Stand-by for the weekly apology for racial quotas.
"Wal-Mart really didn't do as well with minority audiences as they should have done, or liked to have done," Higham explained in "people and product," a news industry publication. "But the result of making a very strong commitment, over a decade, has made an extraordinary difference, to the point that Wal-Mart (now) dramatically over-indexes among minorities."
One of the keys to that success, in this most hard-edged of U.S. businesses, was Wal-Mart's decision to seek advice from two ethnic minority advertising agencies: E. Morris Communications of Chicago, which handled Wal-Mart's African-American ads, and Lopez-Negrete of Houston, which did its Hispanic ad work.
The writer finds a anecdotal evidence to re-enforce his prejudices.
But Higham's Wal-Mart story runs smack up against a very different kind of advice on the value of diversity, from Peter Schwartz of the Ayn Rand Institute.
The villain!
In a recent piece offered to newspaper op-ed pages, Schwartz attacked the notion "that people have worthwhile views to express because of their ethnicity." He savaged the idea "that `diversity' enables us to encounter `black ideas,' `Hispanic ideas,' etc." "What could be more repulsively racist than that?" Schwartz asked.
How dare Schwartz say people are people, when voting blocks are the key to political power!
Now back to the hero.
But, he recalled, "My personal experience did not prepare me for understanding our minority customers as I would have liked. I thought it did, but the process of working with wonderful, committed advertising professionals, particularly with our (minority-run) agencies, opened my mind to just how little I knew."
For instance . . .He doesn't have any specifics. But let's just take it on face value.
I haven't lived my life as a black person. I can learn a lot from those who have. African Americans' encounter with life has been different from mine, precisely because of race. And because it has, we bring different life experiences to the process of choosing, researching, editing and displaying stories.
Ah, being black is not an attribute but an experience.
Schwartz expresses a fundamental faith of conservatives when he rejects diversity as an appropriate goal for society, and when he rejects the explanations of academics who support diversity on campus.
He sneers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty newsletter for saying that students gain "enrichment from the differences in viewpoint of minorities." He scorns the University of Michigan president who says that ensuring diversity "is the only way to prepare students to live and work effectively in our diverse democracy and in the global economy."
Schwarts scorns and sneers and rejects, but does minority enrollment at MIT have to do with a black owned advertising agencies?
Schwartz believes that pro-diversity thinking is "exactly the premise held by the South's slave-owners and by the Nazis' Storm Troopers. They too believed that an individual's thoughts and actions are determined by his racial heritage."
But isn't that what slave owners and storm troopers thought?
He seems to miss something fairly fundamental: The obvious fact that one's life experience does make a difference. But he is not alone. His mindset is the wood in the door against which diversity advocates have been battering for decades. What's interesting to me is that the best case in support of diversity -- the best evidence that it is useful -- is not found in the brie and chardonnay salons of the liberal left, but in the marketplace.
How does the writer's evidence get us here? Because an ex-Walmart employee used a minority run advertising agency, we should open our college doors to students that aren't ready for that level of work? Is the market speaking that? Couldn't a minority run advertising agency be run by people who graduated from colleges that accepted them for color blind reasons?
This is a clever apology of diversity for diversity sake, but it doesn’t take into consideration that it fosters the same racism that it purportedly tries to resolve. If people at a University only meet the kinds of minorities that couldn’t make it without their race, they are bound to see minorities continually struggle to keep up. Won’t that tend to foster the idea that minorities are inferior? And does it help a minority to struggle through college for some grand experiment?
And his argument that race gives people a different life experience may have some validity, but can’t other factors be even more decisive? Does a rich kid like Jesse Jackson Jr. have a much different experience than rich kid, Al Gore Jr.? Do you think Bill Clinton at ten years old would have experienced the same things as Gore and Jackson at ten years? Even simpler, does a city black kid have the same experiences that a country black kid has? You could go down this road forever. There are plenty of factors that can be more decisive than race and ethnicity. But there aren’t any political gains to be made from differentiating city and country kids?
This kind of unfairness assuages white liberal guilt and builds a constituency of people who think that government giveaways are the only way they can make it in the world.
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