You’ve probably heard about those rascals around the country selling cookies on college campuses according to race and gender. It’s a clever way to make a statement about how we treat some groups differently. Southern Methodist University shut down a similar bake sale yesterday, because it created a “potentially unsafe situation.” There was some shouting it says.
"This was not an issue about free speech," Tim Moore, director of the SMU student center, said in a story for today's edition of The Dallas Morning News. "It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created."
If speech didn’t cause a hostile environment once in a while it wouldn’t need to be protected. In fact, closing the bake sale proved the point better than the bake sale itself. Who would have had the guts to close down a “diversity” bake sale? Only diversity of opinion scares people anymore.
"My reaction was disgust because of the ignorance of some SMU students," said Houston, who is black. "They were arguing that affirmative action was solely based on race. It's not based on race. It's based on bringing a diverse community to a certain organization."
I love this current argument about “bringing a diverse community to a certain organization." That’s the best spin I have ever heard. How can the argument that diversity helps an organization be supported? Is there an aggregate measurable benefit other than fewer lawsuits? The minorities that go to these schools usually segregate themselves anyway reducing any theorized benefit. "Bringing a diverse community. . . " sounds like typical white guilt for the sins of our forefathers rinsed out in the sink and made anew with a catchy pronouncement.
Affirmative Action really stems from a lofty notion that some people are too inferior to compete without special considerations. It’s always masked in a “society is to blame” statement, but that’s so progressive racists can feel good about their racism. What happens to the minorities that earned their way into college or the workforce by merit? They’re many times suspected of the kid glove treatment and looked on with a degree of skepticism.
The people who pat themselves on the back for supporting diversity probably still wonder when they see a minority in power if they actually earned it. It's easy for do-gooders to support it in general, but how many people are happy when they come face to face with it? Losing a job, a promotion or a spot in the Michigan Law School can make anyone wonder if politics caused their misfortune. Today’s institutionalized racism can just as easily come from the policies that were supposed to eradicate racism. We're chasing our tails by creating more of what we're "trying" to eliminate.
Why have a Martin Luther King Day if we’re not going to judge people as individuals? Why hold Dr. King up as the gold standard if his words about a colorblind society are inconvenient to modern wisdom? We’d be better to honor Al Sharpton’s birthday. He's a better advocate for today's thinking anyway.
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