harmonicminer

This is a post in the chain on “The Left at Christian Universities”. The last, recommending a very important book, was The Left at Christian Univs, part 3: Diversity.

Following the useful practice of Peter Woods in his book Diversity: Invention of a Concept, I will use the italicized form of the word diversity to represent the common use of the term as political enterprise, and the unitalicized form to denote the conventional meaning of the word “diversity”.

Disclaimers

There are two possible strategies with disclaimers. You can put them at the beginning, or you can put them at the end.

I am doing both. I may also put a few in the middle.

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I am not a racist. Not even close, not in my dreams, not in any way at all.

I am not a bigot. I have warm fuzzy feelings for all kinds of people, from all kinds of backgrounds.

I am not fearful of change. Anyone who knows me would laugh out loud at the idea.

I am an (undead) white male. If you think that means you don’t need to pay any attention to my perspective, you may be a racist.

I regularly donate blood to the High Desert Blood Bank in San Bernardino County, California. I am AB negative (the rarest blood type, about 6 of every 1000 people), and I am CMV negative (some virus I never got, but which most people do), so my blood is good for people with compromised immune systems: the very old, and the very young, as in preemies. For reasons I don’t understand, AB negative blood plasma is the “universal donor” in plasma (not whole blood), and so, since my plasma is so rare and valuable, I give blood plasma about every month. They tell me that my plasma is probably in the bodies of bunches and bunches of pre-maturely born babies in the San Bernardino area, many of them of African-American descent. I consider it something of a sacred duty to do this.

OK? This is almost embarrassing, but the point needs to be made. The reason it needs to be made is because the Left routinely paints anyone who disagrees with the entire diversity enterprise as a hater and a racist. I am neither.

This is really embarrassing.

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First concepts

These thoughts form the backbone of the discussion in following posts. In later posts, I’ll discuss the implications for Christian colleges/universities. I’ll try to support them with a reasonable degree of evidence, some unavoidably anecdotal, because there are certain questions that social scientists simply do not ask, and the political/social commitments of diversity mavens are among them, even though they are blindingly obvious.

1) Diversity is an outgrowth of the political perspectives of the secular Left, and depends for its existence on moral equivalence arguments about the relative status and value of various cultures and sub-cultures.

2) Diversity is virtually always a supporter of the political and social Left. Diversity speakers and presenters are virtually always from the Left. The curious profession of diversity trainer means learning to sell the Left.

3) Diversity is the term that was used to disguise the essentially quota-based strategies of affirmative action, when quotas were found by the courts to be suspect.

4) Diversity is used to sneak in almost uniformly leftist perspectives in a wide variety of areas, not merely the inclusion of persons of minority races in public life and institutions. It is a complete pretense to present diversity as an enterprise that is politically or socially neutral.

5) Diversity is not about helping minorities improve their numerical representation in public life and institutions. It is about helping only certain minorities, which are perceived as not being able to raise themselves out of their current circumstances without preferences, quotas, set-asides, and special considerations of all kinds. As such, it is a racist enterprise on its face, even though its self-talk is that it is anti-racist.

The subtext of diversity is simple: if you are one of the favored minorities, you aren’t able to make it on your own, and need diversity to help you get where you want to go. If you are not one of the favored minorities, you should be ashamed of your racist heritage, and if you resist diversity in any way, it is further proof of your racism.

I’ll try to get around to commenting on each of the points above in subsequent posts.

UPDATE:  Part 5 in this series is here.

Tags: diversity, education, left, politics, right