Mystic "diversity"

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views March 24, 2003]

While businesses will use the rhetoric of the free market when it suits their purpose, they will dump it in a minute when it does not. Against this background, it is not surprising that big business is filing briefs in favor of affirmative action in the University of Michigan case that the Supreme Court will be hearing this spring.

Big business has long been in favor of racial quotas. When an effort was begun back in the 1980s, within the Reagan administration, to get rid of affirmative action, the influence of corporate America helped squelch this effort. Why does big business want racial quotas? Because it is in their own self-interest.

If a corporation does not have enough minority employees to satisfy government agencies, that can lead to racial discrimination lawsuits. But if they hire by quotas and quotas are outlawed, they can be sued by whites for reverse discrimination. Keeping affirmative action legal solves their problem. But that is not how it was presented in the January 27th issue of BusinessWeek, where columnist Roger O. Crockett portrayed corporations as courageously "sticking out their necks" for the sake of that mystic thing called "diversity." Sticking their necks out? Just who is going to do what to them for supporting quotas? It is safer than playing checkers with your maiden aunt.

According to BusinessWeek, corporate CEOs "believe that as minorities' share of the U.S. population has mounted, diversity has become a critical workforce requirement." They get this diversity by hiring graduates of "a campus where diversity thrives" because that is where "students develop an understanding of different cultures." And that, in turn means that these graduates know how to "appeal to a variety of consumers" as well as how to get along with "colleagues and clientele from many ethnic backgrounds."

How do companies in Japan manage to sell everything from cars to cameras, in countries around the world, without having that mystic "diversity"? How does a country with such a racially homogeneous population even manage to educate its young people if "diversity" is such an essential factor in education?

The end of affirmative action in state colleges and universities in California and Texas has not led to declining enrollments of minorities, but to their redistribution among academic institutions. But facts carry less weight than the "diversity" mantra.

-- Thomas Sowell, an economist at the Hoover Institution, is the author of many books, including Preferential Policies: An International Perspective (Morrow), Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas (Free Press/Macmillan) and Migrations and Cultures: A World View (Basic Books).

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