Conservatives sometimes respond to liberal calls for racial diversity in the classroom with their own demands for political diversity. This sort of stuff is usually stupid in my opinion-you are winning tractical battles but ceding the grand strategic war, Pyrrhic victories all. But that begs the larger question, what sort of diversity is important and crucial for young people as they find their places in the world?
What sort of identity do people care about? Racial nationalists, religious fundamentalists and political radicals can give easy answers, but most people are more ambivelant, or more complex, depending on how you look at it [1]. I know many people who associate only with people of their own race, but also of their own political orientation. There are many liberals who I meet who are shocked by some of my views, and totally surprised by my “facts” (don’t you know it is well known that there is more racism in America today than a generation ago? :)). Similarly, as a conservative with an interest in religion in American life, I interact sometimes with right-leaning Christians. When I tell them I am an atheist, they often shocked that I don’t have two horns, not only do they never talk to atheists (especially one that’s pretty well read on religious topics and scripture for a lay person), they tend not to brush shoulders with more liberal Christians influenced by modernist thinking. They listen to Christian-rap, read Christian books and go to Christian schools.
I do think diversity is good. People should go out and look for places where they can establish dialogue and exchange ideas with people they disagree with, this is very healthy for a liberal society. On the other hand, I’m a little skeptical that this is going to happen in for instance medical school, I have friends who are medical students, and I can tell you that they are too busy working their asses off to give too much thought to enriching the lives of their fellow students with extra-clinical banter [2]. To take the medical student example further, the racial diversity of their classmates almost certainly matters less than the racial diversity of their patients. If you take the argument that you need minority doctors to treat minorities since they will be better suited to this, can’t you flip it around and ask if all the Asian medical students aren’t giving sub-standard care to all the non-Asians they will be treating? Perhaps we should try to reduce the number of people of Asian ancestry among the doctors-to-be, and especially the obscene overrepresentation of brown kids in medical school seeing as how they form less than 1% of the patient population.
In any case, as someone with no religious affiliation, little racial pride and lukewarm political loyalties (registered Republican, libertarian when I’m an idealist, not-so-libertarian when I’m a realist, but generally satisfied with the fact that the modern West has vigorous politics)-I really can’t offer much here. If you take the mainstream-Left + some-on-the-Right contention that diversity is important cross-sectionally in social institutions as an end, what should we start weighing besides race? Should we make sure evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics are well represented at Ivy League universities (Pat Buchanan has suggested this!)? Southerners at northern universities? Republicans at Oberlin? Conservatives in the media? Liberals in the oil industry (liberals buy gas too!)?
I’m more inclined toward allowing individuals and local groups make decisions about how much diversity they want in my life. But right now, the top-down view that major social institutions have to manage and massage diversity in a command fashion is ascendent, so I’m curious how far we’ll go here….
[1] We all know about racist wacks and religious nutsos, but we tend not to think about ideological fanatics as much anymore-Communists, Fascists, etc. come to mind-but on a milder note, what about people like Grover Norquist? I bring up Norquist because I agree a lot with his idea of the “Leave us Alone Coalition,” but his recent clashes with other conservatives over his assocations with Muslim groups seem to hinge on the fact that for him politics overrules other identifications. Many Christian conservatives are Christians first, conservatives only later-so close ties with Muslim groups are distastefull to them. Norquist on the other hand is willing to deal with some rather peculiar people who seem to be the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Defamation League or NAACP, they have roles, but are generally a little too high-strung for some of their more moderate supporters.
[2] Medical students probably talk mostly about medicine after all-there is little discussion of religion, politics, etc. from what I know about them. This happens in many fields of work and study-people talk about what they have in common, not what separates them. Big surprise!
Comments are closed.