“Diversity” Chickens Come Home To Roost
I’ve written a number of times about how “diversity,” as I put it here, has become increasingly “un-American,” about “the awkward fact that a significantly high number of the beneficiaries of racial preference are foreigners.” (See, in addition, here, here, here, and here.)
Shirley Wilcher, an early 1970s graduate of Mount Holyoke, looked around at a reunion and became concerned, the Boston Herald reports.
“My suspicions were confirmed,” said Wilcher, now the executive director of the American Association for Affirmative Action. She found a rise in the number of black students from Africa and the Caribbean, and a downturn in admissions of native blacks like her.“Whoa, wait a minute!” the diversiphiles now seem to be saying. “When we demanded that everyone ‘consider race’ or ‘take race into account,’ etc., we didn’t really mean, you know, race; we meant us.” Thus:A study released this year put numbers on the trend. Among students at 28 top U.S. universities, the representation of black students of first- and second-generation immigrant origin (27 percent) was about twice their representation in the national population of blacks their age (13 percent). Within the Ivy League, immigrant-origin students made up 41 percent of black freshmen.
Last month, a Harvard Black Students Association message board asked, “When we use the term ’black community,’ who is included in this description?” A lively debate ensued, with some posters complaining that African students were getting an admissions boost without having faced the historical suffering of U.S. blacks.Someone seems to have neglected to tell the Harvard students that, at the insistence of the diversiphiles, for the past decade or so the justification for racial preference has emphatically not been compensation for or correction of “the historical suffering of U.S. blacks.”
Indeed, even affirmative action apparatchiks like Shirley Wilcher don’t seem to know what arguments they’ve been making. Looking out at the sea of foreign faces who have benefited from “her” cause,
Wilcher would like to know why. She asks if her cause has lost its way on U.S. campuses, with the goal of correcting American racial injustices replaced by a softer ideal of diversity — as if any black student will do.The answer, of course, is yes. “Her cause” lost its way, but not when she thinks. It lost its way even before its clever lawyers decided to exploit the “diversity” loophole Justice Powell carved for them in Bakke, back when it abandoned its historical dedication to equal treatment and took off after the pied piper of racial preference.
If you argue that the most important thing about yourself is your race, that you should be given special treatment because of your race, you hardly have grounds to complain (and you certainly should not be surprised) when people are given preferential treatment because of their race, especially if they can be seen to add a dollop of the “diversity” that you have been using lately to justify your special treatment.
When racial identity trumps individual identity, then it is sad but true that “any black student will do.”
ADDENDUM
As I’ve mentioned a number of times (such as here), in practice racial preference inexorably results in a form of race-norming (selecting the best candidates from separate racial pools), even though that practice was prohibited in the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Although the Boston Herald article discussed above does not say, could it not be possible that in attempting to fill their non-quota of black students admissions officers simply select those with the best grades and test scores, many of whom happen to be foreign?
Say What?
"as if any black student will do" that is a scary comment. it's not enough to discriminate on the basis of race, you have to fine tune your discriminations to so that the right kind of diverse people get in. if someone wrote a book about this, we would say it was too unreal. you can't make this stuff up.
Posted by: Anita | April 30, 2007 10:02 AM
These writers use the most bizarre language. They contrast "immigrant background" with "Native", even though "Native" meant something else five minutes ago; they use "American-born" to mean something -- I think non-immigrant-background -- even though many of the people with immigrant backgrounds are American-born.
Probably the best way to refer to Americans with recent lineage from Africa is "African American", a phrase that writers obsessed with race use all the time. Oddly, that phrase does not appear once in the article.
Posted by: LTEC![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.discriminations.us/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 30, 2007 10:41 AM
Isn't it true that race norming was only prohibited by CRA 1991 for employment tests, NOT college admissions? Despite the disappointment over the Grutter decision, at least that case, along with Gratz and Hopwood, shows the extent to which race norming has prevailed in competitive college admissions.
Posted by: David | April 30, 2007 10:50 AM
"many of the people with immigrant backgrounds are American-born."
Is this true? All of the studies on the beneficiaries of AA that I have seen (not too many, I admit) made clear distinctions between immigrant and American-born, although they do not detail the lineage of the latter, eg, distinguishing between recent and late lineage.
I think this whole meme is a very important and often over-looked one. I don't like AA, but if we have it, then I want it to help other Americans.
Posted by: Dom | April 30, 2007 11:28 AM
David - You are absolutely right that the 1991 CRA prohibited only employment-related race-norming. I should have made that clear. In fact, I was going to go back and do that when I saw your comment. I still think the (accurate) description of racial preference as race norming is useful, since proponents deny that is what they're doing. Race-norming is thus similar in that regard to quotas, which preferentialists endorse in practice while opposing in theory.
Posted by: John Rosenberg![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.discriminations.us/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 30, 2007 1:03 PM
Dom -
You'll have to read the article and judge for yourself how the phrase "American-born" is being used. It's confusing. Here's a quote:
Posted by: LTEC![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.discriminations.us/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 30, 2007 2:17 PM
"I don't like AA, but if we have it, then I want it to help other Americans."
I can appreciate Dom's instinct on this to keep it in the American family, so to speak. But I would rather someone who is not demanding that others be discriminated against be the one to benefit. Besides, the way these systems work if you are not the intended beneficiary of discrimination's rewards, than you are its victim.
There is a nice karmic quality to these unintended results.
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April 30, 2007 3:36 PM