The reason why I hate diversity is because it’s a lie.
On a college campus, true diversity is actually a really great thing. It’s not easy but it’s a very important educational experience. Having people from different places, with very different opinions, of different races and ethnicities, etc is a great thing on campus. My department is diverse by virtue of teaching 7 languages, most of which are taught by native speakers. It’s so good to have all these different people. It’s also very hard. An Italian mentality is different from Germanic is different from Ukrainian is different from Kuwaiti, and so on. Totally worth it, though.
But the word “diversity” is never used in this sense. It definitely doesn’t imply a variety of opinions or cultural norms. It is only used to mean “we need more black people around to patronize and use to make ourselves feel virtuous.” I wouldn’t object to the first part. It’s not a bad idea at all to have more black people in any capacity on campus. But that wouldn’t be diversity. Nothing is really diversity until a bunch of very coddled individuals enacts some ridiculous self-flagellation drama around it.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Diversity” is what they started saying when affirmative action (which I am and was for) was maligned and then cancelled. I first heard it sometime in the late 80s. Affirmative Action was for US people, women and underrepresented minorities, not foreign students / scholars, because, for instance, one could bring a lot of elite Africans on campus and say one had Black people while still systematically excluding African-Americans. Takeaway: you’ve got to realize diversity in the bureaucratic context of universities doesn’t mean diverse as in international, it is a code term for underrepresented US minorities.
Or, one of these. You may be right that it means “Black” and not other ethnicities, at least for some. Here, I quickly learned that “minority” was code for Black. To me “minority” means any/all [underrepresented] minority/ies but not here–I guess because here, there are tons of Black people compared to other minorities, and they were/are the ones systematically excluded. Also, it can be a euphemism, “Black” for some people is a loaded term so they say “minority.”
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Exactly. And as I said, if it were about bringing more black people to campus or making sure more black students actually graduate, that’s a great goal. I’m all for that. But a bunch of professors getting together for weekly workshops titled “So You Want to Be Anti-racist” and feeling virtuous does nothing for that goal. To the contrary, it excludes everybody who isn’t already extremely privileged. They could use this time to provide free tutoring to students who are flunking out. But instead they sit there and feel virtuous.
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“making sure more black students actually graduate, that’s a great goal”
But weren’t efforts to do that at your school shot down by the “diversity” crowd? A lot of the diversity infrastructure seems primarily to be about saving diversity infrastructure jobs – which means that black students need to be continually marginalized in the interests of job maintenance…
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Absolutely. The results are always negative because the way diversity people explain reality is ludicrous. What helps black students pass calculus is not having a professor who “looks like them” but having free tutors and review groups. But funding for tutors and review groups is cut because the theory is that the knowledge of math oozes out of the pores of a black professor and straight into the brains of students, so nothing else is needed.
And please nobody say that “you could have both.” You couldn’t because once you adopt the magical view of reality that men can be women and knowledge is transmitted through physical appearance, you won’t do any rational, meaningful things. You are done for because you abdicated reason in favor of magical thinking.
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“But the word “diversity” is never used in this sense. It definitely doesn’t imply a variety of opinions or cultural norms. It is only used to mean “we need more black people around to patronize and use to make ourselves feel virtuous.””
Where I live, a program like that exists that is called neither affirmative action nor diversity. In my experience, the term and all programs attached to it are used as a tool to eliminate any sensibly minded person, so that the people running the programs, who benefit from them, have free reign to control a system of some kind.
It is also my experience that virtue signalling tends to happen in the beginning, or among the more soft-headed people who fall for that kind of thing. Later on or at the top where decisions are made, people are very cynical and unscrupulous. Some of them even loathe the minorities that they proclaim to serve, with one example in my mind being that a very senior politician behind closed doors said “you’ll never get the blacks to work” followed by conducting a land deal with a foreign nation that would dispossess that particular population of ancestral lands worth, easily, billions.
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I vastly prefer the cynical ones. Vastly. I understand them. They are human. They want to have a nice expensive house, a nice life. They do what they have to get there.
It’s the people who are sincerely talking about “systemic injustices”, “police brutality” and “whiteness” who scare me. Their hunger can’t be satisfied with nice houses and promotions. These are the people who crave pain and blood. But they don’t know this about themselves. They have no idea how angry they are. And even less of an idea why. These are the people who will destroy others wantonly, needlessly out of that rage they can’t identify. There are people like this in every society and there need to be social barriers to keep them in check. We are removing those barriers, and the results will not be good.
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I don’t think that you should be worried about those people. The world has always included virtue signallers or do-gooders, mental deficients or angry psychos who can never be satisfied with anything etc. Imo they aren’t the problem.
The problem in this regard, imo, is this open ended one-size-fits-all tool of elimination that can be used to attack, silence, or remove the sensible ones who can run civilisations and institutions of all kinds without them descending into warlordism or chaos, which I was alluding to when I stated: “the term and all programs attached to it are used as a tool to eliminate any sensibly minded person”, because that is where the danger is.
I am usually loathe to call for laws to be written because any law enacted is basically a threat to deprive someone of their liberty/life/humanity, but in this case I would be open to laws being put into place to eliminate anything, including old laws and policy, that enable a person, organisation, or any other entity so much opportunity to behave in a malfeasant way.
To clarify, since such laws could be used malevolently in and of themselves, what I am saying is that there ought to be a strong framework of laws that allow logical reform and the constraining of easily hijacked laws, policies, budgets & programs so that they can’t be used as they are being used now, because the way it’s going, there are going to be big fights as whole tranches of Western society unwind back to warlordism.
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It’s like that C S Lewis quotation;
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
There’s something chilling about that quote. Reckon Lewis could have written a powerful dystopian novel with his imagination and knowledge of human nature.
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Well, he did write That Hideous Strength…
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The other thing though is that affirmative action and much “diversity” are vastly different in that affirmative action really is about access, justice, success and “diversity” is about … looking cool and modern, or something — the purpose of it is very vague but all has to do with marketing somehow, not fairness. Affirmative action means access in conditions that can produce success, and takes a lot of work at different levels to do well. “Diversity” is articulated as something that will make the university more interesting, having a variety of people around. It’s a very different project, although people try to accomplish some of what affirmative action used to do under the banner of “diversity.” The vagueness leads to a lot of confusion
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