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 iversity,
diversity, diversity. You hear the d-word praised and celebrated
everywhere, by everyone. Democrats
love it. Republicans
love it. Colleges and employers say they want it. We are unified
in our love for diversity, are we not?
But deep down
we also know that, when someone talks about the importance and desirability
of diversity, they are almost always saying — implicitly or explicitly
— that we ought to be willing to discriminate against some groups
and in favor of others in order to achieve it. That's the real agenda
of the civil-rights groups, personnel directors, and college-admission
officers who sing diversity's praises.
Diversity that
occurs naturally, without discrimination, is not an issue. But are
its benefits so great that it is worth the costs of discrimination
— the unfairness, resentment, stigmatization, lowered standards,
hypocrisy, illegality, and on and on — to achieve it? If the "underrepresentation"
of some groups (blacks, Hispanics) must be eliminated in order to
achieve diversity, it is an inexorable mathematical truth that other
groups (Asians, Jews) are thought to be "overrepresented."
Building a floor for one means constructing a ceiling for the others.
So it is fair
to ask: What's so great about diversity, anyway?
Now, I don't
doubt that there are many instances where diversity is very important
indeed, but we do have to make some distinctions here. I was in
a debate about racial and ethnic admission preferences recently
at a college and one of my opponents said that, if there is only
one kind of tree in the forest, and that tree dies out, then there
will be no forest. Therefore, we should discriminate in favor of
African Americans in college admissions. Needless to say, I think
the leap from biodiversity to institutionalized discrimination is
a long one.
The three principal
areas where racial and ethnic preferences are awarded today are
in employment, university admissions, and government contracting.
For the latter, the diversity rationale can be rejected out of hand.
There is not a black way and a white way to pave a road. You give
the contract to the company that can do the best job at the best
price. You want to have some competition, but it doesn't matter
if the competition is between two white companies, or two black
companies, or a white company and a black company. So you can't
use the diversity rationale in the contracting context.
What about
employment? It has to be noted at the outset that there is an important
legal problem here. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 has a categorical
ban on racial and ethnic discrimination by employers with 15 or
more employees. Whatever the plausibility of an argument that this
ban can be relaxed if the employer is trying to correct past discrimination
— a dubious exception that the Supreme Court has carved out — it
does not extend to discrimination justified only by diversity considerations.
If the statute is read to ban only discrimination for which the
employer does not think he has a good reason, then it offers no
effective ban at all.
But, legality
aside, should the employer think there is a good reason for discrimination
if it helps him achieve diversity? There are three possible such
reasons.
The first is
that, if there is not some critical mass reached of racial and ethnic
minorities, then prospective employees who belong to those "underrepresented"
racial and ethnic groups will not want to apply — and this will
result in the company not being able to hire the best people. But
it is dubious to justify not hiring the best people today by saying
that it ensures you will be able to hire the best people tomorrow.
Surely there are more effective ways to persuade nonwhites that
they are welcome. Another problem with this argument is that it
can be turned around to support the exclusion of minorities. If
most of your prospective workers are white, and many of them would
prefer not to work with nonwhites, then it makes no sense to hire
nonwhites.
The second
possible argument is that members of different racial and ethnic
groups bring with them different expertise about what customers
want. For instance, a Latina will do a better job of designing an
ad campaign pitched to increasing the number of Latina customers.
Maybe, but
maybe not. It would be surprising if Latinas were so strongly homogenous
a group that every Latina, and only Latinas, could understand how
to sell a product to them. Is it so difficult for people in one
group to learn what appeals to those in another group? Moreover,
even if there are some jobs where ethnic insight is peculiarly valuable,
these are surely the exception rather than the rule. And of course
we again have a two-edged sword. If you can use this sort of generalization
to decide against hiring an Anglo, you can use it in another context
to justify not hiring a Latina — if, say, your customer base is
unlikely to include people in that specific category.
The third argument
is that some level of diversity is necessary to fend off lawsuits
and boycotts. That is all too plausible, but what it really argues
for is a condemnation of the government agencies and civil-rights
organizations that engage in this sort of blackmail.
It is in the
educational context — particularly university admissions — that
the diversity argument is made loudest. There are a variety of arguments
here, too, but some are mutually inconsistent.
For instance,
sometimes it is argued that racial and ethnic diversity is valuable
because it ensures that different viewpoints and experiences are
represented on campus, but it is also argued that diversity helps
to show that not all African Americans, for instance, think the
same way. Isn't there some tension here? If there is diversity of
experience and outlook among African Americans (as there surely
is), just as there is among whites, then that at least undercuts
the argument that race can be used as a proxy for belief and background.
A recurrent theme in Ralph Ellison's collection of essays, Shadow
and Act, is the diversity among African Americans. While the
Left says it is fond of celebrating diversity, it is selective about
when to celebrate.
Here's another
tension. It is sometimes argued that exposing whites to blacks helps
teach the former that the latter are just as smart as they are,
thus exposing the silliness of bigotry. But for this lesson to work,
you have to make sure that the black students admitted really are
as smart as the white students. If you admit black students according
to a lower standard than the whites, then you will only reinforce
the stereotype of black intellectual inferiority — especially, of
course, when it leaks out that the bar is being lowered for blacks.
Another problem
with the pro-diversity argument in the higher-education context
is that the value of exposure to students of different backgrounds
is wildly exaggerated. For instance, one African American student
stressed to me with utmost sincerity that, had he never befriended
a particular Asian American on campus, he would never have learned
the correct definition of "sushi." Well, perhaps there
is a correlation between ethnic diversity and exposure to food lore.
But so what? Is spreading trivia about raw fish worth institutionalized
discrimination?
Even in the
strongest such pitch for classroom diversity — a course involving
discussion of discrimination — it is not obvious that the presence
or absence of black faces will make much difference. Those students
now will not have lived through slavery or Jim Crow; they will have
been born in the 1980s. Perhaps they will have experienced discrimination,
but hardly of a kind or degree that non-blacks could not imagine
or appreciate without the presence of blacks. Our popular culture
is full of literature, movies, and television about the horrors
of discrimination. I have taught employment-discrimination law and
can honestly say that no special insights into discrimination have
been offered, as a group, by the non-white students in my classes.
There is also
the argument that, since college students will eventually, their
parents hope, get jobs, it is important to teach them how to get
along with people of different skin colors and ancestries, since
this is surely a skill they will need in the workforce.
There may be
some truth to this, but it is not as if someone's education on these
matters is limited to the ages of 18 to 22. A lot of kids will have
been in multiracial and multiethnic environments already. And this
is not rocket science: (1) Treat people decently and as individuals;
and (2) There are many different subcultures in America. If you
haven't learned this by the time you go to college, you haven't
been going to church and reading enough; if you can't pick this
up on the job, you probably weren't smart enough to have graduated
anyhow.
And how much
diversity are you likely to get by using race and ethnicity as a
proxy for different backgrounds? Suppose you are a college-admissions
officer and you have applications from eight students:
· Son
of aeronautical engineer (alumnus) who makes $75,000 a year. Stay-at-home
mom. Lettered in basketball. Vice president of class. Organized
fundraising campaign for Jewish Community Center. 700 math SAT;
700 verbal SAT. 3.5 GPA. White.
· Daughter
of coal miner who makes $30,000 a year. Mom works as part-time waitress.
Leader of church youth choir. Singing awards. 600 math SAT; 700
verbal SAT. 3.6 GPA. First woman in family to go to college. White.
· Son
of construction worker who makes $35,000 a year. Mother deceased.
Built his own ham radio and personal computer. No extracurricular
activities except caring for six younger siblings. 700 math SAT;
600 verbal SAT. 4.0 GPA. Hispanic (Mexican American).
· Daughter
of owner of car dealership who makes $150,000 a year. Stay-at-home
mom. Girl Scout, lettered in three sports. 550 math SAT; 600 verbal
SAT. 3.3 GPA. Hispanic (Cuban).
· Son
of Vietnamese immigrants who run family restaurant. No extracurricular
activities except work at the restaurant. 800 math SAT; 600 verbal
SAT. 4.0 GPA. Asian.
· Daughter
of chemical engineer (alumnus). Mother is schoolteacher (alumna).
Treasurer of class, variety of high-school club memberships, including
yearbook photographer. 750 math SAT; 750 verbal SAT. 3.9 GPA. Asian
(Chinese American).
· Son
of federal manager and city administrative worker (alumna), with
cumulative income of $135,000 a year. President of class, captain
of chess team. 650 math SAT; 650 verbal SAT. 3.5 GPA. Black.
· Daughter
of unmarried welfare recipient. Captain of basketball team. Community
service. 600 math SAT; 650 verbal SAT. 4.0 GPA. Black.
The thumbnail
sketches of these applicants make clear that there is a wide variety
of experiences that they will all bring with them to the university.
It is also rather obvious that, for each of them, race will contribute
the least of their characteristics to any diversity. And it is rather
obvious, too, that you can't draw very many conclusions about the
individual if all you know is his or her race or ethnicity.
The Bush administration
will have to decide soon with whom it stands in this controversy
over diversity versus discrimination. Three conservative civil-rights
organizations — the American Civil Rights Institute, Center for
Equal Opportunity, and Institute for Justice — sent a letter last
week to Attorney General John Ashcroft, asking him to withdraw a
brief the Justice Department's civil-rights division had filed last
October with a federal court of appeals in a case that will be argued
on May 22. That brief argued that "diversity" justifies
the University of Georgia's racial discrimination in its admissions
policy. This week, my organization also published a paper by Robert
Lerner and Althea Nagai: a devastating critique of the social-science
"evidence" offered by the University of Michigan in favor
of its admissions
discrimination. That case is on appeal, and the Justice Department
had supported the university at trial.
To return to
the question posed at the beginning: The great thing about diversity
is its implicit message of our common humanity; serving up racial
and ethnic discrimination to achieve it will poison its beauty.
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