It's time to admit that "diversity" is code for racism. If it makes you feel
better, we can call it "nice" racism or "well-intentioned" racism or "racism
that's good for you." Except that's the rub: It's racism that may be good
for you if "you" are a diversity guru, a rich white liberal, a college
administrator or one of sundry other types. But the question of whether
diversity is good for "them" is a different question altogether, and much
more difficult to answer.
If by "them" you mean minorities such as Jews, Chinese-Americans,
Indian-Americans and other people of Asian descent, then the ongoing
national obsession with diversity probably isn't good. Indeed, that's why
Jian Li, a freshman at Yale, filed a civil rights complaint against
Princeton University for rejecting him. Li had nigh-upon perfect test scores
and grades, yet Princeton turned him down. He'll probably get nowhere with
his complaint - he did get into Yale after all - but it shines a light on an
uncomfortable reality.
"Theoretically, affirmative action is supposed to take spots away from white
applicants and redistribute them to underrepresented minorities," Li told
the Daily Princetonian. "What's happening is one segment of the minority
population is losing places to another segment of minorities, namely Asians
to underrepresented minorities."
Li points to a study conducted by two Princeton academics last year which
concluded that if you got rid of racial preferences in higher education, the
number of whites admitted to schools would remain fairly constant. However,
without racial preferences, Asians would take roughly 80 percent of the
positions now allotted to Hispanic and black students.
In other words, there is a quota - though none dare call it that - keeping
Asians out of elite schools in numbers disproportionate to their merit. This
is the same sort of quota once used to keep Jews out of the Ivy League - not
because of their lack of qualifications, but because having too many Jews
would change the "feel" of, say, Harvard or Yale. Today, it's the same
thing, only we've given that feeling a name: diversity.