The type of diversity that liberals endorse
Betsy's Page
Victor Davis Hanson ponders how some minority groups rate affirmative action and some don't.
<<< Is minority status deserving of government redress defined by some sort of claim of membership in groups that in the past suffered bias inside the United States?
Hardly. The University of California system, for example, not so long ago worried about too many Asians on its campuses. Yet Japanese-Americans were once put in internment camps and Chinese immigrants were denied civil rights. Had Asians lost their aggrieved status because per capita they were doing too well? And does that suggest that race and ethnicity ipso facto are no longer a hindrance to success?
Perhaps the logic of government-mandated diversity instead hinges not just on redressing historical discrimination, but also on considering present-day racial bias.
Again, that doesn't seem to be the case. Arab-Americans, for example, don't qualify for affirmative action, but they're hardly immune to discrimination here in the United States.
In truth, in the 21st-century United States, we don't know what exactly race is or its exact role in our own success or failure, much less the reasons how and why it should count for special government consideration.
In a radically changing America, which immigrants from Mumbai, Muslim Arab-Americans or destitute newcomers from Croatia will the government reward on the basis of their skin color, poverty, lack of English or religion?
Who will prove to have the greater case for victimhood and government redress - the half-African prep school graduate or the poorer, darker Palestinian daughter of an immigrant 7-Eleven store owner?
Or should we revert to class - giving the child of the single, alcoholic, unemployed father preference over the daughter of an immigrant who built a successful business by working seven days a week? >>>
It's clear that you don't really count as a "minority" worthy of that thumb on the scale just because of your numbers. We see this in the new term that has been cropping up in affirmative action - "underrepresented minority." In other words, if you're member of a minority group that may have suffered historic discrimination such as Hanson points out for Chinese and Japanese-Americans or for Jews or, going even further back, the Irish, your minority status doesn't count because members of your group have worked hard and achieved without assistance. What truly helps is if you're a member of a group that, as a group, hasn't achieved. Your group's lack of achievement is immediately credited to the disparate impact of some action that an employer or university took and so you can benefit.
Nicholas Kristof wrote yesterday of three minority groups who have been unusually successful in the United States: the Chinese, Jews, and West Indian blacks. citing the work of Richard Nisbett in Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, Kristof concludes that the family support for a child's learning is key as well as the stress put in these cultures on the importance of education. That is why, of these three successful minority groups, the Chinese Americans and Jews aren't included in affirmative action programs and the West Indian blacks are only included when they can come under the umbrella of programs for African-American blacks and there is sometimes resentment among blacks who have not immigrated here recently for those who have to get the benefit of such policies.
So the general lesson of American policy makers who push affirmative action is that, if you come from a group that has, in general, worked hard to overcome hardship and has succeeded, you should not benefit from affirmative action programs. But if you come from a group that has not done so, then there are programs to smooth way for you and compensate for your group not having the qualities that Kristof described. We will still be divvying up people by race, but also by how successful a race is overcoming setbacks in order to send their children on to college and future achievements. The perverse incentives are there for programs to reward those groups which don't have that emphasis on education and family. And that is they type of diversity that really counts in America.
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