       |
 Diversity@UCLA: By Any Means
Necessary
Chapter 2 Justifying the Unjustifiable The
views of Diversitistas like Carnesale are echoed by students, faculty
and staff. These voices, however, display a refreshing lack of
finesse
in disguising their racially-motivated goals. In a 2001 UCLA
Daily
Bruin article discussing low numbers of minority law school students,
Gary Blasi, a clinical and public interest law professor, bemoaned the
“harm [to] every white or Asian American student who is here because
their education is without the benefit of the perspectives those now
absent students once brought to classroom discussions.”[i] In a
Black
History Month article, the African Student Union Sergeant at Arms Kelly
Wynn expanded on this theme, arguing that a lack of diversity “not only
affects students of color, it affects other students as well because
they're not exposed to our perspective.”[ii]
The students and professors of UCLA commit the fatal mistake of letting race and gender serve as a proxy for intellectual contributions that actually do help students to learn from one another. The prototypical situation - whites learning from blacks learning from Hispanics learning from Asians - sounds eminently reasonable. And it’s one of the reasons why diversity is so far winning the battle of public opinion. But the argument falls apart on closer inspection. The justice of favoring minority students in any way over majority students is sustained only if every minority student possesses a significant characteristic that not one majority student possesses. But what is this characteristic? Is it a background of poverty? A full 8% of white Californians and 9% of Asian Californians are living below the poverty line.[iii] So that doesn’t work. Is it poor educational access? Thousands of “majority” students attend terrible public schools in every public school district throughout the state. But there must be something… Is it coming from a broken home? No, divorce, joblessness or domestic abuse are not unique to any one race or gender. By the time we identify characteristics that, say, all black students possess and no white students possess, we have descended into a group of physiognomic features. Even then, it must be a full set of ethnic traits – curly hair, broad nose, full lips, and dark skin – since Jews, Sri Lankans, Italians, or any other group or admixture thereof might share one or two of these attributes. In short, the Diversitistas will never identify a single substantial characteristic that will prove the justice of Diversity, because lauding the classroom contribution of hair kink or lip size is absurd on its face. The diversity movement is illogical and unjust, and ironically enough, derives a great amount of its success from exploiting politically incorrect assumptions by unthinking whites. However un-PC it may be, the Diversitistas benefit from the benign white misconception that blacks, Hispanics and other minorities really are all different, that they all have experienced something unique or foreign to whites. We know that radicals hate racial profiling – which in its most objectionable form uses race as a proxy for individual characteristics like criminality. But as is their wont, this distaste for profiling is highly selective – and deeply hypocritical. If a black man is pulled over in Beverly Hills because he probably doesn’t live there, and might break the law, it’s racism. But if a black man is accepted to UCLA because he probably overcame a background of poverty and might make a unique contribution to classroom discussions, why, that’s justice. [i] http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/db/archivedarticles.asp?ID=2666&date=1/30/2001 [ii] http://www.dailybruin.com/news/printable.asp?id=3051&date=2/21/2001 [iii] http://www.ppic.org/main/commentary.asp?i=249 |
