Academic justification for promoting group identity comes home to roost:

During the last decade, the League of the South and other “southern heritage” groups have fought to preserve the state flags of Georgia and Mississippi. Some members of the League have demanded that universities hire Southern-born professors. Others have promoted antebellum style dances. Nearly all are quick to champion their “heroes,” including Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, against any slights.

The jargon of group rights and identity politics, normally the domain of the politically correct, permeates their pronouncements. In Georgia, a member of the League boasts that “our Southern heritage celebrates true diversity…and true multiculturalism.” Another from Virginia asks “in an age of political correctness, teaching tolerance of others and multiculturalism…when will the people of the south be permitted to honor their heritage?” Similarly, the national president of the League declares that if “Southerners were any other people in the world, the campaign to rob them of their symbols, their history, and their cultural identity would be termed cultural genocide.” The League stresses the Celtic background of many Southerners as a defining feature of this “cultural identity.”

Ah yes, the celebration of cultural identity and diversity.  How fundamentally American, right? 

Wrong.  In fact, the case can be made that the diversity movement is antithetical to the American ideal of individual rights—as Boston University professor Peter Wood makes clear in his book, Diversity: The Invention of A Concept:

[…] in one area of American life after another, the principle of diversity represents an attempt to alter the root cultural assumptions on which American society is based. Even if the diversity movement fails to achieve a new constitutional order in the United States, it already has achieved a substantial record of increased social discord and cultural decline. The diversity movement has contributed significantly to falling educational performance and lower academic standards (e.g. attacks on the SAT as a tool for identifying high school students who have the aptitude to succeed in college); undermined love of country (by elevating racial separatism); trivialized art (by emphasizing the social identity of the artist, e.g. Toni Morrison); and made certain forms of racialism respectable again. This is not to say that diversity is always and everywhere detrimental to our legal, social, moral and personal well-being. To many, it is an attractive idea and, in the right circumstances, can be enlivening and uplifting. But that could also be said of Turner Movie Classics, and we are not tempted to turn our key legal judgments and the tenor of cultural life over to the custody of cable television.

Whatever its virtues, diversity is a challenge to higher virtues and greater goods. We jeopardize liberty and equality by our friendship with this new principle. It is an unruly guest in our house, and the time may have come to call a cab and send it home […]

[…] Diversity is an idea without a clear intellectual context. Its background is murky, and the language in which its proponents speak is often misleading.

Thus, to see diversity clearly we must always look more than once. Sometimes, within what looks like arrant prejudice, such as in Henry Davenport Northrop’s accounts of Indian Horrors, lurks a hint of real diversity. And sometimes the opposite is true: what proclaims itself as diversity turns out to be little more than prejudice. This book is concerned with both kinds of diversity: the real (and natural) diversity of our social life, and the movement that has appropriated the name of diversity, not to achieve a better kind of national unity, but to give license to ethnic privilege and other forms of separatism.

This separatist, privileging diversity is simultaneously a concept, a political orientation and a personal taste. It is, if not literally everywhere in contemporary American society, nearly so. We need, however, a name for its proponents. Sometimes these advocates of diversity are spoken of as “the multicultural Left” or simply “multiculturalists,” but these terms cover only part of the story. Diversilogues trade in the ideology of diversity; diversidacts teach it; diversicrats regulate it. Each of these words has its place in the story, but for the sake of having one term for the whole tribe, I will write of “diversiphiles” when I mean to speak generally of those who elevate the ideal of diversity above the ideal of national unity. Diversiphiles are a dominant voice in many precincts of American culture.

I write as an opponent of the diversity movement as a whole, but one whose opposition is rooted in disappointment. The concept of diversity draws on some profoundly important human realities that, call them what we will, ought to be central to any enlightened and humane view of humanity. But diversity in this sense is mangled, compromised and ultimately destroyed by diversity in the sense that has prevailed in the diversity movement.

America’s real diversity sometimes seems on the verge of disappearance, while a phony, impostor diversity—made up of spurious claims to separate cultural identities, fashion statements and fantasy vacations—has taken its place.

In my personal estimation, the elevation of group identity politics—helped along by the PC handmaidens who actively champion it—is the biggest threat to individual liberty in this country, as Wood is correct to suggest.  Which is why I’d like to see a whole lot less handwringing over the pragmatic PATRIOT Act, and a whole lot more resistance to the diversity movement, which truly does threaten to rob us of our liberties by forcing on us a Balkanizing mindset that can only lead, legislatively, to legally enshrined relativism.  Which, y’know, would totally suck.

This has been a protein wisdom public service announcement.