Contributors
Bruce S. Thornton - Contributor

Bruce Thornton is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author of Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age and author of Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter Books). His most recent book is Searching for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter Books). [go to Thornton index]

THE RIGHT BOOKS: Equipping the California Conservative
Imagining Diversity
A Right Books Review: Diversity. The Invention of a Concept by Peter Wood
[Bruce S. Thornton] 11/21/03

As with most things, Californians are pioneers in experiencing ethnic and cultural diversity. The Gold Rush that accompanied our state's birth insured that a wild variety of peoples would contribute to our identity: "There is stocky John Bull, a Chinaman, a Hindu, a Russian, and a native Californio, all trying to converse," wrote a Chilean in 1849. "A Chilean and an Oregonian are watching each other suspiciously. A Frenchman and an Italian are winking at a Hawaiian girl."

This variety only increased over the years, as a booming agricultural industry attracted Japanese, Filipinos, Punjabis, Basques, Italians, Portuguese, African-Americans, Armenians, Chinese, Southeast Asians, Latin Americans, and of course generation after generation of Mexicans. We native Californians were living diversity long before it was even a gleam in a college administrator's eye.

This diversity, however, is not what most "diversiphiles," as Peter Wood calls them in this valuable new book, have in mind. An anthropologist at Boston University, Wood surveys the various manifestations of the new tribalism that has come to dominate education, popular culture, law and even industry. What he finds is the term diversity (Wood's italics) denoting the ideologically loaded identity politics that confines individuals to a group defined in terms of victimization and oppression.

It thus violates the heart and soul of a civil rights movement predicated on the recognition that people possess rights as individuals, not as members of some tendentiously defined category or other: "The new perspective of diversity is not just about emphasizing groups at the expense of the whole; it is also about treating groups as having saved up a right to special privileges in proportion to how much their purported ancestors were victimized in the past." As such, this "imagined diversity," as Wood calls it, stands opposed to the foundational principles of American politics and society, and operates not as a force of unity and tolerance, but of difference and divisiveness.

Wood's first task is to discriminate between the fact of diversity and the imagined diversity that drives so many of our institutions. The fact of diversity is "real but superficial," and does not reflect "profound and fundamental differences." The differences of skin color, hair texture, slang, ancestral origins, etc. in America are ultimately not as significant as the similarities created by consumerism, individualism, democratic values, professional sports, and popular entertainment.

Drop an African-American in any African country and he will immediately be recognized as essentially American, not African. Go to any Wal-Mart in the San Joaquin Valley and watch the impatience of the third-generation Mexican-American clerk who doesn't speak Spanish when she has to deal with an illegal alien who doesn't speak English.

The process of assimilation is obvious to anybody in contact with immigrants, as I am as a life-long resident of the San Joaquin Valley, for generations diversity's ground zero. The old immigrant pattern of language loss, withdrawal from the old country's ways, marriage outside the group, and increased Americanization is still happening, as it has for immigrants to America for generations. My Italian grandparents saw two of their four children marry non-Italians, two leave the Catholic Church, and none of their grandchildren speak Italian. Becoming American has always exacted a price that millions of immigrants have chosen to pay in order to improve their lives.

But that fact of American history and diversity, long noted and discussed, is not the issue of imagined diversity, which in fact operates against the old pattern that has worked successfully for generations. Indeed, to the advocates of imagined diversity "melting pot" is a four-letter word, even though it refers to the simple fact of assimilation visible today everywhere. They prefer instead the metaphor of the "salad bowl." The analogy, however, is false, for the ingredients of this "salad" are not all equal: those that can claim some historical grievance predicated on past oppression and victimization are more privileged--a phenomenon Wood calls "selective diversity." American universities, after all, aren't eager to show their "commitment to diversity" by admitting more evangelical Christians or hiring more conservative or Republican faculty.

This imagined diversity, then, is a melodrama of white oppression of the dark-skinned "other" now entitled to redress and reclamation of his superior culture. As Wood explains, despite its superficial tolerance and claim to respect and celebrate cultural difference, imagined diversity actually is patronizing in its insistence that victimization confers value on whole groups, and that members of the oppressed groups, no matter what their individual socioeconomic situation, can succeed only with special consideration. Rather than celebrating the diversity of individuals, imagined diversity enforces a strict conformity that imprisons individuals in some artificial group identity often comprising nothing more than supposedly discredited stereotypes.

The various permutations and consequences of this "imagined diversity" comprise the bulk of Wood's book. Along the way he provided numerous corrections to many of the misconceptions and distortions that diversiphiles employ to rationalize their ideology. For example, the old canard that the West has been fearful and exclusive of the dark-skinned "other" is dispatched in Wood's chapter "Diversity Before Diversity." No other civilization has been as curious about and open to others than Western. Starting with Herodotus' Histories, the whole second book of which is a sympathetic account of Egyptian culture, Westerners have been fascinated with other cultures, appreciative of their distinct qualities, and receptive to their influences, displaying both "a genuine curiosity about the world away from home" and the recognition that "learning about the diversity of mankind enlarges and enriches the mind."

What earlier Westerners didn't have was the sentimentalized cultural relativism that proclaims all cultures are equal and thus beyond criticism, a dishonest idea given that very few Westerners have any intention of actually living in these supposedly wonderful cultures. Earlier accounts of sojourns among cultural difference (for example, Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad) were more truthful about the dangers of encountering cultural difference and the simple fact that some cultures are dysfunctional in key respects-- a fact obvious to anyone who notes the millions of people risking their lives to come to the West. They, at least, are voting with their feet against their original cultures.

Wood's most valuable chapter, however, comprises a devastating analysis of the Bakke case, the 1978 Supreme Court decision in which Justice Lewis Powell single-handedly invented the legal concept of "diversity" as a Constitutionally sanctioned justification for discriminating on the basis of race. The invention was "single-handed" because none of the eight other justices concurred with Powell's diversity argument; no previous cases were cited as precedents; and the University of California, the defendant in the case, didn't even evoke diversity as an argument in its appeal.

Wood's history and critique of this bit of judicial activism is timely, for since Wood's book has come out, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the University of Michigan's law school affirmative action admissions policies, thus validating Powell's judicial legerdemain. So now we have Constitutional law decided on the basis of an intellectually empty concept lacking any validating empirical evidence or basis in law.

The rest of Wood's book relentlessly exposes the intellectual incoherence, hypocrisy, and opportunism that surround this pernicious concept of diversity. As Wood documents, too many people these days make a good living from diversity, including "diversicrat" functionaries who administer various bureaucratic fiefdoms, consultants who charge big bucks to school white folks about their racist proclivities, and the creators of various "multicultural" products and services that bestow a cosmopolitan panache on consumers, not to mention providing as well the suggestion that they are paragons of tolerance and sensitivity to cultural "difference."

Wood concludes, "Diversity is both disappearing and indelible. It is close enough to mere fashion that it might go out of fashion, but it is now so indispensable to American party politics, so rooted in the marketing practices of American business, so overwritten into government regulations, and so tenderly looked after by higher education that it cannot simply vanish." The price we will pay, of course, is the further erosion of the fundamental principle of liberal democracy and the civil rights movement: people are individuals first, and not to be reduced to simplistic tendentious categories.

copyright 2003 Bruce S. Thornton

Searching for Joaquin by Bruce S. Thornton

Greek Ways by Bruce S. Thornton

Bonfire of the Humanities by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton

Plagues of the Mind by Bruce S. Thornton

Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality by Bruce S. Thornton

§