Vanessa Williams, an assistant city editor at the Washington Post, has an OpEd column today objecting to Scott Malcomson’s article in Sunday’s NYT “Week in Review” article, which observed that “Obama is not black in the usual way.” Asking rhetorically “What does it mean to be ‘stereotypically African-American?'” Williams argued that there is no “usual way” to be black.
She’s right, of course. But it’s too bad she didn’t notice how the “diversity” argument is based on the same noxious notions of racial essentialism that she here quite properly rejects. There is no reason to assume that a black skin gurantees that the person it surrounds will necessarily provide any meaningful “diversity” to a freshman class, or newsroom, or anywhere else.
[…] (and by implication, she herself) is black enough. (For earlier discussions of this issue, see here, here, here, and here.) The discourse, occurring mostly among black people, has been dominated by […]
If the students “looked White”, I highly doubt that you and the other anti-affirmative action types would have a problem in the first place.
–Cobra