Tucson, Arizona Friday, 18 July 2003
Diversity has become an Orwellian concept
By Paul Greenberg
There may be no better way to celebrate the centenary of George Orwell's birth than to explode one of those "smelly little orthodoxies which are contending for our souls," to use his phrase.
George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, was a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War and wound up having the fascists shooting at him and the communists trying to arrest him. He fled one step ahead of the Thought Police.
I'd like to think Orwell would also have seen through a current American orthodoxy: Diversity. By capital-D Diversity, of course, I don't mean a diversity of ideas, talents, aptitudes or experiences, but only a cosmetic, quota-derived Diversity.
The capital-D variety is a caricature of any real diversity, for its only diversity is one of appearance. Its object is to fashion an American elite that looks different but thinks alike.
What began as an innocent, and overdue, effort to include all has become a way to favor some of us and penalize others - solely on the basis of our race or ethnicity or sex.
Diversity has become a power game, a way not to break down arbitrary divisions but to create new ones - and, inevitably, a new set of group entitlements and therefore group resentments.
It began with an innocent-seeming loophole. When Lewis Powell handed down his solitary yet governing opinion in California Regents v. Bakke a quarter-century ago, he wrote that race might be considered as only one factor in granting admission to a state's medical school.
Even then, Powell tried to make it clear he didn't mean people should be judged on race as such. He pointed out that there would be a difference between "the child of a successful black physician in an academic community" and a black child with semi-literate parents "who grew up in an inner-city ghetto (but) had demonstrated energy and leadership ."
And that a university admissions committee might in good conscience pass over both those applicants in favor of "a white student with extraordinary artistic talent." All Powell asked was that the university take into account "individual qualities or experiences not dependent on race but sometimes associated with it."
How sensible. But that was all the opening the Diversity hustlers needed. Over the years, they've expanded that loophole into a standing injustice.
Here's what Powell (and many of the rest of us) may not have realized at the time: There's a kind of Gresham's law that operates in all matters pertaining to race.
Introduce race as just one factor in a decision, and it drives all the others out, it's such a pernicious concept.
Now, once again, race has overpowered reason in Gutter v. Bollinger. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor delivered herself of an opinion that is everything Orwell's prose is not - verbose, vague and ideologically determined.
The upshot of her ruling? The 14th Amendment may still guarantee the equal protection of the laws but, to use an Orwellian phrase, some of us are more equal than others.
Orwell had a term for this kind of verbal shell game: doublethink - the ability to ignore the plain meaning of words and even use them to mean their opposite. That's how diversity has become Diversity.
The ultimate accomplishment of doublethink, and its ultimate corruption of the language, is not that people speak and write in it, but that they think in it.
Newspeak, as Orwell pointed out, isn't just a way to obscure thought, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. O'Connor, if I may compliment her in undiluted Newspeak, is a doubleplusgood doublethinker.
* Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 121 Capitol St., Little Rock AR 72201; e-mail: paul_greenberg@ adg.ardemgaz.com. |
