Skin Color Is Not a Viewpoint

The Trump administration has pressed Harvard and other academic institutions to open themselves up to more “viewpoint diversity”. And, if nothing else, Harvard’s leadership has for the first time committed themselves to “viewpoint diversity”, but what they mean by that may be very different.

Everyone is familiar with the negative argument for DEI, affirmative action and similar diversity programs which claim that our country and its institutions suffer from “systemic racism” that has to be remedied through equity programs that discriminate in favor of underrepresented groups and against those groups deemed to be overrepresented. Mostly white people and Asians.

Anyone who has sat through corporate or government diversity training in the past few years probably also encountered the positive argument for DEI which is that a diversity of races, cultures, sexual identities and genders also provides viewpoint diversity. That was the argument that the Biden administration made in defense of its diversity mandates.

“Cognitively diverse teams are better at solving complex problems when compared to more homogenous teams even when the homogenous teams are composed of top performing highly capable individuals,” Army Secretary Eric Fanning had argued. The Biden official contended that it takes members of “different ethnic or cultural” groups to produce better results.

“People who are different from one another in race, gender and other dimensions bring unique information and experiences to bear on the task at hand,” Berkeley’s Greater Good Center contended. “A male and female engineer might have perspectives as different from one another as an engineer and a physicist.”

While that’s no doubt true in any number of areas, is that really true in science? Have women or men made major scientific discoveries about the way the world works that the opposite sex could never have uncovered? And could women have never duplicated male discoveries? The discovery of DNA is fittingly attributed to two men and one woman. Did Marie Curie succeed in isolating radium because she had a fundamentally different perspective on account of her sex or because she was a dedicated researcher? Does the nature of the universe have a gender? Is the scientific method different for men and women?

And, more absurdly still, is it different for members of different races and ethnic groups?

The idea that individuals, no matter how innovative, intelligent or creative, are still “homogenous” as long as they have the same skin color is not only racist, but is mindlessly collectivist. And the notion that ideas are the products of biology, of ethnicity and of skin color, rather than of individuals insists on the primacy of the group over the individual.

The Left not only suffers from groupthink, it suffers from the belief that only groups think. And if only groups think, then intellectual or viewpoint diversity only requires that members of different groups take part. It doesn’t matter who the individuals are so long as the group has a diverse representation of every group. A group with the dumbest possible white man, black man, lesbian and transgender man is inherently better than a “homogenous” group of geniuses because the geniuses lack diversity and therefore can’t come up with any new ideas.

Just don’t tell that to the researchers at the Manhattan Project.

People don’t come up with ideas, as Biden’s former Army Secretary already told us, groups do. A white man, no matter what his personality, his interests or skillset, can only come up with ‘white man ideas’ and a Latino woman with ‘Latino woman ideas.’ Unless someone diversely puts the two of them together, they’ll be hopelessly trapped in their homogenous boxes.

Obama and Biden officials dismissed the threat of China because, they claimed, the People’s Republic was not a true competitor because it lacked diversity. It couldn’t come up with new ideas because everyone was Chinese. Universities, including Harvard, struggled to keep out Asian students because they lacked diversity and would trap colleges into echo chambers full of students who only had ‘Asian ideas’. Harvard and other colleges engaged in racist admissions practices driven by racist ideas because they were convinced diversity was anti-racist rather than racist.

Scale up the racist credo that the only way to succeed is to have the widest possible mix of groups and you end up with everything from open borders to systemic racism. America, many liberals came to believe, could not succeed without maximizing its diversity. Any institution that was not diverse was doomed. And, retroactively, anything that was not diverse was worthless.

Most culture, science and history that occurred before DEI’s eternal Year Zero has been deemed worthless because they were not diverse. Art museums jettison classical paintings. The work of Nobel Prize winners is written off because they were white men who could not truly understand the universe because they were not diverse.

And that which is not diverse is inherently flawed.

America is only as good as it is diverse. The Constitution, the Renaissance and most mathematics are bad because they are not diverse. Had more diverse groups put them together, they would have been far better and will soon be replaced by diverse output.

Rather than measuring diversity by its accomplishments, accomplishments are defined by diversity, and as a result, much of what we produce has become worthless. Rather than producing new ideas, diversity rehashes the same old ideological ones. Academia became less intellectually diverse even as it became more racially and sexually diverse. By making diversity its supreme value, universities adopted a dogma and the political monoculture that goes with it. You can have intellectual and racial diversity as long as they operate within a competitive environment and a marketplace of ideas. Diversity’s only real idea however is diversity. And by diversity it means people, of different races and backgrounds, who believe the same things.

Diversity has little disagreement because the only kind of diversity it values is external. It substitutes external diversity for internal diversity. The only diverse people allowed inside are those who already agree with its fundamental beliefs. And if they disagree, it can only be a limited disagreement in one direction. There is room for intellectual diversity between socialists, Communists and the occasional free market liberal who leaves a lot of room for government intervention. There’s likewise some room for viewpoint diversity between those who believe America is a colonial settler state forever tainted by its original sins and those who contend that it can be redeemed through more diversity. But there’s no room for going out of this leftist box.

Diversity is not an intellectual value, it’s a political one, and therefore it cannot tolerate intellectual diversity and it also cannot be debated. Intellectual ideas can be debated, political ones must be accepted. The only way to maintain a climate of political debate is to have intellectual diversity. The more politics determine the nature of ideas, the fewer ideas there are.

And diversity’s real underlying concept is that the only worthwhile ideas proceed from the political conditions produced by diversity and through the conditions created by politics. Testing this theory in any kind of way is forbidden because that would be bigoted. Questioning it is also bigoted. Any disagreement at all is bigoted and therefore unacceptable.

This is not an argument, it’s a political dogma meant to enforce conformity by banning any arguments against its own premises. An academic institution that accepts it, as virtually all of academia has, ceases to function as anything except a totalitarian political organization with its own thought police, mobs and machinery for outing and ousting all forms of political dissent.

And that is what modern universities have become.

Skin color is not actually a point of view, but the argument that skin color is a point of view is a useful political line for enforcing conformity under the guise of diversity. To argue that groups think and individuals don’t is to dismiss every non-conforming individual as a representative of old non-diverse ideas if he’s white or as non-representative of his group if he’s non-white.

Diversity is the enemy of intellectual diversity because it is the enemy of individuals. Challenging it is the only hope for the return of a country where people think for themselves.

Source: http://www.danielgreenfield.org/feeds/7360093281975501675/comments/default