“Diversity” Is Not Diverse

Writing in USA Today this morning Alan Gomez makes a compelling case that the term”Hispanic” fails dismally to capture or reflect the, well, diversity of Hispanics. He’s right; it’s “a lazy way for Americans to describe the more than 580 million people living to our south.”

That vague term ignores the vast differences that exist among Hispanics from different countries. They grow up in different circumstances and in different cultures. They flourish and struggle in different economies, confront different kinds of crime and immigrate to the United States for different reasons.

I may have more to say about this later, but for now consider the lame laziness of the virtually universal practice in selective higher education institutions of giving preferences to “Hispanics,” with no thought give to whether their heritage is Cuban, Mexican, or Puerto Rican. Do you really think the preference dispensers at the University of Texas beat the bushes (or barrios or neighborhoods) looking for qualified Cuban applicants?

I don’t.

Maybe the best way to kill “diversity” preferences is for the courts to insist that universities practice what they preach, requiring them to demonstrate that their preferences to Hispanics actually reflect Hispanic diversity, etc.

ADDENDUM

David Bernstein made my points, and many more, far better than I have in writing about Fisher v. University of Texas last June. Here’s a sample, but you should  read Bernstein’s whole piece.

Hispanics can be the direct descendants of Spanish conquistadors, their indigenous victims, African slaves, immigrants from anywhere in the world, or any combination of these. Hispanics’ ancestors have come to the U.S. from any one of twenty-one very diverse Spanish-speaking countries, plus possibly Portugal, Brazil, and other countries, depending on exactly how the category is defined. So what exactly justifies singling out Hispanics for preferences, but not members of other groups?

In Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court took the racial and ethnic categories used by the University of Michigan Law School as a given, and never addressed why Hispanic ethnicity, but not other ethnicities, should count for affirmative action purposes. For that matter, Grutter never explained why Hispanic should be considered an ethnic rather than just a linguistic category. After all, according to a recent Pew Foundation study fifty-one percent of Americans of Spanish-speaking heritage identify themselves by their family’s country of origin, while just twenty-four percent use a pan-ethnic identify such as Hispanic or Latino.

In any event, the diversity rationale endorsed by Grutter fails to explain why a state university is permitted to give preferences to a Hispanic individual of European ancestry, or an American of Mexican descent whose family has lived in Texas since 1850 and is fully assimilated into American life, while denying such preferences to, say, a dark-skinned child of Arabic-speaking immigrants from Yemen. The one hundredth Hispanic admitted to a university freshman class as an affirmative action candidate would seem to add less ethnic or linguistic heritage diversity than the first Kazakh or Mongolian. Yet it’s permissible under Grutter to give only the former a preference to satisfy diversity goals.