Diversity
Wood, Peter
0 n visiting the Aru Islands southwest of New Guinea in March 1857, Alfred Russel Wallace encountered some diversity: At early morn before the sun has risen, we hear a loud cry of `Wawk—wawkwawk,...
...Nor do universities have a presumptive obligation to admit students who profess beliefs fundamentally at odds with the ethical foundations of liberal education...
...But they face an almost impossible task, since the diversity they attempt to conjure is itself rather tenuous...
...As he reflected on all this variety, Wallace had to abandon the Sunday-school theology that God created each species to serve some human need: "All living things," he wrote, were not made for man...
...In the 2000 census, about 4 percent of Americans claimed a multiracial background...
...Once upon a time we anthropologists thought the world might actually be like that...
...The categories of concocted diversity plainly do not make sense without such aid...
...it denies us our individuality...
...Believe me, compared to the alternative, preferential treatment feels better...
...secretary of transportation, Norman Mineta, issued orders that prevented security guards at airports from "profiling" for Middle Easterners...
...but within the culture of diversity, few in higher education dare resist minority students' descent into the faux authenticity of street personae...
...But if we stick to arguments that can be considered in the light of day, the distinction between the actual diversity of American life and a political ideal of arranging access to social goods in proportion to the size and strength of social groups—the distinction between diversity I and diversity II—can be both expanded and sharpened...
...Some "Hispanics" look like Europeans...
...Everywhere we anthropologists looked, we found people on the move, changing languages, borrowing customs, merging traditions, intermarrying, creating hybrid cultures, reinventing themselves, acting as the custodian of ancient laws in the morning and participating in the global market that afternoon...
...The ethical side is more complicated...
...REAL DIVERSITY I would like to linger a moment on the distinction between diversity as something real in the world and the diversity that we sometimes manufacture as a substitute for the real thing...
...So many delegates need to be women to send there, and one of them needs to be an LGTB.You know like proportionate to the size of the university, so I am like, "Wow...
...Despite pressure from many African Americans, who would prefer that Woods adhere exclusively to an "African American" identity, he continues to refuse to pigeonhole himself...
...The truth is, much of the diversity of which we speak in America exists nowhere but in our minds...
...It also is not unusual for me to be the only Black person in a class.This really bothered me my freshman year...
...Diversity II advocates, for example, routinely describe the United States as rapidly becoming "minority majority," by which they mean that the population comprising members of minority groups will soon be larger than the population of non-minority whites...
...And increasingly, Americans seem to see themselves not as members of a single group, but as participants in several cultures...
...One of his reports, "Jungle Fever," is an account of Professor James Shapiro teaching Heart of Darkness to a class consisting mostly of freshmen...
...The actual diversity in American society is real but superficial...
...They worry not that immersion will fail to work but that it will work—and thus threaten what they view as the preservation of separate cultures...
...That is a substantial rejection by ordinary people of the diversity II grid of mutually exclusive categories...
...Having such authentic black views expressed in class, argued Rosen, is a good reason to maintain affirmative action in admissions...
...The League of Nations and the United Nations may provide models of a sort for artificial diversity too—not in the representation of nations per se, but in the elaborate formulae for cultural balancing...
...When Alfred Russel Wallace traveled through the Malay Archipelago, he found the diversity of species astounding...
...Its appeal is based in part on the conviction that America really is composed of separate groups, all competing for access to the same resources...
...They are not so concerned about specific little details...
...Thus diversity II, the ideal, depends—at least in principle—on diversity I, the facts...
...and Mon-Khmer is Austronesian...
...The language of race gives Americans a way of talking about and emphasizing some social differences and repressing or ignoring others...
...The term "Hispanic" notoriously plays similar tricks...
...The Aviary was still a special place filled with shrill cries and strange whistles, but its enchantments were now fugitive...
...and the various smaller birds chirp and whistle their morning song...
...We can and do argue with one another over the significance of this fact, but the fact itself is not seriously in dispute...
...This is the great Bird of Paradise going to seek its breakfast...
...Years later, by the time I was finishing college, Pittsburgh's Northside had been gentrified and the Aviary expensively renovated...
...Pinning down and labeling, however, are precisely what concocted cultural diversity requires...
...To induct people into college even partly because of race is to hand down a life sentence of self-doubt, based on the suspicion that one couldn't have succeeded on merit alone...
...That I take to be a dream of diversity worth dreaming, for surely we have much to learn from each other when we meet as equals united by the common pursuit of knowledge...
...On closer inspection, categories such as black, white, Asian, and Hispanic break down...
...Real diversity in some extreme forms—such as going to live among the Typee or, like John Walker Lindh, joining the Taliban—might not be good for you, but real diversity within certain bounds most certainly is...
...John Sykes, a gay student, showed he had learned the key lessons: "What I have learned now, and I've taken a lot of DPD (Difference, Power, and Discrimination) (I am in two right now), is that it is not just tolerating people with differences, it is embracing them and supporting them...
...Whatever else this complex story is about, it does not advance the idea that we can achieve happier and more fulfilled lives by plunging into cultural exchange and exploration of our links to other peoples...
...The so-called "Hispanic Caucus" in California, for example, seems to have garnered the power in that state's legislature to force Hispanic quotas on the University of California system (which anyway had little will to resist...
...For the few missionaries driven mad, there were dozens who came to admire profoundly the people they lived with and who became expert linguists and ethnographers intent on creating an enduring record of the fast-changing cultures they had come to love...
...Natural diversity is not, in and of itself, good or bad...
...To treat people as objects, as though they are theresiduum of their race, class, gender, and other such superficialities, and not individuals who define themselves through their ideas and creative acts—that is injustice...
...But what are those bounds...
...Such group identities may seem real enough to politicians trolling for votes and marketers looking for regularities in consumer behavior, but in fact they are shadowy formulations and deeply at odds with our cultural imperative to treat individuals as individuals, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds...
...Shapiro's class reads Conrad under the diffuse illumination of diversity, and in that light the story of a morally disastrous temptation to identify with the primitive "other" disappears...
...It indeed has a strong base on the Left, but it also has appeal in many other precincts in American politics...
...At the November 2001 convention in Las Vegas of the National Association of Multicultural Education, Professor Smith made a presentation in which he declared that "African Americans learn holistically...
...Equating reasonable searches of individuals who fit a profile with "hate" and "discrimination" is pretty far from common sense, but it is entirely consonant with the ideals of diversity...
...Artificial diversity is, essentially, dehumanizing...
...Today, New England's universities have some of that international flavor...
...lorries and parroquets cry shrilly...
...Kurtz, an exemplar of a civilized European, goes far upriver (usually taken to be the Congo), where he descends into murderous savagery...
...cockatoos scream...
...It had become self-consciously educational...
...One refers to the facts, the other to hopes or wishes...
...The campus aviary, of course, exists mostly in the minds of the bureaucrats who attempt to organize it...
...Kurtz may be a darkness in Western civilization itself...
...That is, races are social conventions, not biological realities...
...Inside, a walkway took one at treetop level through a microcosmic rainforest...
...and it makes us complicit in denying the full humanity of others...
...some have African features...
...The students in turn mostly focus on Heart of Darkness as an indictment of Western imperialism...
...Species whose ancestors last met when Tyrannosaurus rex still was king now found themselves part of the bird equivalent of Mister Rogers's Neighborhood...
...A real diversity produced by building a community that is an aristocracy of talent could end up with disproportionately large numbers of people in one social category and few in another...
...and it doesn't, for that matter, describe gross physical appearance...
...But dividing Americans into supposed ethnic categories does not guarantee that Americans will act as members of those categories...
...sometimes it appalls us with Rwanda-like cruelty...
...It is, in a certain light, an enchanting vision—for it assigns each of us a kind of primordial identity, so that we are born with a rightful claim on our portion of the world...
...In the wake of 9/11, for example, the U.S...
...To be in favor of this kind of diversity is to lay claim to a kind of righteousness tinged with modesty...
...Once we allocate political rights by group identity, the assignment of group identity becomes the crucial determinant of everything else for the individual...
...But artificial diversity merits no such respect...
...It would be futile, however, to look for general agreement about the exact details of this ideal...
...By mixing racial and ethnic categories and an all-purpose Latino designation, the census offered 126 ways to label our social identities...
...And those who serve this sentence also come under intense psychological pressure to perpetuate the arrangement, so that others might "benefit" from the same "breaks...
...We continue to use them as labels, but are increasingly aware how much they distort reality...
...He asserted that "surrendering to actions of hate and discrimination makes us no different than the despicable terrorists who rained such hatred on our people...
...Perhaps because of this, when anthropologists lend support to the diversity movement—as many do—they frequently turn obscurantist, invoking the aid of postmodern irony or neo-Marxist dialectic...
...Diversity II, by contrast, is an ideal...
...We actively recruit LGBTs and it just feels like my issues matter...
...If only Kurtz had escaped from his pernicious stereotyping—or perhaps, if only Conrad had made that escape—things would have turned out well...
...There is no obvious answer, but the supracategory GLBT is now common on college campuses, while as yet there is no call for sympathetic recognition of, say, necrophiles...
...On the whole, the students she spoke to were enthusiastic about the concept of diversity, but somewhat disappointed by the practice...
...Making the present generation pay for the mistakes of past generations only makes sense if we assume a kind of "group right...
...Those who advocate diversity as an ideal often go to great lengths to invent and impose counterfeit varieties, partly because they have lost sight of the important differences between real and artificial diversity...
...It is not a wise trade...
...When Ms...
...The real Mr...
...But the logic of this position, once exposed, ought to make us wonder: Do we really want to configure ourselves into a society based on group rights...
...The willingness to impose inferior education on immigrant students is a powerful indication of the insecurity at the heart of diversity...
...If a group's rights were infringed in the past and the group still exists, it can be compensated...
...It is part of the human condition...
...And they are alert to the idea that the darkness in Mr...
...With skill andluck, political leaders can negotiate across the lines of such divisions and occasionally they are worn away by conquest, intermarriage, or oppression, but division itself cannot be eradicated...
...And its murkiness is compounded by the strong tendency of the diversity II movement to conflate facts with ideals...
...Conrad offers a dark vision of Western man in deep confrontation with another culture...
...While some college administrators may see in diversity "an intellectual resurgence comparable to the Renaissance," the aviary has a less certain appeal to students...
...Pursued as social policy, diversity is a form of systematic injustice and it makes us accomplices to injustice...
...The diversiphile vision, with its endlessly repeated refrain that America is "not a melting pot," is really a form of nostalgia for the days before the melting was complete...
...Each of these types of college practices an absolute or a relative policy of exclusion...
...These sorts of glib generalizations now pass, under the banner of diversity, as sensitivity to cultural differences, rather than the soft bigotry they actually are...
...To favor diversity is thought to place one on the side of kindness, generosity, and openness to the world...
...It expresses a vision of society in which people divide themselves into separate groups, each with profound traditions of its own, but held together by mutual esteem, respect, and tolerance...
...The inextricable fact of social and cultural diversity is evident in the bellicosity between Pakistan and India and in the separatists of Quebec...
...Although this claim has a genuine demographic basis, diversity II advocates typically employ it in a highly misleading fashion...
...When we think through the implications of group rights, we see a long and frightening road out of democracy and individual freedom, and into tyranny and the straitjacket of stereotypes...
...it doesn't designate a common language...
...A great many students buy into the vision promoted by their schools and colleges, but complain that the promised idyll never quite materializes...
...real diversity on campus could come from rigorously eliminating any orm of linguistic, ethnic, national, sexual, or religious favoritism—indeed, any favoritism based on social identity...
...Determined not to commit similar injustice, Mineta proved susceptible to the argument that it would be unfair to focus security efforts on people who, on the basis of apparent age, sex, cultural background, and ethnicity, were most likely to be affiliated with terrorist groups...
...In Columbus, Ohio, for example, 18,800 people identified themselves in2000 as having more than one race, and twenty-one Columbus residents "identified themselves as being of five races...
...But the new system was, at least in intent, more of an effort to save the diversity doctrine by adjusting the categories than a step toward their abolition...
...We have good testimony on this: David Denby, a critic for the New Yorker, took a leave in the mid-1990s to retake Columbia University's "Literature Humanities" and "Contemporary Civilization" courses, which he had taken many years before...
...The America that is plainspoken, ambitious, at once pious and profane, proud of achievement, skeptical of privilege, and egalitarian through and through impresses most strangers...
...We are drunk with the idea that every difference of ethnic custom, every foreign or regional accent, every traditional recipe, and every in-group attitude betokens a distinct worldview...
...The real diversity of the world is one of its crucial characteristics...
...The result is an abundant public record of student endorsements for, and gripes about, diversity...
...A growing number of other Americans seemingly feel the same way...
...lorries and parroquets cry shrilly...
...It is, at best, a morally neutral pedagogical contrivance...
...Are the ethical imperatives against discrimination and in favor of real diversity within every college campus so great that we should abolish this other kind of diversity among colleges...
...It is sometimes justifiable to exclude students from a university or to review their entrance according to stricter criteria...
...But her position, too, contributed to the diversity of the class...
...But it is sometimes much worse: a set of social arrangements that are unjust and that thwart our higher aspirations...
...Diversity is also a political doctrine, asserting that some groups deserve compensatory privileges, as redress for benefits they historically have been denied...
...Most white kids have respect for validated knowledge...
...diversity that prompts one to praise or blame in the spirit of demonstrating his openness to other cultures—these are, every one of them, pernicious forms of diversity...
...It is human nature for the members of a tribe to be more alert to its internal disputes than to its shared premises...
...For example, Deborah Burke, an anthropologist and "Diversity Web Site Coordinator" at Oregon State University, conducted interviews with students about their views of diversity for OSU's "2002 Pride Celebration: From Silence to Celebration: It's a Rainbow World After All...
...Diversity that is achieved by racial, ethnic, or any other quotas in college admissions...
...Clearly this is false at the level of individuals...
...We have a moral duty to understand the world as best we can, and that includes coming to terms with its real diversity...
...Here, for example, is a remarkable statement from the University of Michigan's 1995 "Preamble" to Understanding the Difference That Diversity Makes: Assessing Diversity and Tolerance Initiatives on College and University Campuses, in which the splendor of diversity scholarship is recognized: In the same period in which the student body has changed so dramatically, so, too, has the scholarship upon which knowledge is constructed.With the new scholarship on formerly understudied groups, an intellectual resurgence comparable to the Renaissance has taken place, invigorating academic disciplines, disrupting former ways of understanding things, and challenging higher education to rethink what it teaches, the way it teaches, and why it teaches what it does...
...cockatoos scream...
...We know with reasonable certainty, for example, that about 13 percent of the U.S...
...Sometimes that is a diversity that awes us with its Aru Island beauty...
...Diversity bids us to think of America not as a single society unified by the shared ideals of individual freedom and equality before the law, but as divided up into separate groups—on thebasis of race, ethnicity, or sex, for starters...
...The "Asian" label likewise mixes people who adhere to unrelated religions: Hinduism in Gujarat, Confucian-inflected Shinto in Japan, and Theravada Buddhism in Cambodia...
...But contemporary American higher education is an odd place—as odd in its way as the old Aviary in Pittsburgh...
...We live, perhaps as most cultures live, in illusions that enwrap other illusions...
...and the various smaller birds chirp and whistle their morning song...
...Our college campuses today are perhaps the best examples of these simulacra, designed to look as real—in the aviary or aquarium sense—as possible...
...population considers itself of African descent...
...Other diversiphilic students at Oregon State and elsewhere unreel a long list of complaints about diversity's deeds falling short of diversity's promises...
...It is the racial preference component of diversity that most demands hypocrisy of faculty members, students, andadministrators...
...Their idyllic vision appears in thousands of college brochures and Web pages...
...GROUNDED / n the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many Americans seemed to revert to the older language of tolerance and fairness toward others and put aside, at least temporarily, the newer language of deference and celebration...
...John Sykes, like, does object to the alleged privileges of "Greeks"—fraternity members...
...To single out their race as the defining feature of their identities is simplistic—and mean...
...The artificial imitations of human diversity have some precedents, such as the living tableaus of native peoples that were assembled for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the "It's a Small World After All" pavilion at Disneyland...
...In the midst of this, the U.S...
...In other cultures, it has to feel like the truth...
...When I recently came across Wallace's description of the cacophony of sunrise on 0 n visiting the Aru Islands southwest of New Guinea in March 1857, Alfred Russel Wallace encountered some diversity: At early morn before the sun has risen, we hear a loud cry of `Wawk—wawkwawk, wok—wok—wok,' which resounds through the forest, changing its direction continually...
...Consider Joseph Conrad's short novel Heart of Darkness, published a century ago (1902...
...Professor Shapiro begins by asking, "Who here comes from a savage race...
...Yet on reflection, despite my pleasant days in the Pittsburgh Aviary, I've never really heard anything like Wallace's birds of paradise wawk-wawk-wawking at the break of day...
...Some colleges, such as Michigan State University, run annual "What Diversity Means to Me" essay contests...
...Heart of Darkness has now been turned on its head and made into a tool, of sorts, for promoting the diversity worldview...
...king-hunters croak and bark...
...And to be against it is evidence of small-mindedness...
...This sort of grasping at nonexistent straws is one illustration of the psychological legacy of affirmative action...
...Any other application is quickly—and often thoughtlessly—denounced as motivated by hatred, bias, or other bad motives...
...The diversity that is inextricably part of the world includes natural diversity (of the Aru Islands, for example), but it also includes much of human social and cultural diversity...
...Professor G. Pritchy Smith teaches in the College of Education and Human Services at the University of North Florida and is the coauthor of Common Sense About Uncommon Knowledge: The Knowledge Bases of Diversity...
...The horror...
...They have quotas to go to their legislative conference...
...Angel Wilson at Oklahoma State University, for example, writes: It's not uncommon for me to go an entire day without seeing someone who looks like me...
...Thus even diversity /—diversity in the sense of actual racial and ethnic variety—is more elusive than the definition at first suggests...
...Generations of readers have had no trouble penetrating this far up Conrad's river...
...Secretary Mineta is a Japanese American who was interned in Wyoming with his family by the U.S...
...There is no reason, despite the fantasies of globalizers and the fears of antiglobalizers, to think that our species is on the verge of total homogenization and uniformity...
...They imply that the members of the coming "minority majority" will look upon access to American colleges and universities, jobs and elected offices in exactly the fashion the diversity II advocates themselves do: as spoils to be divided in proportion to the demographic size and political strength of the groups...
...Others soon follow his example...
...The political tactic of diversity II advocates, in other words, is to convert the mere numbers of diversity I into organized groups committed to diversity II ideology, and to that end they practice the old political trick of pretending that what they hope will happen already has...
...Americans believe in the existence of race and that belief continues to have dramatic consequences, no matter that "race" is, scientifically speaking, a nullity...
...And the language of diversity provides a new and somewhat surprising way to recategorize "race...
...They will be talking, "Well we have to go to this thing for this USSA (United States Student Association...
...TWO MORE DIVERSITIES T he vision of the university (and the larger society) governed by a doctrine that each "group" will receive its due proportion of the good things that everybody wants has an undeniable appeal to a large number of Americans...
...Rogers's neighborhood was across town, at the WQED studio...
...In that light, cultural diversity makes no difference...
...One could now stand in front of a window and watch fourteen cockatoos sit on an authentic dead Australian tree, patiently serving their life sentences...
...government during World War II...
...To search for fellowship by means of cultural diversity is to puff with pride those differences that Christianity, in principle, sets out to abolish...
...The temptation to build little imitation diversities, however, is not written into our fate...
...Group rights may not necessarily devolve into apartheid-style hierarchy, but they clearly have led to deeper divisions and fiercer resentments in the countries that have experimented with them...
...In the last two decades, American society has gone to great trouble to create aviary-or aquarium-like imitations of cultural diversity, a word that I will italicize when it refers to this new social ideal...
...Heart of Darkness is quite plainly framed by the idea that the cultural otherness of the Congo is a dangerous thing, and powerful enough to unhinge a strong and cultivated man like Kurtz...
...The black newspaper columnist Clarence Page, for example, writes: So, of all the arguments I have heard various people make against affirmative action, I find the least persuasive to be the charge that it makes its recipients feel bad...
...This shift was reflected in the rejiggering of group identifiers in the 2000 U.S...
...In almost the same light, however, it is also a very disenchanting vision, since it means we are born into a world where other groups are always trying to muscle in for a larger share and we will have to join with our "own" kind to defend our portion...
...I don't intend to give much space to Euro-snobs, Rolex-wearing Latin American revolutionaries, and anti-globalist crybabies, but I acknowledge that they do see something clearly that our homegrown diversiphiles and multiculturalists altogether miss...
...Faced with tough academic challenges, some middle-class black and Hispanic students suddenly adopt the stance of the ethnic outsider who rejects academic standards, blames the system, and acts too tough to care...
...Recruited in the name of diversity, students quickly understand they have a part to play involving their ethnic identities (or other recognized classification...
...We ought not to welcome into nuclear engineering programs Iraqi students sent to America on Saddam Hussein scholarships...
...And in these respects, favoring artificial diversity is not righteous...
...The United States does indeed contain some enclaves—communities of recent immigrants, Native Americans committed to maintaining a distinct heritage, insular groups such as the Amish—that stand somewhat aside from the mainstream culture, but it is easy to exaggerate even these differences...
...and the resentments only multiply...
...All persons will be provided opportunity and encouragement to explore and discover the richness of the tapestry of human experience...
...It is one thing being tolerated and that is totally not the same thing as being embraced and celebrated...
...The idea was to recognize the Tiger Woods phenomenon...
...In a recent article in the New Republic, for example,leffrey Rosen extolled one of his African American law students for articulating what Rosen thought was an appropriately African American view of racial profiling...
...The stamp occasioned no outrage or protest, but it sold poorly...
...Read in this way, Heart of Darkness isreduced to a kind of warning against prejudice...
...the group gains a strong interest in ensuring the conformity of its members...
...The ethics of exclusion on the basis of social identity also involve the question of whether single-sex colleges, tribal colleges, and historically black colleges are legitimate...
...The fullest expression of artificial diversity, however, is the contemporary American college campus with its (sometimes illegal but real) admissions quotas, its multicultural affairs offices, its division of students into ethnic clubs, and its curriculum aimed at convincing students that these strange impositions are simultaneously justified as corrections of past wrongs and as preparation for living and working in American society...
...Or, if that enormity seems too distant to contemplate, we can consider India's attempts to abolish caste hierarchy while promoting group rights for low-caste and untouchable groups...
...And therein lies the temptation: to diversity, to arrange it to suit our tastes and our political and social convictions...
...What Wallace glimpsed in the natural world was its independence of being...
...It is interesting, too, that the self-designation of "mixed race" is found not just in the states where it is most conspicuous, such as Hawaii and California, but across the country...
...But at a deeper level, the human mind distrusts—perhaps it even abhors—the violation of human reciprocity that comes from taking what's not rightfully ours...
...I was only a visitor to a menagerie, to the dreamlike diversity of someone who planned a world free of predators, where the monsoon never blows and fresh fruit magically appears twice daily...
...Diversiphiles offer a make-believe account of American life as filled with a robust diversity of cultural traditions...
...Artificial diversity, for example, hollows out religion, turning communities of faith into centers of multiculturalism...
...diversity that takes the form of hiring or not hiring faculty members because of the social category they are alleged to inhabit...
...To see the world in this way is perhaps to be primed for the advantages of concocted diversity...
...President George W. Bush famously made his 2000 nominating convention into a display and celebration of ethnic diversity and followed up by appointing a conspicuously diverse cabinet...
...It would be a mistake, however, to think that diversity is exclusively an ideological preoccupation of the American Left...
...In 1997, when the golfer was asked by Oprah Winfrey how he classified himself, Mr...
...While Americans generally accept the idea that we are a diverse people, we are highly uncertain about whether and how to identify the parts...
...0 n visiting the Aru Islands southwest of New Guinea in March 1857, Alfred Russel Wallace encountered some diversity: At early morn before the sun has risen, we hear a loud cry of `Wawk—wawkwawk, wok—wok—wok,' which resounds through the forest, changing its direction continually...
...But the child from the suburbs who, in venturing off to college, encounters people in his dorm sporting fake Polynesian tattoos has not yet met real diversity at all...
...Even criminals who live by depriving others of their possessions typically develop rationalizations for why they deserve what they steal and why their victims deserve to be robbed...
...They fear that a society as rich and powerful as the United States will simply impose its culture on the rest of the world...
...They are taught, as John Sykes was taught in his Difference, Power, and Discrimination classes at Oregon State, that group identity is to be "celebrated" and "embraced...
...Profiling violates diversity's paradoxical injunction that social differences ought to be recognized only for such purposes as dispensing contracts, awards and government patronage, and for rooting out discrimination...
...With a little patience, however, one can spot the rare species, the arctic terns or whooping cranes of campus diversity...
...Real diversity can be thrilling, not least because it can sometimes be deadly...
...The diversiphiles' paradox is, from an anthropological point of view, easy to resolve...
...Minority students are particularly vulnerable to the lure of self-stereotyping that diversity dangles...
...Kurtz could have learned to enjoy the polyrhythms of central African music and to play the mbira, and his indigenous friends could have gained a useful intermediary to the Belgian state...
...It can be conjured up as a demographic artifact by taking note of the growth in the Hispanic population through a high birthrate and high immigration, and then adding the Hispanics to the other "minority" populations in the United States...
...It simply is, and our goal as men and women seeking to become educated is to comprehend it in its full complexity...
...The real small-mindedness is to think that the Aru Islands can be fitted inside a greenhouse on Pittsburgh's Northside, or that it is generous to lower college admissions standards for people because of their race...
...Dying, Kurtz achieves an instant of clarity, "that supreme moment of complete knowledge," in which he cries out, "The horror...
...lorries and parroquets cry shrilthe Aru Islands, it brought to mind the Aviary on Pittsburgh's Northside...
...The new, much larger Aviary featured exhibits of birds in simulations of their natural habitats...
...It jeopardizes the integrity of everyone's education for the sake of maintaining a fleeting illusion of fairness...
...Far from it...
...The term "Hispanic" clearly doesn't describe common social background...
...When it comes to the serious question of how to prepare ourselves for the real world, we should shun illusion no matter how enchanting and strive to take our places amidst the magnificent diversity of things real...
...it is arrogant and bigoted...
...Japanese has so far defied linguistic classification, but seems to have some distant connection to Altaic languages...
...In school we learn about the self-enclosed worlds of peoples in other places and times—Samoans, Egyptians, the Akan Kingdoms of Ghana, the Plains Indians—and vainly imagine that the differences between a black middle-class family and a white middle-class family living on the same street in a suburban American neighborhood are likewise a profound cultural divide...
...Wilson also complains about the pressures of being a minority student in a diversity-minded social system: "I hate to admit it, but anyone that happens to be a minority is viewed under a microscope, especially on our campus?' But she acknowledges that she enjoys the attention, too, though she "resents the fact" that she often has to explain that she speaks for herself and not all "the other men and women of my race...
...In the student government we do affirmative action...
...Census...
...Artificial diversity has just that kind of grip on American campuses—and not just on campuses...
...For very practical reasons, that extreme is impossible—who, for example, would teach in a university with no common language...
...Real diversity has its own perils, as the real-life counterparts of Conrad's Kurtzoften found out...
...You know it feels like I matter, like again I am being embraced...
...It is the sort of diversity that exists mainly because people say and believe it exists, not because it arises from profound and fundamental differences...
...The label combines into one category people who speak completely unrelated languages: Gujarati, for example, is an Indo-European language descended from Sanskrit...
...Many Americans do not share it, and even among those who do profess a favorable view, opinions vary as to what precisely a truly diverse society should be...
...Of course, cultural contact can be mind-opening in constructive ways...
...Yet the distinction between these two basic meanings of diversity is not always easy to maintain...
...Why these four and not others...
...The life experiences of a Gujarat American, a Japanese American and a Cambodian American have only one significant commonality: not that they are Asian, but that they are American...
...Jihadists should be kept out...
...It is cobbled together from other illusions, the most significant of which is racial diversity...
...The gulf between the real diversity of the world and the artificial and often imaginary diversity of our social experiments is very large...
...In Plato's allegory, those who watch the shadows believe they are the only reality and strongly resist looking outside...
...Others soon follow his example...
...To admit students in this fashion is to tell them that the college—and perhaps society at large—does not believe they could succeed on their own abilities...
...They find, as Angel Wilson at Oklahoma State found, that they are expected to be "representative" of their group...
...student involvement, and the cultural center community...
...Racial preferences in college admissions are but one component of concocted diversity in higher education, but they are surely the foundational idea of the whole movement...
...Artificial diversity's illusion of fairness is really a flickering of several separate fires on the cave walls...
...We take real but small differences and magnify them into chasms...
...Rosen is by no means exceptional in employing this form of supposedly benevolent racial stereotyping...
...The switch merely shows that we still have the cultural resources to invoke different sets of cultural ideals depending on the national circumstances and mood...
...But whether the great variety of people swept into this demographic artifact will act in the fashion hoped for and predicted by the diversity II movement remains to be seen...
...The concocted diversity of contemporary campus life has precisely that element of charmed artificiality, a deadness and inertia beneath whatever lively rhetorical appearance we evoke...
...After considering the shallowness of conventional categories and seeing the growing popular trend toward acknowledging mixed heritages, we ought to wonder whether the conception of America as a constellation of ethnic groups is really valid...
...some show Native American ancestry...
...We have been encouraged to imagine people to be much more different from ourselves and from each other than they are...
...Diversity I is the sort ofthing that we might expect could be counted, or at least approximated, with wide agreement...
...And near at hand, we have the example of Canada wrestling with "Quebec's distinctiveness" (as it was called in the 1991 constitutional reform proposals) and the rights of its aboriginal peoples...
...We have a single currency of ideas and values, just as we do of money...
...The visitor from abroad—the twenty-five-year-old Tocqueville touring seventeen states in 1831-1832, Dickens on an Ohio steamboat in 1842, or some modern traveler such as Jonathan Raban wandering the country from Guntersville, Alabama, to Seattle—is more apt to be impressed with the commonalities...
...Eliminating barriers may not always produce the diversity some think is ideal...
...In a deep sense, America has one culture...
...It turns us each into mere exponents of social groups...
...the real biological diversity of humanity does not divide neatly into races...
...We are creatures with an infinite capacity for self-consciousness and a desire to tinker with the world, but our aviaries are simply enchanting illusions...
...Such actions, rooted in insecurity, offer no valid educational path...
...Christian fellowship is grounded in the profound idea that we are equal in the eyes of God...
...This is the great Bird of Paradise going to seek its breakfast...
...Certainly many Americans regard their ethnic heritage as an important part of their identities, but that sense of attachment is one thing, and the claim that America is best understood in terms of the fortunes and rivalries of ethnic groups is something else...
...Diversity II supporters do, however, often translate their ideal into numerical "goals" for particular situations—and they do so by invoking diversity I. So, for example, we hear that because 13 percent of Americans are of African descent, 13 percent of TV anchormen should be of African descent...
...He also wrote: One of the most committed conservative students in my recent constitutional law class was an African American woman who, like Clarence Thomas, bitterly resented the claim that African Americans think and vote alike...
...Whether it is to admire our energy or to sneer at our busyness, the visitor has no doubt that we are essentially one culture...
...He is very likely right that most of the beneficiaries of racial preferences in college admissions (or the newsroom jobs and presidential appointments he refers to) do not "feel bad" about receiving an unearned benefit...
...Within that cabinet, several individuals appear as strongly committed to the diversity ideology as anyone on the American Left...
...It is not that her views actually matter, but that she, too, contributes to "the diversity of the class...
...And for every murderous Kurtz stranded upriver, there were hundreds of native people who bravely ventured downriver to discover a new intercultural world in the coastal cities...
...Her earnest claim to individuality is flicked away as he assigns her to her proper role as a specimen of a rare subspecies, a black conservative...
...The diversicrat hope of creating discrete blocks of people based on specific and exclusive identity claims and distinct cultural resentments would be derailed if large numbers of the target populations were to opt out of the categories...
...Herman Melville, who jumped ship in the Marquesan Islands and sojourned some weeks among the tattooed, cannibalistic Typee people, encountered real diversity...
...Turtles basked on logs in the artificial creek thirty feet below, next to long-legged birds persistently wading in search of nonexistent fish, while in the diffuse light of a perpetual dawn, other birds flitted about or, unseen, made raucous cries from the trees...
...Diversity offers a vision in which different ways of life, different outlooks will be celebrated side by side—but according to certain softly stated proportions in the number of celebrants...
...Even recent immigrants and communities of Native Americans and religious dissenters share far more of this currency than may appear at a casual glance...
...Others soon follow his example...
...My opportunity to go to college does nothing to repair my grandmother's lack of such opportunity...
...Now that the old ethnic groups have taken firm hold in the common enterprise and common values of America and the barriers to new groups have been torn down, we have the curious phenomenon of an ideological movement that asserts that our continuing differences are gigantic...
...The label "Asian," for example, lumps together the immigrant hotel manager from Gujarat in western India, the Japanese American business executive, and the Khmer American fisherman...
...In principle, it ought to be easy to distinguish between them...
...But these are mere illusions...
...population is less a salad bowl and more a melting pot than the diversiphiles expected...
...One reporter wondered whether the 2000 census might be the start of a historical trend leading to an idea of race as "more someone's description of his mood than his identity...
...In fact, it worries some of them...
...In the Aviary, birds from the Amazon mingled with birds from Queensland and the Congo...
...And they encounter teachers like Professors Rosen and Pritchy who seem less intent on fostering individualistic thought among minority students than encouraging conformity to stereotypical expectations...
...Most white males have not felt particularly bad about the special preferences they have received because of their race and gender for thousands of years.Why should we...
...When I was growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1960s, the Aviary was one of my favorite places...
...they go and lobby their congressman...
...New England once was—and in some ways, still is—such a place...
...diversity that consists of syllabi in which books have been included or excluded because of the race, nationality, gender, or gender preference of the authors...
...These last two points, of course, are hotly disputed...
...TWO DIVERSITIES A mong the many meanings of diversity, let's for the moment distinguish two: the actual racial and ethnic condition of America, which I will call diversity I, and the diversiphile ideal of how American society should recognize and respond to its racial and ethnic composition, which I will call diversity II...
...Here is a specimen of the common house sparrow version from California State University, San Bernardino: CSUSB will be a university community where all individuals are secure to explore and develop their cultural and diverse identities...
...But Page mistakes the criticism...
...Indeed, to guard against people like Tiger Woods defining themselves out of the system, the Office of Management and Budget propounded a rule that anyone who checked the "white" box and also another box would be "allocated to the minority race:' The results however, offer further evidence that the U.S...
...Universities do not labor under some obligation to educate the youth of hostile powers in fields that might endanger our national security...
...Burke asked Sykes to describe his "ideal regarding a community," he replied: I would say OSU is pretty close as far as, like there is the OSU community and...
...The basic political program of diversity II advocates (the diversiphiles) is to create a society in which the real diversity of society at large is proportionally represented in schools, colleges, the workplace, government, the arts, and all other positively valued social contexts...
...It connotes a willingness to accommodate others who are not like one's self...
...One of the greatest moral gains of the Civil Rights movement was the widespread recognition in American society that stereotyping is pernicious...
...Rosen's condescension to this student is crushing...
...It is a political movement within American society (and some other Western nations) with a recent and particular history...
...The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his...
...JUSTIFIABLE EXCLUSIONS...
...The beneficiaries of affirmative action likewise are forced by the logic of their situation to seize explanations that somehow they deserve their good fortune...
...Rapid immersion is without question more effective at teaching English to children who speak another language at home than corralling them into "bilingual education" classes...
...The diversity movement, however, doubles back on that lesson...
...America is indeed one culture, not a "salad bowl" of distinct peoples...
...Diversity in this sense is largely (but not entirely) an illusion...
...We conjure other differences out of thin air...
...AUTONOMY Artificial diversity presents itself as benign, but is far from it...
...Postal Service issued a Ramadan stamp, the reception of which was an apt symbol of the shifting balance between old-style tolerance and new-style diversity...
...Diversity legitimates such destructive play-acting as a valid form of seeking one's identity...
...This may sound small, and surely it is but a fraction of the multiracial reality in America, but the 4 percent should be considered in comparison: the number of professed "multiracials," for example, is only a little less than a third the number of professed African Americans...
...Ideally, a university on the New England littoral would be a place where those thirsty for knowledge from every corner of the world, from great capitols to upriver hamlets, would seek their passage to higher education...
...Elsewhere, one can find student discussion groups with long sophomoric rants about the need for more black/brown/ female/GLBT professors...
...During one two-week period in Borneo, he discovered more than 320 new species of beetles-34 in one day...
...Page's comments illustrate the rationalization at work: the hallucination of "white males" benefiting from "race" preferences for "thousands of years," and the glib assertion that the alternative to affirmative action is racial (and gender) discrimination...
...In its small-mindedness, however, the diversity movement is unable to take in this sort of criticism...
...king-hunters croak and bark...
...The Left grumbled, but most Americans cheered as the U.S...
...Western India, Japan, and Cambodia were never joined in a single empire, never shared a single culture, and never even experienced similar forms of colonialism or Western contact...
...and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own wellbeing and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected...
...The LGBT quotas that please John Sykes, the microscopic attention that alternately pleases and displeases Angel Wilson, have some counterparts elsewhere in our society, but they definitely don't reflect the real diversity of American life...
...We have a recent historical model for such a society: South Africa under apartheid...
...To Mineta, profiling would be a form of "discrimination...
...THINKING OUTSIDE THE CAVE T he false assurances of artificial diversity are the shadows on the wall in our version of Plato's allegorical cave: images that we mistake for substance...
...But it is not the only injustice that we have licensed as we have allowed artificial diversity to sweep through the university and through society...
...But diversiphiles betray themselves at every turn, with their worries that the preciously thin evidence of cultural differences among us might melt away like a scrim of snow on an April morning...
...Indeed, ethnic interest groups that claim to speak for whole categories of people have achieved considerable power in some states...
...It offers a justification of sorts for reviving and maintaining racial stereotypes that should be recognized as morally repellent...
...It shows that corrosive self-doubt fully at work...
...It merely groups together some of many sexual orientations and appetites that have been subject to disapproval within our culture...
...Wallace was a witness to natural (I am tempted to say real) diversity...
...military pressed the "war on terrorism," in Afghanistan and elsewhere...
...Hispanics" of my acquaintance include a distinctly Anglophilic Andean professor, a Jewish Brazilian who works in banking, an Argentine poet, an aspiring screenwriter whose parentage is part Puerto Rican and part French Canadian, an Azorian janitor, a lawyer and school superintendent born in Cuba who is a dedicated opponent of bilingual education, and another Castro refugee who went crazy and lives on the streets of Boston, perpetually firing a make-believe gun at tourists...
...Diversity sees itself as a tool for knocking down the door to exclusive enclaves—colleges, workplaces, churches, organizations of all sorts...
...The greater danger we face, however, comes from artificial diversity—from its false assurances and from what it robs us of...
...When I recently came across Wallace's description of the cacophony of sunrise on 0 n visiting the Aru Islands southwest of New Guinea in March 1857, Alfred Russel Wallace encountered some diversity: At early morn before the sun has risen, we hear a loud cry of `Wawk—wawkwawk, wok—wok—wok,' which resounds through the forest, changing its direction continually...
...One is the idea that educational access in the present can make up for denial of educational opportunity in the past...
...I am a part of the community...
...The opening pages of Moby Dick give a glimpse of the city of New Bedford as the crossroads of the nations...
...The truth is that she and the other student both deserve to be treated as complex individuals whose lives reflect many influences...
...And indeed some identity groups, such as the NAACP and the Japanese Citizens League, opposed the census provision to allow individuals to check off multiple ethnic boxes...
...And from what Sykes, Wilson, and thousands of others say, it is clear that whatever else college diversity is, it is not the simple extension of the real world of social and cultural difference into the groves of academe...
...And indeed, real diversity calls us to understand that others were not created for our convenience or edification...
...Concocted diversity imagines the world as divisible into neatly defined social groups, each with its own thriving traditions...
...Instead, the nation's airports became snarled as the guards performed random searches of travelers who fit no known pattern of security threat...
...It was no more real than the coral reef at the New England Aquarium near where I live now in Boston—a similarly charmed instant of eternity, as long as the pumps are turned on and the divers feed the sharks...
...A university that admits more minority students, a company that hires more minority workers, a museum that shows more works by minority artists can each be said to have taken a step toward diversity...
...How could a university be so far behind in terms of diversity...
...The new category of sexual nonconformists, "gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered" (often abbreviated GLBT, sometimes LGBT), for example, corresponds to nothing in the real world...
...But Rosen does recognize that not all African Americans think alike...
...It plants the idea that "equality" itself is an artificial social arrangement imposed by the actions of others, and it negates the idea of equality as the underlying and inherent condition of all humanity...
...But the diversiphiles shudder at the prospect and pour their energy into stopping it...
...But the political behavior of diversiphiles shows their grasp of the reality: the traditions they say are so robust are in fact so evanescent that we are urged to do all we possibly can to perpetuate them...
...And in this very important sense, the "minority majority" is a political fiction...
...In the world as we know it, people have always spoken different languages, held different and incompatible worldviews, conceived and practiced conflicting beliefs, pursued irreconcilable goals, and organized themselves into separate and often hostile groups...
...Our orientation to such cultural diversity has changed radically and in a remarkably brief period...
...This is the great Bird of Paradise going to seek its breakfast...
...Woods replied that as a teenager he invented the word "Cabli-nasian"—CAucasian-BLack-INdian-ASIAN—in recognition of his father's mixed Caucasian, Black, and Indian ancestry, and his mother's Thai heritage...
...The possibility that Kurtz may perhaps have been a little too open-minded just disappears...
...If we accept the premise that American society is a battleground of competing ethnic groups (and some groups defined on other diversity criteria, such as handicap or sexual preference), the idea of a certain kind of diversity enforced from above seems far more palatable...
...And how does a university, or any other institution, achieve real diversity...
...The university community is united in the condemnation of acts of hatred & intolerance...
...I cannot ponder that idyllic vision for long, however, without coming back to my memory of those long-legged birds futilely stalking the shallows for nonexistent fish in the Pittsburgh Aviary—and the fourteen cockatoos forever sitting on the same dead tree...
...the individual faces powerful pressure to conform...
...But the facts kept getting in the way...
...Many of them have no relation to him...
Vol. 36 • March 2003 • No. 2
