If ever there were an exemplary couple of sentences to illustrate what’s wrong with the genetic-diversity-only movement in college, these are it:
Is Condoleezza Rice really a black woman?
While she may appear on the outside to share the color and therefore sentiments of black people, actions speak louder than both words and skin.
Hats off to Dayo Olopade, sophomore from Berkeley, who writes in the Yale paper (I don’t know why), for so neatly and baldly stating the assumption: “to share the [skin] color and therefore the sentiments of black people.”
I’ve tried to explain that the academic diversityniks use race and gender as a proxy for ideas (they get outraged when it fails them).
I’ve tried humor:
… across academe, where diversity is only skin deep and intellectual diversity is dangerous and probably offensive to somebody who’s “diverse.” The campus idea of diversity generally resembles a bag of Peanut M&M’s?: different colors on the outside, same nutty interior.
I’ve even tried quoting Thomas Sowell, another whose color doesn’t “share” the sentiments:
“In academic circles,” Thomas Sowell noted in 1995 in The Vision of the Anointed, academics rely on “diversity” as a “vast generality” often standing for “a quite narrow social agenda, as if those who reiterate the word ‘diversity’ endlessly had no idea that diversity is itself diverse and has many dimensions besides the one with which they are preoccupied. Advocates of diversity in a race or gender sense are often quite hostile to ideological diversity, when it includes traditional or ‘conservative’ values and beliefs.”
But not even the great Sowell bests this succinct summation of Olopade’s. So I extend my gratitude to the Berkeley sophomore ? indeed a wise fool.
