Posted on 10/12/2012 3:20:23 AM PDT by Kaslin
There is an uplifting American feel about a university, a workplace or a neighborhood brimming with people of different races. It is the product of a nation assembled of people from everywhere else. From many places, one people.
Other nations have diversity of a sort, but no one can go to France and become French. I cannot go to Brazil and become Brazilian. The diversity of America, an assemblage of skin colors painted with a wide swath of history from immigration to slavery, has become a uniquely beautiful concept.
Leave it to government to screw it up.
The Supreme Court’s consideration of Fisher v. Texas has opened a flood of lecturing about the moral necessity of clinging to race as a criterion for university admissions.
Decades after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prayed for a nation that judges not by pigment but by character, that dream is largely realized. In a sad irony, the greatest remaining resistance is from a chorus of those who likely consider themselves heirs to the King legacy.
From predictable soapboxes on the left, they insist that even though racism is now one of our foremost societal evils, it must still be practiced-- repackaged in the form of race preferences to favor students of color in college, and, one presumes, workers of color in every workplace.
University admissions is a particularly sensitive arena in a nation where many minority student scores lag behind white totals. Without a shred of mainstream thought to suggest there is something about students of color that automatically cripples them, we properly look at other factors-- family stability, socioeconomics, the crapshoot of which high school a student lands in.
But those factors, which can all help or hinder grade levels, can apply to white students as well. So why the continuing drumbeat to maintain race as a factor in college admissions?
There are several motivations, and all of them act to our detriment.
For many, it is a skewed sense of justice, as in the argument demanding atonement for hundreds of years of slavery. In this logic, adding points for race is a type of rough reparations system that balances past wrongs. This has always been horribly misguided. The proper successor to past injustice is current and future justice, not some endlessly swinging pendulum of grievances. Even the sincerest advocates of affirmative action seem unaware of the insult they deliver with a message that says minority kids can’t cut the mustard without ethnic favoritism.
Then there is the hijacking of the concept of equality, from the equality of opportunity that encourages and rewards positive behaviors, to a presupposed equality of result, in which attributes and gifts are subjugated to factors we are taught are irrelevant in every other way.
As a child, I was taught that race did not matter, and grew to think and live that way. As an adult, I see no end to the cries of those who desperately need it to matter, as a vehicle for their own continued significance.
Beyond showboats like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are allies who have a stake in a racially divided America, so they work hard to keep it that way, trumping up racism where it does not exist, which surely keeps it residually alive in the form of resentment from those who are fed up with that narrative.
But foremost in the preaching on behalf of race preferences is the mantra of diversity-- the notion that the Supreme Court simply must allow schools to grant or deny points based on race so that students are not sentenced to the nightmare of associating only with the like-skinned.
(Unless, of course, the environment is a historically black college, in which the racial near-unanimity is empowering and uplifting).
In Texas, where I live, it is guaranteed that if our state universities used the same criteria for all races-- and let those include grades, test scores, essays, interviews, life challenges of any sort-- the result would be student bodies featuring every race in some proportion or another.
While I cannot predict what the racial makeup of those classes would be, I proudly proclaim that I do not care. Nor should anyone. If one student body were predominantly white, another predominantly black or Hispanic or Asian or Eskimo, it would not matter one bit in an education marketplace made honest at last.
If we get to that glorious day, no one will ever look at a black face on campus and scoff that race must have been a leg up. Hispanics will have the pride of knowing they have walked through the same tunnel as students of every other race.
This, and not artificially prolonged group privileges, will foster additional racial healing.
As time passes, I am less able to assign good motives to the diversity fetish. Many of its practitioners are less interested in diversity for its own sake than in maintaining the heavy-handed government needed to enforce it.
America is a land of many races and creeds because of a compelling beacon of liberty. Liberty demands neighborhoods, schools and workplaces that reflect the racial makeup of whoever happens to be there, on whatever path they have chosen with whatever talents they bring.
Diversity that occurs naturally is a thing of beauty. But at the swordpoint of government, it becomes a cause for discord that ultimately harms us all.
As long as people understand most of the “protected” classes go on to become token employees somewhere or other, they can somewhat insulate themselves from the potential damage of these programs.
I’ll be damned if I have something serious (in regards to health, finance, education) that I would entrust to anyone who might only be their because of their race and/or gender.
Boston school system circa 1950: Poles, Frogs, Huns, Squareheads, Brits, Gees, Spaniards, Eyeties, Blacks, Russkies, Dutch, even a Turk or two and a smattering of Greeks (that would be me), and probably a few nationalities I've forgotten.
Equating all white European tribes as the same is ludicrus, as we were pretty busy killing each other for a few thousand years, just as all the black tribes of Africa were busy killing and enslaving each other.
"Diversity" is Commie balderdash.
Affirmative action stands for the proposition that two wrongs DO make a right.
This article shines diversity, but you cannot shine a tennis shoe.
Affirmative action is needed if blacks want to continue to get into college and to get Gubmint jobs.
That cannot be denied.
Affirmative Action was meant to be a bandaid to place over the wound that blacks were not up to the same standards whites were in performing at tests for jobs or college entrance. That wound was supposed to be healed over the years as blacks went to integrated schools and caught up to the standards they needed for jobs without Affirmative action.
Well that has been about 40 years now. The blacks have held back education in our schools. Instead of blacks catching up whites have gone down. Entrance exams have been lowered and still they cannot pass them in proportion to whites.. Discipline in schools is disproportional in schools and also in the jobs where blacks work, because of behavior problems and problems showing up for work.Not because of racial bias, but because they create the problems.
We can argue race all day long,but we cannot deny the fact that if we want diversity we have to have Affirmative action for blacks. After 40 years of it , it is still needed and will always be needed.We can argue the reasons, but we cannot argue the facts.
Blacks blame it on racism, whites blame it on blacks inability to catch up .But the proof is in the pudding.
Balcks have not caught up and academic skills and discipline in schools are dropping despite us pouring money at the problem.
Now they want to have affirmative action in school discipline. They are going to have to punish a helluva lot of whites for minor problems to achieve that.
Be the first kid on your block to ...
...collect the whole set!
Any time government mandates that we have people (any people) present based on superficial or other characteristics, then Government has infringed our Freedom to peaceably Assemble with whomever we choose (and to not assemble with those we choose not to). Not that I'd make those decisions based upon such superficial characteristics, but those in our Government would.
Well said, And i would add that because of all of this socialist bull we are losing the ability to communicate with each other.
As in the days of the tower of Babel when God confused the tongues.
Older people can remember when you had no doubt about what most people would think about a particular issue as long as it had nothing to do with politics, but now we don,t know for sure even what our friends think.
Could this be the way it happened back then?
Diversity forced upon us is like potty training a puppy.
If the puppy poops on the floor, you push his nose in it and put him outside. After awhile he learns and is house-broken (deversified). The principle has always worked.
However, if you take a puppy and let it poop on the floor and then take a different puppy and push his nose in it, he may bite you and the whole diversity thing goes to hell.
Well, I’m tired of my nose being forced into the pile of poop called diversity by actions of the government.
And......I’m mad as hell!
That is such BS. America is land of many races because of the 1965 immigration act and a wide open border.
But do we really want diversity? I know most people will verbally pledge their fealty to Diversity, but do most people really want it?
And for all the white people out there who really do support diversity, they need to be asked how far this support goes? For example, do they support racial preferences to achieve diversity? Would they give up a spot in a selective university in favor of a less qualified (academically speaking) minority applicant? Even better, what if they have children applying at a selective university? Would they support aff action/racial preferences for a black or Hispanic kid over their own child?
Framing it that way would of course get one called a racist (what doesn’t though unless you take the liberal position), but it would drive the question home to all those moderate white voters. Mouthing support for Diversity is one thing, but if you really buy into it, then you should be fine with a policy that may screw you or someone close to you.
This whole argument against racial preferences on the grounds that it leaves the beneficiaries with a stigma is valid, but it is hardly the main reason to oppose aff action. It’s like whites have come up with this as a pathetic attempt to shield themselves from inevitable charges of racism.
The main reason to oppose preferences is because they are blatant discrimination against whites. It is sanctioning permanent discrimination against whites in the name of Diversity. I wish the GOP had the stones to say that.
Diversity that occurs naturally is a thing of beauty.
What about homogeneity that occurs naturally?
But at the swordpoint of government, it becomes a cause for discord that ultimately harms us all.
Indeed and that is exactly what we have now. Government mandated and sanctioned.
The reason they won't is found in this quote FTA:
As time passes, I am less able to assign good motives to the diversity fetish. Many of its practitioners are less interested in diversity for its own sake than in maintaining the heavy-handed government needed to enforce it.
The GOP leaders want that power as much as the 'rats do. The whole "moral" argument for diversity is actually a smokescreen.
I am 70 years old, and have seen a few things in this life.
I have seen entire neighborhoods go black, neighborhoods that were once great places to live.
Now I think it is reasonable to assume that some of those people who moved from those neighborhoods were liberals, were people who knelt at the shrine of diversity, were definitely not racist. but at some point , they had enough of diversity and they moved with the rest of us racists.
In fact many of the first blacks who moved into these neighborhoods couldn’t wait to get out, and we know they weren’t racist.
Perhaps diversity would be fine if it could be limited, but that would be racist ——wouldn’t it?
The diversity fetish is nothing more than a very successful effort to promote reverse discrimination as a form of reparations while at the same time disenfranchising European Americans through the promotion and maintenance of an open borders for non-whites policy. Its been extremely successful at diluting “U.S. American Solidarity” and its actually working to undo nationalistic patriotic identification. But that’s not the case only in the U.S.! Its also been quite successfully used in the U.K. and at its core its rooted in an intense anti Anglo-American agenda propagated by Global Marxists headquartered in the U.N. For all practical purposes...........they’ve won. And the proof of that is sitting in the White House today.
“There is an uplifting American feel about a university, a workplace or a neighborhood brimming with people of different races”
Nonsense.
America is not unique because we are a democracy or because of the pablum of us being a "nation of immigrants". We are unique because of our traditions. And those are British-American.
“As time passes, I am less able to assign good motives to the diversity fetish...”
With this line, the writer shows himself to be the fool that he is.
If he truly had any brains, he would NEVER have assigned ANY “good motives” to “the diversity fetish”.
“Diversity” has been one of the greatest frauds ever foisted upon Americans and shoved down our throats.
I never once accepted its mendacious lies.
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