Doubling Down on Diversity

Consider this post a correlate of the previous post about the woke left’s willingness to countenance political violence. Like Daniel Greenfield, Samuel Abrams sees the origin of this anti-American rhetoric in the academy. He notes, after Andrew Sullivan, that we all live on campus now. 

Marxist critical race theories have escaped the confines of he academy and have now become de rigueur across the nation.

This means that corporate America is now promoting critical race theory. Tech titans are all in with wokery. And the American military has recently felt obliged to support woke theories.

Abrams explains:

But what happens on our college and university campuses is anything but confined to the ivory tower or irrelevant. The omnipresent ideas that have seeded and informed the problematic anti-racist rhetoric and the tactics of bullying, canceling, and silencing others come directly from our campuses and now dangerously pervade into the zeitgeist to such a degree that Andrew Sullivan famously wrote in 2018 that, “We All Live on Campus Now.”

From private companies like Coca-Cola asking employees to be “less white” or Ogilvy’s diversity and inclusion team pushing books by Angela Davis or Howard Zinn as part of its initiative to promote a “more equal and just world,” it is obvious that the “woke mob” has escaped the confines of our nation’s campuses and the narratives of harm and victimization have spread into the real world.

The oppression narrative is on the march. We should also see that this is also a revolution narrative, one that is designed to foment violence against the purported privileged few, that is, against white and Asian Americans itself.

It’s time to talk about what is going on in lecture halls and around seminar tables; namely what is being taught and by whom in campus that continues to seed the ideas behind the mobs. While administrators have been at the forefront of executing a woke agenda, the intellectual groundwork for the dangerous ideas come from the faculty and their teaching and research.

The Marxist left has been proselytizing its narratives through critical race theory.

Although methodologies and critical approaches come and go, what is particularly dangerous here is that CRT is not just purely an academic, ivory tower approach to scholarly questions, it is a worldview that now advocates for activism and social change in the guise of being purely academic such that now many professors proudly call themselves scholar-activists with their own, ironically, colonial or imperial ambitions

In principle, these theories are designed to overcome system racism. In truth, they seem more to have to do with affirmative action programs and diversity quotas.

Having chosen to ignore standardized testing, and having admitted students who cannot compete against their classmates, the universities have discovered that the only possible explanation for the disparities is racism. So, let’s double down on failure. You recall that two Georgetown law school professors lost their jobs because they dared mention that black students were consistent underperformers:

Viewing people as members of narrow and simplistic racial groupings foolishly suggests that one should be defined by race and little more. This is an absurd way to understand people and the human condition, dividing us rather than unifying us and finding common ground based on shared humanity and history. This is the antithesis of what the academy should be teaching, which include the values of intellectual diversity and social inclusion.

Noble sentiments, indeed. As of now, it’s going to take more than sentiments. Unfortunately, universities and even corporations are doubling down on failed policies. To cure a problem caused by diversity quotas they are instituting more diversity quotas.

Curb your optimism.