Letter to UCLA Newspaper: Society’s obsession with diversity itself subtly racist
UCLA student columnist Eitan Arom features an intriguing letter from a UC-Berkeley alumnus on the subject of a recent Daily Bruin column, “Editorial: Crop of commencement speakers lacks diversity”.
I am a 61-year-old white man, the sort that is often considered irrelevant and accused of being angered by the loss of privilege following social incursions of one or another previously oppressed groups. To allay any such considerations, I state for the record I have enough privilege to suit me, and no lack of money. I say what I say out of concern for our educational and other institutions.
I am old enough to remember when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stated that one day he hoped we would be judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. Our obsession with diversity has created a society in which the reverse of the reverend’s hopes have been achieved. We care less about an individual’s achievements, the new criteria being whether they are African American, Hispanic, LGBT, female, American Indian or some other protected group.
I believe this obsession with diversity is actually subtly racist. It suggests that without special treatment by the great white father, no member of the protected classes could succeed. I don’t know about others, but I would feel greatly insulted. There’s two cents’ worth from an old white male.
Dr. Andrew Kindler
UC Berkeley alumnus
Letter to the Editor: Society’s obsession with diversity itself subtly racist (Daily Bruin)
Comments
Spot on.
Quite often, the people who tout diversity actually reject it because they only want their kind of diversity. Here’s an experiment: Step 1. Walk down the street with a foreign born black person and note the positive response from other blacks. Step 2. Walk into a room with a foreign born black person, see the positive responses from blacks, as in Step 1. Then, watch the subtle and very negative changes in expression as that person speaks and the others realize the person does not belong to their group.
Diversity basically means somebody there is pulling our strings. Somebody decides how many of the right kind of us should be present anywhere so the numbers come out the way the number cruncher wants them to. Diversity itself is very dangerous because the government number cruncher is tabulating who we are and how many of us there are. As the people discovered during WWII, that kind of information facilitates genocide.