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When 'Diversity' at Elite Schools Deepens Inequality

01.01.70

The recent death of New York University law professor Derrick Bell, a black champion of "critical race theory," and a recent report that the Supreme Court may take up a new challenge to affirmative action at the University of Texas at Austin both mark the decline of racial "identity politics" and "diversity" practices that preoccupied America before 9/11 and the advent of the current economic and political crisis.

Not even racism's raw eruptions against our first black President or its grinding ubiquity in the lives of countless non-whites (especially young black men) have caused the crisis gripping this country. And not even the staunchest anti-racist activism, necessary though it surely is, will get us out of it.

Racism will only become more virulent if Americans distract themselves from the real crisis by raising either barriers of white racism or banners of defensive black and Latino racial pride. The truth, clear amid growing economic inequality, is that even as some "diversity" champions have draped elite universities in the brilliant raiment of "diversity" to redress long histories of racism and sexism, they've also transformed those institutions from the crucibles of civic-republican leadership training that they once were into career-networking centers and cultural galleria for a colorful global elite that answers to no polity or moral code. That's a problem 'diversity" can't solve. affirmative-action case of 1973, that "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race:" Many voters in 2008 certainly took account of race, but in order to get beyond what both the romantically multiculturalist left and the still-segregationist right consider "essential" to race: its supposedly ineradicable depth, on both sides of the color line.

Source: TPMCafé