Capitalism Magazine’s Walter Williams writes that diversity is doublespeak for ideological confirmity:

Diversity is simply the old racism in a new guise, spiced up with a touch of sexism. Diversity is a call for race-conscious decisions in hiring, promotion and college admittance policy. Diversity management success is measured by the numbers: How many minorities or women are employed, promoted or enrolled? Wrong numbers invite the wrath of the state.

At colleges, diversity doesn’t mean political diversity. It is by no means unusual to find colleges where the bulk of the faculty — sometimes 80 percent or 90 percent — is registered Democrat. In some academic departments, such as philosophy, history and political science, it is by no means rare to find 100 percent of the faculty is registered Democrat.

Equal treatment, academic standards and meritocracy are the major casualties of the quest for diversity. In fact, equal treatment, academic standards and meritocracy can lead to charges of racism by the diversity elite. Being a 65-year-old, I can remember when blacks demanded that questions about race be removed from job or credit application forms. We said race was irrelevant and demanded color-blindness. In today’s racial spoils system, racial designations are required.

Stanley Fish writes a pair of compelling (if ultimately wrongheaded) responses to such non-racialist arguments trumpeting “fairness” and “meritocracy” of the sort Williams employs here — “How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words” and “Reverse Racism: Or How the Pot Got to Call the Kettle Black in America.”

Essentially, Fish argues that concepts like “fairness” and “merit” are not value-neutral terms, and so to wield them as the hammers of some spurious metaphysical equity is the new form of bigotry in the U.S. Both of these essays are a few years old, but both deserve a careful read.

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