When last heard from here, syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., was busy making the IUNS (Iniquitous Ubiquitous Non Sequitur) that white students are not “materially harmed” by race preferences and that we wouldn’t “even be having this conversation if the students who got in ahead of the plaintiffs had done so one the basis of, say, life experience or athletic ability.” Race, oboe playing, down field running — doesn’t matter, it’s all the same.
Now he’s back, saying of Rep. J.C. Watts’s defense of Lott that he “would have more credibility had he not allowed himself to be trotted out like a show pony to promote his party’s alleged diversity.”
Alleged diversity? Excuse me, but what exactly is the difference between diversity and “alleged” diversity? Wait a minute, it’s coming to me…. Isn’t this the same sort of thing that The Progressive and other lefties said about the “faux inclusiveness” of the last Republican convention and then of President Bush’s cabinet? Sure enough, as I discussed here, the apparent diversity at the convention was only “stage managed,” explained James Traub in the New York Times Magazine. Well, what did Traub say about Powell and Rice being named to powerful positions in the new administration? That they “have less symbolic value than comparably placed figures in domestic policy would.” Real power, apparently, is as nothing compared to symbolic value.
Now I think I get it. Real diversity has to be the result of conscious, race-based preferences and choices, preferably enshrined in law or at least regulatory policy. Diversity that just sort of happens when you’re not focused on race, unplanned, in what might be called a free market of race and ethnicity, that’s only “apparent” diversity.
Your rebuttal has the right idea but the wrong details. The “faux diversity” of the 2000 Republican Convention, as I understood the complaint, was that the part of the convention routinely visible to the TV cameras “looked like America”, as Clinton used to say—for example, you could see J.C. Watts there—disguising the fact that the delegate body as a whole was almost all white.
And this charge is absolutely true. Most of America got to see the TV face, while the white-bigot vote (that is, the Trent Lotts) could rest comfortable in the overall composition of the convention.
The better rebuttal, to my mind, was to point out that the Democratic Conventions have featured similar tokenism with respect to physical disabilities. Remember that week both Christopher Reeve and Michaela Alioto—a losing primary candidate—spoke?
Andrew – I think this point is fair, although I’m sure that a survey of the criticism of the Repub. convention would not be as nuanced as yours. That is, I’m sure I recall that some of the criticism wasn’t just of the TV face of the convention, but of the fact that blacks were playing major roles there, as they have in the admin. that followed.