House of Eratosthenes

Three black lesbians work for you. One of them quits, and you hire a straight white guy to take her place. Did you increase the “diversity” of your work force?

We can all probably agree that the mathematician will always say yes, and that the politician will always say no. But in our society, mathematicians don’t talk too much about the D-Word. When we hear about it, we hear about it from politicians and advocacy groups — always as a good thing, but always as something toward which straight white guys can’t contribute. Seldom, if ever, does a situation arise where the politicans are forced to admit this. But it’s true. Diversity is good, white guys aren’t part of it. So the word “Diversity,” when you look objectively at how it is used today, and take all factors into account, is used to legitimize discrimination. For those of you who believe having exclusionary thoughts toward a particular race might constitute a hate crime, the D-word is also used to legitimize hate crimes.

But our prevailing sensibilities, especially way up in the ivory towers, compel us to look upon diversity — political diversity, not the hard mathematical concept which would claim straight white guys as legitimate members — as a wonderful thing. It is so good, that if you happen to hold a position of any authority, and you are caught failing to unreservedly embrace it, you should be driven from your post. The Supreme Court’s Grutter v. Bollinger decision, as well as others, define “diversity” as a “compelling state interest” capable of making constitutional, things that otherwise would not be. You can read that opinion here. But keep in mind: The mathematician says straight six-foot-tall white guys can contribute to this objective, the politician says they can’t. The politician makes the rules.

What’s fascinated me about this ever since I can remember, is that people down in the trenches who do the actual work, side unfailingly with the mathematician. And they also agree on something else: Diversity, as a goal for hiring and other similar things, doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with outcome; it has much more to do with freedom, and fidelity to hiring the best people possible regardless of racial background. You hire ten white guys, or ten hispanic amputee homosexual this-or-that — it doesn’t matter, as long as while you were hiring them, you were unwaveringly faithful to the objective of hiring the best people you could. Reasonable people of both left-wing and right-wing persuasions agree that this is what we really want when we use the D-word, so long as those people are low enough in our society that they have to do some real work. It seems once you’re high enough to actually decide things, you often avoid the consequences of those things being decided haphazardly, and start to lose sight of what’s “diverse” and what isn’t.

Sometimes when we suffer this confusion, we aren’t talking about hiring or acceptance practices, but disasters. Frederick Studemann, or one of this editors, appears to be suffering from this misperception of what “diversity” is and what it really means. His piece in the Financial Times of London alerts us to something meaningful about the bombings in London that took place on Thursday: The victimization is diverse.

…collectively the faces staring from newspaper pages, television screens or posters stuck to the walls near blast sites reflect one of the defining characteristics of the British capital: its remarkable cultural diversity.

Mister Studemann, your article falls short of informing us whether this is something to be bemoaned, celebrated, or simply noted for future reference, but I really don’t care which it is: This is sick. I’m just racking my brain here, trying to come up with some train of thought which would conclude you’ve commented on something newsworthy here in any way. It’s not that I’m failing to come up with anything because I do have a handful of ideas. But they all make me want to barf in my mouth a little.

Perhaps the most legitimate one — and this is like being the most honorable prostitute — is the argument that, by bombing London, the terrorists were striking out at the notion that people of dissimilar backgrounds should be allowed to work together. This is an augmentation to whatever collective set of reasons we should have, for striking back at them:

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, said the bombers wanted �to divide this city because of its easy-going, multi-cultural mix. The fact that people work together and live together is an affront to them�.

Let me see if I can recap. In addition to killing completely innocent civilians, who were doing nothing more provocative than simply going about their daily lives, to make a political statement, which is not terribly polite — the terrorists have commited a surplus crime against humanity through their failure to embrace diversity. Therefore, we’d should start treating this as a real problem.

I hope I missed something. Isn’t the value of a life with yellow skin, or black skin, or white skin, red skin, purple skin, all equal? Don’t we all have the same right to go about our business, reasonably free of any fear of being blown up? If that is so, then, what do we care about the diversity or lack thereof? I really would like to know.

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Oh, Then We’d Better Treat It As A Real ProblemMonday, July 11th, 2005

Oh, Then We’d Better Treat It As A Real Problem
Monday, July 11th, 2005