The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

THE MYTH OF DIVERSITY

by Jared Taylor American Renaissance (Part II of VI)

Immigration

Despite President Clinton's view that "diversity" started with Columbus, for most of its history the United States was self-consciously homogeneous. In 1787, in the second of The Federalist Papers, John Jay gave thanks that "Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs . . . ."

This is not exactly a celebration of diversity, nor was Jay an eccentric. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson were all explicit about wanting the United States to be a white country, and in 1790 the first federal naturalization law required that applicants for citizenship be "free white persons." Until 1965, it was very difficult for non-whites to immigrate to the United States and become citizens (an exception being made for the descendants of slaves). Immigration law was explicitly designed to keep the United States a white nation with a white majority. It was only in the 1950s and 60s that the country turned its back on nearly 200 years of traditional thinking about race and began its long march down the road to nowhere.

Once the country made the fatal assumption that race was a trivial human distinction, all else had to follow. Congress abolished not only Jim Crow and legal segregation but, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, put an end to free association as well. The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965, which abolished national origins quotas and opened immigration to all nations, was a grand gesture of anti-racism, a kind of civil rights law for the entire world.

As has been pointed out in such books as Lawrence Auster's The Path to National Suicide and Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation, the backers of the immigration bill were at pains to explain that it would have little effect on the country. "Under the proposed bill," explained Senator Edward Kennedy, "the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. Secondly, the ethnic mix will not be upset. Contrary to charges in some quarters, it will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area." The senator suggested that, at most, 62,000 people a year might immigrate.

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law, he also downplayed its impact: "This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or power."

The point here is not that the backers were wrong about the bill--even though in 1996, for example, there were a record 1,300,000 naturalizations and perhaps 90 percent of the new citizens were non-white. The point is that "diversity" of the kind that immigration is now said to bless us with was never even hinted at as one of the law's benefits.

No one dreamed that in just 20 years ten percent of the entire population of El Salvador would have moved to the United States or that millions of mostly Hispanic and Asian immigrants would threaten to reduce whites to a racial minority in California by 1998. In 1965, before the discovery that "diversity is our strength," most people would have been shocked by the thought of such population changes.
Today, the intellectual climate is different, but in entirely predictable ways. "Racism" looms ever larger as the greatest moral offense a white person can commit, and anyone who opposes the arrival of yet more non-whites cannot but be "racist." There is therefore no longer any moral basis for opposing the prospect of minority status for whites, and what would have been an unthinkable prospect before 1965 must now be seen as an exciting opportunity. Thus did diversity become a "strength," despite the suspension of disbelief required to think it so.

This is a perfect example of an assertion, for purely ideological reasons, of something obviously untrue. Like the equality of the races, the equivalence of the sexes, the unimportance of heredity, the normalcy of homosexuality, and the insignificance of physical or mental handicap, the strength of diversity is one of a whole series of monstrous absurdities on which liberalism depends.

Having started with race, diversity now includes just about anything. Feminists, angry people in wheel chairs, AIDS carriers, militant homosexuals, and people who would rather speak Spanish than English have all taken much of their style and impetus from the civil rights movement. Demands for "inclusiveness" almost always include the language of grievance and compensation pioneered by blacks. Fat people fight discrimination, ugly people struggle against "lookism," and at least one local government has required that the stage set for a strip tease show be wheel-chair accessible. Anyone who opposes the glorification of the alien, the abnormal, and the inferior can be denounced with much fanfare and a huge sense of superiority. The metastasis of diversity is a fascinating story, but the disease began with race.

Occasionally a mainstream author sniffs around the edges of the population problem. At some risk to his professional respectability, columnist Scott McConnell of the New York Post has pointed out that if it will be such a good thing for whites to become a minority, there is no reason to wait until the next century. We could throw open the borders right now and become a minority in just a few years. "Why deny ourselves and our children the great benefits of Third Worldism that we are planning for our grandchildren?" he asks.