The Diversity Warriors

Take a look at any large organization in the USA and you are certain to find statements and programs dedicated to promoting “diversity.” Look at those programs and read those statements and you are likely to find that “diversity” refers to externally observable physical traits such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and disability, along with non-observable traits such as religious belief, sexual orientation and socio-economic background. A common element of all these different forms of diversity is that each can be a “checkmark” on a shopping list – that a company looking to demonstrate the bona fides of its diversity program can tally its employees, both with raw numbers and as percentages, into these categories.

One of the benefits touted in the advocacy of diversity programs is the introduction of a variety of world views deriving from the varying life experiences of people who fit into different “diversity” categories. A Vietnamese lesbian Wiccan, we might expect, will bring a different perspective to the table than a German-Irish heterosexual Catholic white male will. Someone who grew up in a poor, high crime inner-city neighborhood in New York or Boston, it might be presumed, will see the world differently than someone who grew up in an affluent suburb of Dallas or Albuquerque. On paper, this sound quite plausible, even likely, and it may very well be true in the majority of cases, but diversity of demographics is no guarantee of diversity of thought.

It is likely, in fact, that organizations will eschew diversity of thought or opinion when that diversity runs counter to its mission and goals. As an extreme example, how likely is it that Planned Parenthood would hire and respect the voice of someone who’s staunchly pro-life? And, why would that someone even consider joining Planned Parenthood? Even in less overt, less binary situations, differences of opinion or belief from the prevailing ones won’t usually get an employee hoisted on his peers’ shoulders and paraded around the office. This isn’t a good or bad thing, it’s simply a reflection of reality. Organizations exist for certain purposes, and those purposes are advanced if the employees or participants are of a common mind-set. Diversity of appearance simply masks homogeneity of thought.

Why, then, the whole “diversity” thing? If we’re to be cynically honest, organizations that tout diversity are bowing to external demands. The chattering classes have come up with the idea as part of the debate on discrimination and bigotry. Organizations embrace it to put forth a corporate image that acknowledges the criticisms and external pressures from these chattering classes and those who look to them for what and how to think. “Diversity” is a means to impose a form of affirmative action on others, and a tool with which to criticize them when they do something disagreeable. The goals therein aren’t about expanding the range of ideas, viewpoints and opinions, but rather about control.

Consider the recent flutter of tut-tutting that followed Jerry Seinfeld’s Superbowl commercial. In case you missed it, Jerry’s catching heat for the lack of diversity among the guest stars of his Web series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” Apparently, he’s somehow “at fault” for not having female or black comedians on his show. Saturday Night Live has caught some recent heat in that regard, as well, for its lack of a black woman on the cast. Here there isn’t even a pretense at asking for diversity of viewpoint, apart from a blatantly racist implication that having someone of a different race or gender assures that diversity of viewpoint. Racist and ironic, in that those same chattering classes are usually at the fore of promulgating the notion that humans are all the same once you get past appearances.

Certainly, a black person who grew up in the worst part of Detroit with a drug-addicted single mom is going to have a different worldview than a white person, child of a doctor and a lawyer, who grew up on the Upper East Side of New York City. But what if the latter was black instead of white? Would the class warriors claim that an organization doesn’t get “credit” if its minority tally grew up among the 1% rather than coming from the bottom quintile of the socioeconomic spectrum? Of course not – if the demographic checkbox is filled, the credit is received.

What of diversity of opinion? You may also find, in the diversity statements and policies of some organizations, advocacy for the embrace and acceptance of different opinions, ideas and viewpoints. This sort of diversity isn’t as easily quantified and tabulated, given that opinions, ideas and viewpoints aren’t externally visible, can’t be tabulated easily, and are (or at least should be) mutable and evolving. But, even if it was measurable, can any of us recall or contemplate a situation where this sort of diversity is encouraged and praised by the chattering classes? Could one imagine a situation where an organization is called to task for having too many registered Democrats and not enough registered Republicans? For declaring that, once it polled its employees or members, it found too big a concentration of pro-choice folks and was now working on recruiting or hiring pro-life people? For finding too many who embraced Keynesian economics among its ranks and looking to get some Chicago or Austrian school folks on board?

Yes, the hypotheticals I put forth above involve statist and left-leaning cadres being infiltrated with those holding opposing views. This is because the chattering classes I refer to are almost invariably statist and usually left-leaning. It is people and groups of this bent who so often judge others and other groups by appearances, and that’s what “diversity” really is – judging a book by its cover. When the subject of content comes up, the statist way, no matter what its acolytes claim to the contrary, is to homogenize people and groups of people into a single “correct” set of behaviors, opinions, beliefs and positions on causes. One can draw no other conclusion after pondering what statists advocate, from political correctness to Common Core to speech codes on campuses to “forbidding” the use of certain words to putting the rights of the offended over the right of free speech etc. And then there’s ObamaCare, whose mandates on coverage not only ignore but actively obstruct “diversity” of policies in favor of “thou shalt cover what we decree.”

There are exceptions to the “book by its cover” reality of diversity. Unfortunately, the exceptions prove the rule. Consider a scholar, academic, writer, etc who is both black and conservative (or, “not-liberal”). Given that over 90% of blacks vote for Democrats and that it’s widely recognized that the black community identifies strongly with the Left, a black conservative is an unusual creature. By any logical measure, he should be embraced by any group or organization that seeks to improve the diversity of its ranks. Yet there’s a special sort of hatred reserved by the chattering classes for the likes of Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and (especially) Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In examples such as these, we see how diversity of opinion is not only scorned, but how having a “diverse” belief set trumps the book-cover metrics by which diversity is judged.

We celebrated the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States as a crowning achievement in the long march away from the nation’s history of racism, as well we should have. Yet, do we take note that he is a Harvard (7 of 43 presidents), Ivy League (14 of 43) educated attorney (25 of 43) when contemplating his diversity? What’s more likely to tell us what to expect, his skin color or his educational background and resume? The latter doesn’t much matter to the diversity warriors, except perhaps, again ironically, that he has a pedigree that suggests his beliefs and opinions will conform to theirs.

Long gone are the words of Martin Luther King:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

“Content of their character” doesn’t fill a checkbox on a diversity menu, “color of their skin” does. The pursuit of equality – the true and proper goal of any civil rights movement – has been cast aside in favor of demanding an amalgam, a menagerie if you will, based on categorizations established by the diversity warriors and identifiable as such by external characteristics and specific labels. Diversity is a jar of cheap jelly beans, varied in appearance but with little consideration given to each one’s actual flavor.

Why have we reached this state? Why has the goal of making outward appearance irrelevant been replaced with actively noticing differences in outward appearance? Part of the reason is, as mentioned above, the ease of measuring and publicizing diversity based on outward appearances and check boxes. In a sound-bite culture, it’s easy to respond to “what are you doing to ensure diversity in your organization?” with “we have 15% of X, 9% of Y and 8% of Z in our ranks.” But I suspect that the real reason stems from the utility of “diversity” as a weapon to be wielded against those who don’t share the diversity warriors beliefs and goals. Politics trumps idealism, and the cynics use and manipulate the dreamers to achieve selfish ends.

In politics, ineffective, counterproductive and overtly nefarious policies and endeavors are wrapped up in noble-sounding nomenclature. The Affordable Care Act is proving to be anything but. Head Start might as well be labeled “Government Baby Sitters.” The USA PATRIOT Act doesn’t share the value of liberty and the distrust of government that our original patriots had. Such policies and endeavors often, almost invariably, start with noble intent, and often, almost invariably, diverge from that original noble intent as the sausage-making of politics runs its course. Yet people too often embrace policies and endeavors because of their names, because of the promise behind those names, and usually inform their views of those policies and endeavors with their own predilections and desires. “Diversity” sounds fantastic, and it’s vague enough to accept all sorts of overlays and interpretations. Like “fairness,” its meaning is in the eye of the beholder, and like “fairness,” the metrics by which it is judged are often manipulated in pursuit of ends that have little to do with the idealized goal. Those manipulators, the diversity warriors, use the positive sound and hopefulness of the word itself to dupe the idealists into supporting their agendas and to bully everyone else into submission and compliance.