March 13, 2003

Sometime ago I drove by a church in my community that had placed a cloth banner over the traditional sign that gave the name of the church and the times of their services.

The sign read: Celebrating Diversity

I thought that was interesting only because I had not seen any positive benefits from "Celebrating Diversity," other than some people feeling good about it.

More recently I drove by this same church and noticed that the banner had been removed and a new permanent sign had been set in place stating their mission: celebrating diversity.

I love celebrations. I know what celebrating life is all about. I know what celebrating Christmas and the Resurrection is all about. There are so many things in life that we celebrate.

What is so compelling about "celebrating diversity" that a church would make this their single mission statement to the public?

If we look into the matter, we find that a major cultural transformation that actually started in the 1970's became rooted in the 1990's. I recently found an article by Dr. Frederick R. Lynch introducing me to diversity's dubious origins and a new book that I will mention later. I have substantially relied on the article by Dr. Lynch for this column.

Those in the business world ignored the restless progress of a powerful political and social movement that has steadily institutionalized it's ideas in law and social policy.

The increasingly influential networks demanding diversity and multiculturalism were too long dismissed by conservatives as not a big deal.

By the mid-nineties, this major cultural transformation was well underway. Business leaders and politicians were chanting "diversity is our strength."

And - absent any early protest or criticism "goals and time tables and other quasi-quotas in hiring and selection have become taken-for-granted practices."

I recently became aware of a book written by Boston University anthropologist Peter Wood entitled, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept.

The key message of Wood's book is: ideas count. He states up front that, "Diversity is not about fine tuning American society ... a way of tweaking equality and liberty to achieve more equality or greater liberty. It is, rather, a brand new thing, a principle that aims at no less than transforming American society through and through. Wood says, "The principle of diversity represents an attempt to alter the root cultural assumptions on which society is based."

The "diversiphile" revolutionaries, as he calls them, are not concerned with real, complex social and cultural diversity and with a long-standing anthropological tradition of observing, comparing, and judging very real and sometimes troubling cultural differences - such as the practice of female circumcision in some Muslim societies. Instead they are captivated by an artificial, uncritical, "celebrating of differences" along only two dimensions: race and gender. Their legal and political agenda is to both legitimate and achieve ethnic-gender proportional representation throughout society: in schools, universities, the work place, government, the civic establishment, religious institutions, the arts, etc.

In 1978, Justice Lewis Powell, in his ruling in a discrimination lawsuit brought by would-be medical student Alan Bakke against the University of California, suggested that states have a compelling interest in ethnically diverse instructors. Achieving this with obvious racial quotas was illegal; but race could be a "plus factor" in selective procedures. Powell's decision legalizing racial "pluses" to achieve diversity was given added impetus with overstated projections of massive demographic change and the rise of "minority majority" in America.

Along with Powell's Supreme Court diversity decision, regulatory threats and exaggerated demographics, Wood's "diversiphiles" began their long march through the institutions.

Has this movement succeeded?

Wood says that there is no evidence that diversity works. He demonstrates that these "diversiphiles" have:

• Increased social discord and cultural decline.
• Contributed significantly to failing educational performance and lowered academic standards.
• Undermined love of country.
• Trivialized art.
• Made certain forms of racism respectable again.

Wood says, "Diversity is both disappearing and indelible. It is close enough to mere fashion that it might go out of fashion, but now is so indispensable to American party politics, so rooted in the marketing practices of American business, so overwritten into government regulations and so tenderly looked after by higher education that it cannot simply vanish."

Perhaps Dr. Wood's book can help to reduce their pretentious claims and reduce self proclaimed powers.

I have some ideas for the local church that do, in fact, make a positive difference.

I highly recommend this book. ::Read More