Leo Morris, editorial-page editor at the News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, offered up some blistering criticism today of an assertion by a Brookings Institution demographer that we are experiencing an “extraordinary explosion of diversity all across the United States.” This is just “extraordinary crap,” Morris wrote, since America “has always been a nation of minorities.” The problem comes in exalting differences in skin tone over deeper, more meaningful differences in cultural and religious experience:

Now, if someone can patiently explain to the rightwing dummy why a Hispanic kid in California and a black kid in Chicago and a white kid in Aboite – who are mostly all educated in the same kinds of public schools and who are all caught up in the same popular culture – are more “diverse” than an Irish immigrant fleeing the potato famine, a Jewish immigrant escaping from Russia and an Italian immigrant trying to get away from the Cosa Nostra, I’ll take it all back.