Race-based behaviors provide a range of different results for similar inputs. America is both Integrated and Segregated by race. Diversity is designed to thin out the so-called “advantages of whiteness” as is “Inclusion”. According to Judge Allison Burroughs of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts decision to uphold Harvard’s admission’s policy of favoring less academically qualified blacks and Hispanics over Asians. We are told, for the umpteenth time, that despite their lackluster academic records, blacks and Hispanics should be admitted over better qualified whites and Asians to promote all important diversity.
Using past judicial reasoning as a guide to the future, naked racial preferences will survive as a compelling state interest. Their existence will require deceit (“holistic” admission screening being the equivalent of sausage making) but they will survive. What good-thinking person, Supreme Court Justices included, could oppose diversity and all of its wondrous benefits? Certainly not university experts—some 37 higher education groups filed an amicus curie brief endorsing the “Harvard model” of holistic admission.
Left unsaid in this celebration of diversity is an obvious but never raised question—”how exactly does adding blacks and Hispanics so dramatically upgrade learning vis-à-vis other students who are equally diverse but have different skin colors?”
Now to bell the cat: this disinterest in assessing the benefit of diversity strongly suggests that racial preferences are just a political pay-off to a favored constituency no different than, say, ethanol subsidies to farmers or tax abatements for real estate developers. Alas, only the bravest of the brave will dare admit it in public, but at least in principle, the good news is that this confession is not especially loathsome. Politicians love to take credit for catering to their constituents.
What is immoral about a group wanting prestige diplomas unobtainable via color-blind admission standards? Recall that for decades Harvard awarded degrees to less-than-brilliant offspring of wealthy WASPs. Acquiescence to such demands is also just part of American pluralism whereby all (or nearly all) interests are accommodated via the political process. Just think of it as the moral equivalent of ethanol subsidies helping preserve the romanticized family farm. All and all, just one of countless examples of political corruption whose justification required lying, albeit lying that is particularly embarrassing.
Views: 0
