't really help you find a pot of gold.
If this diversity nonsense were just an innocuous misconception that had the benefit of making people feel all warm and cuddly it wouldn't be so bad. The problem is that having the wrong priorities leads to the wrong actions. Because we have elevated diversity to virtue status we constantly jump through hoops in order to achieve it, and this causes us to engage in social-engineering schemes like quotas and what has euphemistically been termed "reverse-discrimination" -- like what's going on at the University of Michigan. Our strength and greatness don't lie in our diversity -- our weakness lies in the kind of ignorance that causes us to buy into such inanity in the first place.
