You remember Eugene Robinson. If not, or even if you do, take a look (or another look) at my most recent post about him from a couple of months ago, “WaPo’s Robinson Undercuts His Own Case For Preferences,” which begins:
I’ve written about the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson too many times to cite, here (with links to 9 or 10 more) and elsewhere. He seems to spend half his time lambasting Republicans — yesterday’s Opponents of Health Care Law Are Delusional was one of his milder efforts — the other half pushing race preferences, and the third half repeating those points on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
That post went on to discuss a recent book by Robinson that unwittingly undercuts his frequent defenses of “diversity”-based racial preferences, concluding (quoting from a New York Times review):
If the “race based community … no longer exists,” if it has splintered into disparate groups that are different not only in their economic need but also in their “culture,” in what sense can mere pigmentation continue to provide a proxy for the “diversity” that is the lone remaining weak reed supporting racial preference policies?
Now, again unwittingly, he’s done it again. In today’s race column on “Trayvon Martin and dangerous times for black men,” Robinson once again undermines the case for “diversity” preferences:
Black America was never a monolith, but over the past five decades it has become much more diverse — economically, socially, culturally. If you stood on a street corner and chose five black men at random, you might meet a doctor who lives in the high-priced suburbs, an immigrant from Ethiopia who drives a cab, a young aspiring filmmaker with flowing dreadlocks, an unemployed dropout trying to hustle his next meal and a midlevel government worker struggling to put his kids through college.
Those men would have nothing in common, really, except one thing: For each of them, walking down the wrong street at the wrong time could be a fatal mistake.
Leave aside for now the fact that there are also wrong streets in America where it could be fatal for an Asian or white man to walk. If those five black men “have nothing in common” except the danger they may face in certain neighborhoods, why should any of them — or their wives or sisters or daughters or sons — be given any preferential treatment based on the assumption that their race alone makes them purveyors of “diversity”?
