He’s discounting the fact that diversity of culture is also important. The culture of a poor black family is vastly different from that of an affluent white family. Period. Exposure to the other culture leads to better understanding. It’s not just about “people are people so why bother with ‘diversity’”. It’s that the culture a person comes from is an important gateway to understanding that person.
I don’t think I responded in enough depth here:
How did you boil all of this down to “diversity is all about getting people to be nice to minorities?” That’s reductio ad absurdium.
I think the meaning is clear and I would agree completely. Why the push back?
I know it’s true in my own life.
Why don’t you ask the major American businesses?
From the links “First, low-level unease between managers and employees of
different races, ethnicities, and cultures may impede
productivity and prevent the formation of the close working
relationships that make a business “hum.” Second, managers
unskilled in considering diverse perspectives may fail to
recognize excellent ideas when they come from unexpected
sources. Third, a lack of exposure to persons of different
races and ethnicities may result in economically inefficient,
and improper, hiring and promotion decisions, influenced by
false stereotypes rather than an objective assessment of true
merit”
According to the briefs filed before the supreme court, presumably with a straight face, the three benefits that can only be obtained through going to diverse schools are:
- Learning how to make friends with blacks and hispanics, because they are so different than whites and asian that making friends with them is so different than the process of making friends with whites and asians. This is obviously not true and pretextual. Everyone like respectful, kind and friendly people regardless of race.
- Learning that black and hispanics can have good ideas too. All non-racists already know this.
- Black and hispanics can be good employees too. All non racists already know this. An"objective assesment of true merit" is much easier when all races are treated the same by schools so that hiring managers know that if a person was good enough to get into a quality school they did it on their own merit, and not because the school wanted them to create diversity to help the other students.
Be nice to others, even if they are a different race can be written on the walls of a classroom and everyone will then achieve the benefits of a diverse education without the need to discriminate.
I’ve heard that a lack of educational diversity also contributes to an inability or unwillingness to accurately synthesize complex written materials, but I don’t have any, like, examples of that.
Puddleglum,
It’s really very simple.
- people from different backgrounds and races have different cultures.
- people feel more comfortable around those whose culture they are are familiar with. Since they know how to interpret the actions and statements of those people, and in turn know how their actions and statements will be interpreted.
- While it is not as black and white as you facetiously suggest, those who don’t have exposure to alternative cultures will tend to assume that everyone is exactly the same background as they do. When they encounter someone with a different background, they may misinterpret the responses of this person as rude, misguided, threatening, etc. Often leading to bigotry against that type.
- This recognition of alternative world views is best developed at an early age when the child’s own view to the world is forming.
Therefore it is best for a child to have as diverse exposure to different world views as possible.
Here’s just one example, out of an infinite number of ways diversity can be helpful and necessary.
I’ve had quite a bit of exposure to Native American culture (one aspect of it, it varies from tribe to tribe and geographically). I’ve spent time on reservations, in peoples’ living rooms, at weddings and at funerals. I’ve learned things that go beyond “Everyone like respectful, kind and friendly people regardless of race.” There would be many times if I acted like in a manner I thought was “respectful, kind and friendly” I would have made people very uncomfortable. Did you know, for example, on the Res it’s considered impolite to get out of your car upon arrival at someone’s house and knock on the door? How would you know that? The custom is to wait a few minutes so people have time to see you’ve arrived and get themselves or their house “in order.”
There are many other things I learned that help me be a better lawyer to native people, help them understand the the legal process, and make them feel more comfortable and empowered. In doing so, I think I’ve also learned to be a better lawyer to everyone else too. As a lawyer, I need people to trust me, understand me, and feel like they are understood as well. I may have thought I was doing this by “being nice and respectful” but I would never have achieved as much as I could have by getting a deeper exposure to their culture and experiences. To a greater or lessor extent, the same would be true to other professions and other minority groups. Not knowing what we don’t know never serves us well.
I think it absolutely makes sense to ask those questions. The point I’m making is that major newspapers, civil rights groups, and the like seem to very schizophrenic in the matter; in some situations they ask why quite forcefully, while in other situations they appear to ignore the matter.
In all the years that I spent studying math at the university level, I don’t recall ever meeting a black math professor or graduate student. I’m not saying that they don’t exist, but clearly they’re rather thin on the ground. Moreover, the situation seems to be pretty similar in computer science, physics, and any other hard science you’d care to name. I attended Harvey Mudd College, a top-ranked science and engineering school which is currently one percent black. Other top science schools are in the same ballpark. So clearly the world of science and technology is one where Blacks are grossly underrepresented.
By all logic, if racial diversity is vitally important, then I’d expect to encounter a vast amount of discussion about the lack of diversity in the technical fields and a vast number of proposals to address it. But I don’t. In the particular case of the technical fields, everyone seems content to not notice the issue. Yet, at the same time, I encounter vast numbers of editorials, articles, books, lawsuits, and so forth concerning issues of racial diversity in other areas. The question is, why so much noise about racial diversity in some places and silence about racial diversity in other places?
I work in a technical field and I can tell you that the lack of racial and (perhaps even more so) gender diversity in the workforce and at technical universities is considered extremely important, and many initiatives have been created and implemented to address it.
Here is a discussion from 2013 at IEEE about it: http://www.todaysengineer.org/2013/Apr/career-focus.asp
One of the big impediments I have seen first-hand is exactly the viewpoint you have been presenting here. White male engineers just don’t seem to understand why having a diverse workforce would matter in a technical area: either the design works or it doesn’t and the race or gender of the person creating it doesn’t really matter. I think they are being somewhat short-sighting with that viewpoint, but it certainly is prevalent.
This is a different question from the question in the OP.
Racial diversity is important because we tend to group by appearance (among other things) and “races” have an average externally evident appearance. Yet we live in a heterogeneous society. When there is an absence of racial diversity, two things occur. The first is that a self-propagating divisiveness is generated. The represented group is going to incline (even inadvertently) toward structuring process and opportunity in the direction of how that group does things, making it even harder for an under represented group to have opportunity. The second thing that occurs is resentment. We do not choose our appearance. If the grouping into which that appearance sorts us seems itself to be a primary barrier for success, that perception of unfairness is a substantial block to harmony in a heterogeneous society.
As to your current question, I think the answer is that we as a society (and to some extent this is mirrored the world over) tackle the tackle-able things. So far we haven’t done well smoothing out the disproportionate representations in sprinting, the NBA and any of the STEM/medicine/law fields where a minimal, quantifiable standard is the only accepted litmus test for qualification. In those sorts of fields, rather than focus on outcomes, those of us interested in promoting diversity do focus on extending special efforts to get underrepresented “races” to a position where the minimal standard can be met. Any diminution of the “noise” level around the lack of success may be a tacit acceptance that those efforts are real and substantial, even if they have not produced a high number of successes to date. I don’t think you’d get much noise level generated about lack of asian proportionate success in the NBA for the same reason: it’s hard to argue that asians aren’t allowed to participate in the pathway to get there, or that the pathway itself is not open to all who want to take a shot at their hoop dreams.
Tabs on the XLs break down individual PhD categories.
I read the Washington Post and the New York Times and occasionally stop by Slate, Salon, Kos, and other liberal websites. My summary of how liberals think about these issues is based on what I read there. I read a whole lot of hand-wringing about racial diversity in particular areas, most notably college admissions. Also some hand-wring about racial diversity among corporate executives, in Hollywood and a few other places. But I don’t see much hand-wringing about racial diversity in other places, such as the U.S. Senate, elite private elementary schools, math and hard science departments, &c… Now obviously I don’t read every single editorial that gets published so there may have been some hand-wringing about these topics that I missed. But based on what I do read, that’s what I’ve found.
That doesn’t appear to make a whole of sense. The status quo until recently in cities like Washington DC is that the public school system is overwhelmingly black while private schools are overwhelmingly white. In 2001, Black students in DC public schools outnumbered whites by almost 20-to-1; compare that to the numbers for the elite private schools listed in the OP. Looks like racial and economic segregation to me.
A voucher scheme would give some poor families a chance to send their kids to private schools. This would obviously reduce economic segregation. Given the close ties between race and wealth, it would also give more blacks and chance to attend private schools currently dominated by whites. Thus vouchers would reduce segregation.
Empirically, here’s what the data show:
Private schools participating in Cleveland’s voucher program were 18 points less segregated than Cleveland public schools on the segregation index, which compares the racial composition of schools to the racial composition of school-age children in the greater metropolitan area. … This confirms the findings of previous research in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Washington D.C. that private schools participating in voucher programs are substantially less segregated than public schools in the same cities.
Indeed, if liberals really wanted to increase kids’ exposure to racial diversity, they ought to embrace voucher programs.
This is an entirely different argument. As a child I knew a couple of Indians and never knew about it being rude to knock on their doors or even that teepees had doors you could knock on. The only way to know that is to experience that. You didn’t find that out by sitting next to an Indian child while learning math. Going out and experiencing different cultures is a valuable thing to do. You don’t experience a culture by letting a couple of members of that culture into the same classroom. When I was a teenager my family hosted Spanish kids as part of an exchange program. The knowledge I gained about Spanish culture was they think our food is of poor quality and mostly suck at basketball. And that was actually living with someone from a different culture, not just going to the same school.
If a business wants to sell to a subculture they need to find being who know that subculture not people who sat next to members of that subculture in school.
If anyone isn’t convinced of the importance of diversity after these arguments against it, I don’t know what it’ll take.
Your mention of sprinting and the NBA is interesting. Here is a challenge for people who think diversity is important. Pick a sport that has a fantasy league, draft two teams, one that is race sensitive and has spots reserved for people of each race and one that is race neutral and just takes the best person available regardless of race. Which team do you think would win?
Which one has more Eskimos?
The issue is understanding, not consumption. For the record it’s easy to find the Times writing about gender or racial diversity in Congress, not that the Times is the voice of the far left. And I didn’t have any trouble using Google to find people writing about racial diversity in the sciences, and I’ve seen tons of pieces over the years about about the lack of women in Silicon Valley and the gender politics of videogaming. Nobody covers everything, and I don’t know if you’ll find all of these issues covered even if you check out a passel of left-leaning sites. But it’s not like nobody is saying these things. Why you assumed liberals aren’t interested in them is a question best left to the observer.
That’s what it is. So are we turning this into a school voucher argument now? All of a sudden your focus has narrowed a great deal.
You seem to make a different argument every other post, with little acknowledgement of what came before.
Of course you do. More importantly, there’s more to diversity than helping white people.
That’s one word I would definitely not use.
I am surprised at the question.
The places where no one appears to be asking the questions are the places that are already monocultural and the people there are comfortable in their surroundings. Nothing prompts them to ask the question simply because they see their surroundings as “reality” and they do not challenge it. Why would that be surprising?
An analogy occurs on this board every election cycle. Any number of posters on the Left and on the Right go on at great length about the inevitability of “their side” winning the election, even when all the facts indicate that their side is going to lose. Most of those posters live in situations in which their friends and those relatives with whom they associate all think as they do and they cannot conceive of “reality” differing from those views. It does not occur to people who live in homogeneous groups that there are any sizable number of people with seriously different viewpoints. Thus, right up until the second week of November, 2004, we saw posters assuring us that Bush was going to be out on his ear and right up until the second week of November, 2012, we saw posters insisting that Obama was going to be crushed at the polls.
People tend to believe that the like-minded people around them are the reality of the world, so white- and male- dominated STEM careers are filled with people who do not even recognize the lack of diversity in their surroundings as odd, much less as an issue to be addressed.
If the world itself wasn’t a diverse place, I guess I could see why creating diversity for the sake of diversity in the educational environment would be seen as unnecessary. But the world is an incredibly diverse place, and it’s only becoming more so.
I think it’s important for kids to experience being the “only one” at least once in their lives. Whether it be being the only white kid on the basketball team or the only guy on the cheerleading team. If you’ve never experienced the “minority experience” then I’ve gotta imagine it’s really hard to understand what minorities go through sometimes. And it’s one of those things that should be experienced when one is young rather than old. I’ve worked with folks who experienced the minority experience late in life, and they seem to have a harder time with it.
I had a coworker named Chuck a few years back. A white guy, close to my age. He’d gone to integrated schools his whole life, and it showed because he was so comfortable around me and the Hispanic guys we worked with. He played basketball in high school–one of the few white guys on his team. The two of us would exchange lines from The Color Purple while we were out in the field together. Politically, he was one of the most conservative people I’d ever met at that point in my life. But he was still totally cool. I wouldn’t vote for him if he ran for president. But I’d recommend him to other Republicans for sure.
In contrast, I work with a guy now who–based on where he grew up–I can tell he didn’t go to school with very many black people. Used to be every time he talked to me in a social way, he’d have to mention something “black people” related…as if I walk around with a “ASK A BLACK PERSON!” sign on my forehead. He’d tell me about all the black chicks on TV he thinks are hot, apropos of nothing. His joking-around humor was always racial, but not in a funny way. He still works with me, but I’m using past tense because he doesn’t come by my office anymore. Why? Because he thought he was being funny about two months ago. He wasn’t. And this time I didn’t fake laugh. Through gritted teeth I told him to leave my office. Poor baby. Hasn’t been around sense. Maybe if he had grown up around black people, black people wouldn’t be such a damn novelty to him that he can’t act like a normal person around us. And guess what? He’s pretty liberal. I’d trade him for a million Chucks any day.