This is not only bad for the newspaper, it is bad for all the other minority reporters who might or might not have been recruited for this same cause (and these include, in diversity-speak, non-white men and all women). Regardless of excellence or mediocrity, they must all go home at night wondering whether the boss chose them for the color of their skin or the content of their clip file. And that stinks, but it's an old story, and it never has a happy ending. Manipulating human beings to realize any utopian dream, from Marxism to diversity, is always a nightmare on some level. Treating people as symbols, as colors, as trophies, is ultimately dehumanizing. As we examine (via the revelations of the Blair case) the fanaticism of journalism's drive to "diversify," this should become obvious.
Which should lead to some tough questions: Exactly what is "diversity," and why has it become an end in itself? One definition of diversity comes from Newsweek's Seth Mnookin, who recently lamented that The New York Times hasn't immediately declared it "will continue its commitment to making the paper's reporters better reflect the world they write about."
Is that what this diversity is about -- reporters who better reflect the world they write about? Such a state of journalistic affairs would relegate middle-aged white women to the Hillary beat, black men to cover the NBA and Secretary of State Colin Powell, Asian reporters to SARS -- and they could all flip for multi-racial Tiger Woods. And what in diversity's name was Jayson Blair doing writing about former POW Jessica Lynch's family (white), anyway? In a word, such "diversity" is absurd. It is also deeply depressing. For its devotion to identity politics, presumes that human beings are incapable of reaching across race and sex -- a fallacy belied, thankfully, by centuries of more expansive hearts and imaginations.
Mnookin also writes of the media's "responsibility to reflect different viewpoints, to report on varied cultures, to shine lights in places we might not tread ourselves." That sounds more like a decent day's work, although I wonder if diversifiers realize it doesn't require anything special -- not race, not sex -- besides shoe leather. And I wonder if they could ever accept "different viewpoints" -- conservatives, say -- in their newsrooms. There's the kind of diversity -- none of this skin-deep stuff -- that has always been too rich for their blood.