The diversity fig leaf

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views March 11, 2002]

In September, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the crude “black bonus” in the University of Georgia’s admissions policy wasn’t what the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision meant when it allowed colleges to take “diversity” into account in admissions decisions. Let’s hope that this decision spells the beginning of the end for the “diversity” argument in college admissions. It has been, from the start, an argument shot through with duplicity and bad faith. It is a craven, disingenuous, and destructive canard, antithetical to interracial harmony and black excellence--and racist besides. . . .

The diversity shibboleth has taught a generation of young Americans that black students are more important for their presence in promotional brochure photographs than for their scholastic qualifications--an essentialization now as rife among black as among white students. This message ultimately perpetuates the very underperformance that has made the fig-leaf diversity notion necessary.

The very term “diversity” craftily overshoots the actual goal in question. Mormons, paraplegics, people from Alaska, lesbians, Ayn Randians, and poor whites exert little pull on the heartstrings of admissions committees so committed to making college campuses “look like America.” The diversity that counts is brown-skinned minorities, especially African Americans. . . .

Racial preferences continue to receive protection from the diversity fig leaf. It’s a powerful rhetorical weapon. The question, “Aren’t you in favor of diversity?” today means, “Don’t you like black people?”--and nothing chills most thinking white Americans more than the fear of being deemed racist. At the same time, many blacks cheer preferences under the misguided impression that racism is the only possible cause of unequal performance, and thus they remain blind to the importance of the perseverance and individual initiative that will truly succeed in fostering black excellence.

A university culture truly committed to erasing the sins of the past would champion diversity in its true sense, infusing its discourse on race with a range of views wider than variations on victimhood. Since 1978, diversity has served as a flimsy and evasive perversion of justice. It has helped no one, least of all black students. It’s high time we swept it into the dustbin of history.

-- John H. McWhorter, excerpted from "The Campus Diversity Fraud," City Journal, Winter 2002

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