Seeing Things

"Diversity"?

Like Pooh, I’m a bear of little brain and sort of meander through my days noticing things and smelling the flowers. Because of this, I notice a lot of rank stupidity, and ignore most of it. Being a writer, I don’t ignore everything, and I sometimes write about the stupid ideas I see bandied about. For the most part no one cares what I think, and I’m okay with this; but sometimes, once in a while, my observations are validated when someone writes a book or (in this case) a friend-of-the-court brief in an important case. Suddenly, the questions I’ve been asking see a little sunshine. I don’t kid myself by thinking I had anything to do with the matter percolating to the surface, but it is still a good feeling to find that I am not the only person who has made this observation.

Last week the very impressive young lawyer, Cory Liu, penned a brief for David Bernstein for the Supreme Court cases regarding the admissions policies at Harvard and UNC. Today this was covered by the Wall Street Journal:

Even so, one of the more persuasive friend-of-the-court briefs argues that such a decision would still leave unfinished business. Filed by David Bernstein of George Mason’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, it suggests that not only are racial preferences arbitrary, unfair and unconstitutional, so are the racial boxes the schools use to classify students.

Take “Asian”, a label that covers 60% of the world’s population—lumping Indians with Chinese and Cambodians and Koreans. They have almost nothing in common, from religion to language to culture.

Same with “Hispanic”. Harvard and UNC, Mr. Bernstein writes, can’t “explain why white Europeans from Spain, people of indigenous Mexican descent, people of Afro-Cuban descent, and South and Central Americans who may be any combination of European, African, or indigenous by descent are grouped together as ‘Hispanic’.”

Well, duh. This, I suspect, is something every thinking person knows but have, collectively, refused to discuss in order to avoid being called racist and to maintain the narrative. The first time I was exposed to this clumsy manner of sorting humanity, while taking my SAT exams in 1975, I sincerely thought it was a joke. I was seventeen years old and checked the boxes for “handicapped”, “black”, and “female”. Boy was I surprised when the scholarship offers began to arrive!

To me, Bernstein’s brief makes perfect sense and I’ve been arguing as much for decades. Racial classification is a stupid exercise, and the stupidity is only compounded when government gets involved. Were I a guidance counselor today I’d advise every student applying for admission to college to check whatever boxes are most advantageous in any given week and then defy the school to explain how these groups are defined and why the applicant does not qualify. At the very least, the explanations would be great comedy coming from people reluctant to differentiate between men and women. It would be edifying to hear Harvard’s explanation to a dark-skinned individual who’s grandparents hail from Bangladesh why, exactly, she is “Asian” and not a “person of color”, or why a Semitic Jew is “white” and an Arab from the same region is not. Hilarity would be inevitable, I think.

No one is going to hire me as a guidance counselor, but that’s my advice to anyone applying for anything—school, a job, benefits—or filling out any form that asks that you self-identify. Mileage may vary, and it may be better today to identify as an Hispanic with no legal status for being in the country. The definitions are arbitrary by design, so one has to keep up with the current group-think.

The “Diversity” con has always been a house of cards, predicated on the idea that what people look like tells us something about who they are. Didn’t Lenny Bruce sort that bullshit out way back in 1961?

Listen to Bruce. In his bit, the white dude expressing racial prejudice is the butt of the joke. Ignorant and stupid, and believing that people can be put into groups and understood. In the bit, the bigot is the idiot. We all know it. That’s the laugh.

The laugh today is we could do exactly the same bit with an admissions director meeting a young scholar from Sri Lanka, Japan, or Korea.

Yuk. Yuk.

So the right thing for the Supreme Court to do is to do away with the boxes entirely, as Bernstein suggests. Just end the charade and condemn racism outright and honestly. Put the lie to the silly, disingenuous arguments once and for all. Humans are humans and individuals are individuals. There are no “races”. There is no collective anything. Individuals amass honor or guilt or responsibility, not arbitrary groups.

We all know this and understand it in our bones. It is simply true. My calico cat has a different personality and quirks than my black cat and my gray tiger cat, but these differences have nothing to do with being gray or black or calico. They are all cats. Gray cats don’t all sleep more or spend more time chasing their tails. Calico cats aren’t all great leapers.

Why is real so hard?

Peace.