Diversity (University Style) Defined

As the Supreme Court is about to hear a case from the University of Texas on the permissibility of basing admissions to universities on race, we will hear a lot of talk about a supposed need for diversity. In the context of affirmative action at colleges and universities, the term “diversity” is used with a particular meaning. It does not  refer to the desirable goal of creating a community of active discourse and widely diverse opinions where students are exposed to a variety of viewpoints  and theories, but rather to something quite different. Diversity is to plain, direct, race-quota based patronage as creation science is to plain, old fashioned  creationism,  that is a fundamentally intellectually dishonest fallback and expedient developed for public consumption after the actual belief becomes untenable.

A Diversity Puzzle

It is an article of faith among the politically correct that ethnic stereotypes  - the humorless and  hardworking Germans, the voluble French, the reserved and  reliable English, the canny and thrifty Scots and Jews, the excitable Italians, the stolid Scandinavians, the laid back and procrastinating Hispanics, the dedicated and hardworking Japanese and Chinese, and so on - are barbarous relics without a shred of validity. Among the same people it is an article of faith that a student body or workforce comprised of people from many various ethnic groups gains strength from the different viewpoints and ways of thinking and behaving that people from different ethnic groups bring to the mix solely by virtue of belonging to those groups. It would be interesting (and probably fun) to see how a diversity peddler who was put on the spot would reconcile those two beliefs.

Quixotic Gripes

Feeling a bit quixotic and perhaps wanting to offer a small homage to George Orwell, I note a few well established examples  of the corruption of language by  the marching enforcers of political correctness. 

The  term “challenged” makes utterly no sense as a euphemism for “handicapped”. A challenge is a provocative invitation to compete or strive. A blind or crippled person may well face challenges as he tries to cope with his handicap, but blindness and lameness are not themselves challenges. They are conditions. As an aside it is interesting how the use of the term “challenged” illustrates the futility of the whole enterprise of creating euphemisms. “Mentally retarded” was once a polite term for “feeble minded” or “dim witted”.  Once it  fell into too frequent use as a pejorative  for prissy sensibilities, we got “mentally challenged” which is itself now showing up in enough insults and jokes to cry out for its replacement. (“Retarded”, by the way, was better linguistically than “challenged”. It at least described the condition reasonably accurately.)  Similarly, “handicapped” and “disabled”, at first euphemisms for “crippled”, were replaced by their variant of “challenged”, and it too is now wanting a substitute euphemism. (The possible substitute “differentially-abled”  never got off  the ground, perhaps because its absurdity was obvious even to the irony and non-tin-ear challenged.)

Then we have the racial and ethnic  terms “native American” and “African American”.  “Native American”, in particular, offers a nearly unbeatable combination of goofiness and arrogance. In every other context  a native of a country or region is someone who was born there. So in usual usage, I am a native American as are upwards of three hundred million other native born citizens of this country. “American Indian” is a perfectly polite term that has the advantages of being both descriptive and devoid of loaded and inappropriate connotations. “African American”, on the other hand,  suffers mainly from being simply inaccurate. The term is used to refer not to a person’s continent of origin but to his membership  to some noticeable degree in a particular racial group, i.e. to a black American. It does not refer to a Boer, an Egyptian, or a Berber who becomes an American citizen, though each of these is an African American in the sense that Americans  tracing their ancestors to other places are called Italian Americans, German Americans, or Chinese Americans, for example. On the other hand, a black person living outside the United States and holding citizenship in another country is not an African American in any sensible usage, though there have been reported cases of politically correct newspapers calling citizens of various African or Caribbean nations “African Americans” to avoid using the  term “black”.  This is odd, since “black” was fairly recently quite politically correct and is descriptive, non-offensive, and, best of all, accurate in terms of what is meant.

All in all it is silly business, and the silliness can become particularly apparent when the politically correct dogs start chasing their own tails and catching  them. “Colored person” was a term used in polite conversation fifty to a hundred years ago to denote a black person. It was later deemed horridly inappropriate by people who more or less simultaneously decreed that “person of color” was just a splendid term to use.   Similarly there are those out there who claim to see vast differences between “disabled person” (bad) and “person with a disability” (supposed to be good). However the fact that most of this makes no sense does not mean it is completely unimportant. One should remember that in schools, governments, universities, and the traditional media there are large numbers of earnest fools and resentful scoundrels who equate the use or avoidance of the correct neologism of the day with virtue or vice and sometimes act on their judgments.