Diversity versus viewpoint diversity

One of the stated purposes of diversity at least used to be to let people of different viewpoints learn from one another. However, the way in which diversity so often works out in practice has led to the use of "diversity of everything but viewpoint" and variations thereon as a punchline.

Now, the right-thinking people have responded by memory-holing that stated reason. Jim Downs writes,

Words have a history. Their meanings develop at a particular time in response to specific questions and debates. “Diversity,” for example, emerged as a term that the left adopted in order to advance the goals of yet another historically laced term, “multiculturalism,” which referred to efforts to value the experiences of marginalized and oppressed peoples. That so-called gay Republicans can co-opt that term for their conflicted plight is an abomination. Gay Republicans, by and large, are not oppressed, nor do they suffer from the lack the financial capital or social status that would qualify them as marginalized. Yet they use the term with zero historical consciousness.

Somebody is showing zero historical consciousness.

Zack Ford puts it more succinctly when he says, "Ideas are not identities." While he applies that statement against some particularly unappetizing ideas, his blanket statement both belies the above-noted stated reason for diversity and places the emphasis squarely on identity politics. It also does not explain why diversity cannot cover both.

Faux News op-ed: I Am Down with the Working Class

One might think that as an undergraduate majoring in identity studies at Uxbridge University, I would consider the concerns of working-class people to be beneath me. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I pride myself on being down with the working class.

I make a point of acquainting myself with working-class culture by asking the working-class people I know: at home, the maid and the gardener, and on campus, the cafeteria workers and the maintenance people. They seem less pleased to answer my questions than I assumed they would be and sometimes downright resentful. For this, I blame false consciousness engendered by capitalism.

I believe that this is important because, like all of my friends, I grew up in the banal environment of upper-middle-class suburbia. I can now connect to the more vibrant and authentic cultures of people who are free from this burden.

It also helps me see the solution to their plight. Just as my parents pay my tuition, room, and board and give me a healthy allowance, surely society can afford to do likewise for working-class people.

I have one classmate, however, who inexplicably does not see things my way. Given where he came from, he cannot expected to be so enlightened as the rest of us, but would it kill him to keep his stupid redneck hick opinions to himself?

Someone actually said this: Pure reason as a construction

In case you've wondered what deep thoughts are pondered in humanities departments, as reported by that ne plus ultra of journalistic excellence, The New York Times, I have exciting news for you. The newspaper of record has interviewed John D. Caputo, the Thomas J. Watson professor of religion emeritus at Syracuse University and David R. Cook professor of philosophy emeritus at Villanova University, who shares the following insights:

Postmodern theory tries to interrupt that expression [of referring to "we" with no analysis of who "we" are] at every stop, to put every word in scare quotes, to put our own presuppositions into question, to make us worry about the murderousness of “we,” and so to get in the habit of asking, “we, who?” I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.

Someone's still appealing to postmodernism? Greetings, time traveler from the nineties. Also, are we sure that it's "pure" reason, not postmodernism, that's "a white male Euro-Christian construction"?

So what is the professor's proof that "pure" reason is a white male Euro-Christian construction?

White is not “neutral.” “Pure” reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is “colored.” Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and “white” is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by “reason” — and “we” white philosophers cannot ignore it.

What's that thing called again when you postulate what you're trying to prove? It has "reasoning" in its name, but it's not the good kind of reasoning. Also, I suppose that wanting pure anything is now the moral equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

Then there is this:

The trigger-happy practices of the police, not all police, but too many police, on the streets of black America should alert everyone to how profoundly adrift American democracy has become — attacking the poor as freeloaders and criminals, a distorted and grotesque ideological exaggeration of freedom over equality.

Nothing says "ideological exaggeration of freedom" like trigger-happy police.

Would she be happier if the advertisements were in Newspeak?

In Richmond, British Columbia, this is happening:

A Richmond woman has renewed her call for a ban on Chinese-only signage after ads for Crest toothpaste appeared in several city bus shelters.

Kelly Starchuk says advertising only in a language other than English or French acts to isolate people rather than bring them together, which she believes is a threat to multiculturalism.

"If we can work together and be honest with one another and have this inclusive community which includes our official languages where we communicate with one another, that is the utmost important thing," she said.

Right, because nothing says "multiculturalism" and "inclusive" like trying to get a municipal government to dictate the linguistic content of advertisements. Whether Proctor and Gamble should put up Chinese-only advertisements is up to the market to decide, and here, the market is more multicultural and inclusive than at least one resident nanny-statist wants it to be.

Starchuk adds, "There doesn't seem to be a solution." Perhaps because there doesn't seem to be a problem? On this side of the 49th parallel, we have plenty of Spanish-only advertising, but Anglophone Americans somehow muddle through.

Finally, this comment deserves a shout-out:

All adverts should be in languages Indigenous to this land, not those imported from Europe or Asia.

Free speech and hate speech, or: The obligatory Michelle Shocked post

Michelle Shocked has the right to be Princess Clara on the subject of same-sex marriage and then to backpedal furiously when called on it. Concert-goers have the right not to support her, as do performance venues in the absence of a contractual obligation to do so.
People have responded to Shocked in ways like this:

Freedom of speech and artistic expression are critically important, but this isn't free speech. This is hate speech.

In fairness, the petition calls for voluntary measures rather than government censorship. Yet in making the distinction between free speech and hate speech as though they were mutually exclusive categories, which, at least in the US, they are not, the author of the petition plays a dangerous game. For one thing, our opponents have become adept at playing the hate-speech card whenever anyone dares to examine their beliefs critically.

Nothing says "progressive" like blatant classism.

I'd prefer to believe that this was an isolated incident. Nonetheless, when I first encountered self-declared progressives, one of the first things that I noticed about them was their combination of feigned regard for the downtrodden working class and undisguised contempt for actual working-class people. In the same breath, they could talk about their enlightened, egalitarian ideals and grouse about those stupid redneck hicks. I even pointed out as much in a letter to the editor and thus lost a "friend," who could muster no response except the standard-issue appeal to ridicule. Never underestimate people's willful ignorance of their own hypocrisy.

The "gay men are racists" meme

The old meme of gay male racism is making the rounds again. According to this meme, the fact that gay men have preferences in terms of sexual or romantic attraction shows the prevalence of racism among gay men. The idea that preferences in sexual or romantic attraction automatically translate into racism seriously begs the question, but let's assume arguendo that it's true. The meme still depends on the standard politically correct "proofs": bald assertions, sweeping generalizations from cherry-picked anecdotal evidence, a pretended ability to read other people's minds, and appeals to one's own emotions.

Now let us see what the actual evidence says. This article discusses racial and ethnic selectivity among men who have sex with men in San Francisco, and people who know it only from blog posts about it cite it as proof of gay male racism. Yet the discussion section of the article states,

We also wish to point to the quite high level of interracial partnering in our sample. Overall, 46% of partnerships described were interracial. Moreover, the interpretation of racism would be unfair without comparable data from other populations. While population-based data on the race/ethnicity of sexual partners are rare, the US Census estimated around 2% of marriages were interracial from 1970 through 1992 (US Census Bureau 1998). More recent estimates raise this to only 7% (Cary 2007). While same sex marriage is currently illegal in California, therefore precluding truly comparable figures for MSM, these estimates are many-fold lower than the interracial partnering we observed in our study.

When the evidence contradicts the conclusion, it's time to rethink the conclusion.

I am not claiming that no gay men are racists or that preferences never arise from racism; after all. I am saying that if we constantly search for things by which to be offended, we can blind ourselves to what is actually happening.

This week's last acceptable prejudice

Out of the following groups, all of which I have seen advanced as the victims of the "last acceptable prejudice," which do you suppose to be the victims of the One True Last Acceptable Prejudice?

• Catholics


• Mormons


• Christians in general


• Irish-Americans


• Italian-Americans


• Southerners


• The European-American working class


• Fat people

People who want a gold medal in the oppression olympics, as well as people who complain about bigotry because they have been called on their own bigotry, often claim to be the victims of the last acceptable prejudice. The current last acceptable prejudice, thanks to the presidential campaign, is anti-Mormonism. You'd think that by now we'd have used up all of the last acceptable prejudices, but oddly, it doesn't work that way.

Identity crisis

The LGBT talking heads love to refer to the "intersection of identities." The people throwing that term around typically use it to mean that for any given person, you can go through a check list of identity groups to which that person belongs and feed the results into an algorithm that will tell you everything you need to know about that person. Do you see how that is different from a more elaborate way of stereotyping by race, sex, socioeconomic status, and the like? Neither do I.

Obviously, a person's life experience does affect who that person is now. But just as obviously, intersectionality as typically understood grossly oversimplifies human natures, as does politically correct reductionism in general. Just consider how differently siblings in a family can turn out.

Ageism works both ways.

Allegations of ageism are a common topic of conversation in the LGBT community, but people who comment on the matter tend to leave out the fact that ageism runs both ways. While some twinks and twinks emeriti seem to think that only people within a narrow age range should ever leave the house, some younger gay men complain about being treated as decorative objects who could not possibly ever having anything useful to say, solely because of their age. That last part, however, does not fit into the reductionist P.C. world view.

Political correctness means always having to say you're sorry.

In the endless and vitally important quest to find new things of which to disapprove, may I present the latest form of -ist, -centric, -phobic, and -archal oppression, namely, school integration. From this article:

White teachers were entrusted with the assimilation process of the black student population. Black children assimilated into this culture based on the normative practices of white aesthetics and Heteronormativity.

The integrated functions of oppression within the newly formed education system created a platform for black oppression and suppression of sexual identity. Black children had to forsake their ethnic pride (adopt the character of a white person) for any chance of social mobility. The Brown vs. the Board of Education streamlined assimilation of black children within the white culture, opened the narrow door of economic mobility, and provided a platform for white supremacy aesthetics in the hiring process of black teachers and the development of the young black mind. For a chance at economic upward mobility gay black teachers and students were forced to hide their true identity. What unfolds when these identities are elements of one person?

So it's official: No conceivable state of affairs can escape politically correct censure. Note also the association of heteronormativity with European-American culture, since we all know that it was completely unknown among African-Americans.

The WaPo's non-diverse view of diversity

In this article, The Washington Post compares Internet usage among Hispanic, black, and white people. What happened to Asians, Native Americans, and others who fall outside of the "Choose one and one only: white, black, Hispanic" paradigm?

Today's vocabulary word: diverse

diverse, adj. non-diverse, but in a way of which we approve.

Further reading

Magnet schools

Proponents of the "Harrison Bergeron" model of education are complaining that a local science magnet school is non-diverse, since African-Americans and Latinos are underrepresented. Nonetheless, European-Americans are also underrepresented, and one particular community of color — Asian-Americans — makes up 46% of the student body. In that case, what definition of "diversity" are people using? After all, a magnet school like that has to be the least effective tool of white supremacy ever.

The self-appointed spokespersons for queerdom

It appears from an email that I've received today that the National Stonewall Democrats speak for me, whether I like it or not. The email trumpets the National Stonewall Democrats' endorsement of One Nation, Working Together. The latter organization supports a fairly predictable laundry list of liberal causes, some of which I support, but others of which I do not.

The email includes the following:

You spoke and said we need to stand together as One Nation.

I did? It continues:

The LGBTQ community values align with the values of One Nation:

Who is this LGBTQ community, and who gets to decide what its values are? If we form some sort of hive mind, I have somehow been left out. When I was involved in mainstream LGBT organizations, the people in charge responded to my feedback with an attitude of "Sit down, shut up, and let us do your thinking for you." So much for diversity, inclusivity, and consensus-building.

You might be a liberal if ...

(A companion to "You might be a conservative if ...")

• You think that ATM fees are too high and that taxes are too low.
• You think that prosperity is something that politicians can just decree into existence and that some politicians refuse to do so because the plutocrats keep lobbying for poverty.
• You want politicians at the national level to decree prosperity into existence and politicians at the county level to protect you from it.
• You give all of the credit for the 1990’s Clinton and Gore and all of the blame to someone else. You insist that the Clinton-Gore new economy and the dot-com Dutch tulip mania had nothing to do with each other.
• You think that small is beautiful, except in government.
• You regard local home rule as an outmoded, unworkable, and even racist concept, except in the District of Columbia.
• You think that while the point of diversity is to let people of differing viewpoints learn from one another, the way to achieve diversity is to suppress those same differing viewpoints.
• You want to improve our public schools by doing the things that made them a mess in the first place.
• You oppose road construction but support the tax increases proposed to fund that road construction.
• You think that corporations frequently oppress us and are often monopolistic, whereas government never does and never is.
• You consider yourself to be down with the working class, even though you never interact with any actual working-class persons except those whom you are paying to serve you. You regard people less economically fortunate than you as the virtuous working class when they say what you want to hear and evil redneck trailer trash otherwise.
• You think that tax cuts cause deficits in a way that spending increases don’t.
• You are sure that the plutocrats are behind everything bad. You resent that big companies like P&G and HP lobby for anti-gay laws, over the objections of the Joe the Plumbers of the world.
• On those many occasions when a member of the religious right and a member of the P.C. left say exactly the same thing, you have no problem simultaneously disbelieving and believing it.

Diversity

We still hear from conservatives about those advocates of campus "diversity" who try to squelch viewpoint diversity.  While I do not lightly agree with social conservatives, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.  It often seems that while the purpose of diversity is to let people of differing viewpoints learn from one another, the way to achieve diversity is to avoid all contact with those differing viewpoints.

I attended a law school well known for "diversity."  Our classes were filled with people who were diverse by race, sex, and geographic origin, most of whom thought exactly alike.  I was one of the few persons, and sometimes the only person, who supplied diversity in class discussion, even though I was on paper the least diverse person ever, being a white male non-athlete from the Washington suburbs.

Then again, as usual, conservatives are in no hurry to lead by example.  Indeed, when they make up the majority, they forget all of their fine words about viewpoint diversity.  Free Republic quickly banned me for expressing an opinion that was by their standards politically incorrect.  The thread topic was - you guessed it - the threat to viewpoint diversity by those nasty liberals.

Everyone knows ....

Everyone knows that all gay men are attracted exclusively to macho jocks, except that it's also an infallible dogma that we are all attracted, just as exclusively, to twinks and pretty boys. Moreover, it's teaching necessary for salvation that we all like smooth guys, except, of course, insofar as we all like hairy men.

It is vitally important that we slavishly follow sweeping generalizations about gay men, no matter how often we contradict ourselves in the process. Otherwise, we might actually have to stop paying lip service to diversity long enough to recognize that we are already a pretty diverse community, and we certainly couldn't have that, now, could we?

Bill Kristol and The Washington Post

(It's time to get this show back on the road, I guess."

It seems that Bill Kristol will write a monthly column at The Washington Post. It would be nice if The Post put less effort into taking a "collect 'em all" approach to conservative talking heads and more effort into ... oh, gosh, I don't know ... incorporating actual facts into its reporting.

The supposed reason is to provide a "diverse range of opinions" on the op-ed page. Huh? The Post already has plenty of freedom-hating "conservatives" and freedom-hating "liberals." Only in Washington would a group of opinions all clustered around the bottom of the Nolan chart be deemed "diverse."