The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

THE MYTH OF DIVERSITY

by Jared Taylor American Renaissance (Part IV of VI)

Public Services

At a different level, it is now taken for granted that public services like fire and police departments should employ people of different races. The theory is that it is better to have black or Hispanic officers patrolling black or Hispanic neighborhoods. Here do we not have an example of one of diversity's benefits?

On the contrary, this is merely the first proof that diversity is a horrible burden. If all across America it has been demonstrated that whites cannot police non-whites or put out their fires it only shows how divisive diversity really is. The racial mix of a police force--touted as one of the wonders of diversity--becomes necessary only because officers of one race and citizens of another are unable to work together. The diversity that is claimed as a triumph is necessary only because diversity does not work.

The same is true of every other effort to diversify public services. If Hispanic judges and prosecutors must be recruited for the justice system it means whites are incapable of dispassionate justice. If non-white teachers are necessary "role models" for non-white children it means that inspiration cannot cross racial lines. If newspapers must hire non-white reporters in order to satisfy non-white readers it means people cannot write acceptable news for people of other races. If blacks demand black television newscasters and weathermen, it means they want to get information from their own people. If majority-minority voting districts must be set up so that non-whites can elect representatives of their own race, it means that elections are nothing more than a racial headcount. All such efforts at diversity are not expressions of the inherent strength of multi-racialism; they are admissions that it is a debilitating source of tension, hostility, and weakness.

Just as the advantages of diversity disappear upon examination, its disadvantages are many and obvious. Once a fire department or police force has been diversified to match the surrounding community, does it work better? Not if we are to judge from the never-ending racial wrangles over promotions, class-action bias law suits, reverse discrimination cases, acrimony over quotas and affirmative action, and the proliferation of racially exclusive professional organizations. Every good-sized police department in the country has a black officers' association devoted to explicit, racially competitive objectives. In large cities, there are associations for Asian, Hispanic, and even white officers.

Many government agencies and private companies hire professional "diversity managers" to help handle mixed work forces. This is a new profession, which did not exist before the idea that diversity is a strength. Most of it boils down to trying to bridge the gaps between people who do not understand each other, but since it concerns subjects about which management is afraid to ask too many questions, some of it is pure snake oil.

Maria Riefler has trained Nestle, Walt Disney, Chrysler and Chevron. She likes to divide employees into groups that represent the body and the "triune brain." This is supposed to help them understand how "stereotypes are hidden deep within the primitive part of ourselves."

It is a very peculiar "strength" that requires the constant attention of experts and other bumcombe artists. Like hiring black police officers to patrol black neighborhoods, "diversity training" is an admission that a mixed work force is a liability.

This is the merest common sense; it is hard to get dissimilar people to work together. Indeed, a large-scale survey called the National Study of the Changing Work force found that more than half of all workers said they preferred to work with people who were not only the same race as themselves, but were the same sex and had the same level of education. Even more probably felt that way but were afraid to say so.

These days there is much chirping about how diversity is going to improve profits. American companies are hard-headed about profits. A great deal of research, much of it quantitative, goes into decisions about product lines, new markets, establishing joint ventures, issuing stock or moving the head office. If there has been any serious research showing that "diversity" improves profits it would have been first-page news long ago. Not even the most desperate data massage seems to have produced a study that can make such a claim.

Just how big a headache diversity actually is for companies is clear from the endless stream of news stories about corporate racial discrimination. In just one month--November, 1996--"diversity" made quite a lot of news. Texaco agreed to spend $176 million on black victims of company "racism," and lawyers for the firm that sued Texaco were getting about ten calls a day from people asking how to file for discrimination settlements. Just a few days later, 22 former employees of the nation's largest printing company, R.R. Donnelley and Sons, sued over what they claimed was $500 million worth of racism.

In the same month, both the U.S. State Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms settled multi-million dollar class action discrimination suits brought by blacks. Likewise in November, three blacks brought a class action suit against an Avis Rent-A-Car franchise with outlets in North and South Carolina, claiming they had been turned away because of race. Within the month, the owner of Avis said it would break its contract with the franchisee, and hired a law firm to check up on other Avis operators. Every one of these cases, which are expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally damaging, is a consequence of racial diversity--and these were just the cases that made the news.

It would be edifying to count the number of public and private organizations that exist in the United States only because of its diverse population, and that are not needed in places like Japan or Norway. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Office of Federal Contract Compliance, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, and every state and local equivalents of these offices exist only because of racial diversity. Every government office, every university, every large corporation, and every military installation has employees working full-time on affirmative action, discrimination claims, and other "diversity" issues.

Countless outreach programs, reconciliation commissions, blue-ribbon panels, and mayoral commissions fret professionally about race every day. Not one of these would be necessary in a nation of a single race. There must be tens of thousands of Americans consuming hundreds of millions of dollars every year enforcing, adjusting, tuning, regulating, and talking pure nonsense about the racial diversity that is supposed to be our strength.

Indeed, Tom McClintock, a former candidate for controller of the state of California estimated that before the 1996 state ballot initiative was approved to abolish racial preferences, the annual cost just to administer California's affirmative action programs was from $343 million to $677 million. This figure did not include the cost of private preference programs or the cost of state and local anti-discrimination machinery, none of which was affected by the 1996 measure.

If diversity were a strength people would practice it spontaneously. It wouldn't require constant cheer-leading or expensive lawsuits. If diversity were enriching, people would seek it out. It is in private gatherings not governed by some kind of "civil-rights" law that Americans show just how much strength and enrichment they find in diversity. Such gatherings are usually the very opposite of diverse.