… the false theory of progress, which maintains that we

alter the test instead of trying to pass the test.

—G. K. Chesterton

Last month, the Bush administration announced that it was filing

legal briefs to challenge the University of Michigan’s policy of

using race as a factor in deciding who gets admitted to its

undergraduate program and its law school. President Bush

described Michigan’s policy as a disguised quota system which

violated the Constitutional right to equal protection.

Predictably, the administration’s initiative sparked an orgy of

hand-wringing in

the liberal establishment. “The Bush

administration sacrificed truth for political gain” and sought to

“appease its right-wing supporters,” thundered an editorial in

The New York Times. “The administration should start leveling

with the American people about race, and it should stop trying to

turn back the clock.”

It seemed to us the Bush Administration was being admirably

straightforward. In

its admissions policy, the University of

Michigan employed the Orwellian principle that all applicants are

equal, but some are more equal than others; it did this to be

sure of admitting a predetermined proportion of black students.

It looks like a quota system; it acts like a quota system; it is,

in fact, a quota system.

But according to the editors of the Times, Bush used the

term “quota” to scare people and achieve its nefarious ends.

“The administration has fixed on the word ‘quota’ because it has

long been political kryptonite. Pollsters know that many

Americans who say they favor ‘affirmative action’ flip sides

when asked about ‘racial quotas.’”

Let’s suppose that “many Americans” do respond to these phrases

the way that the Times suggests they do. What does that tell

us? We think it is a testament to the mendacious cleverness of

the phrase “affirmative action.” Pollsters discovered people

didn’t like that practice when it went under the name of quotas,

so the politically correct establishment came up with a more

pleasing euphemism. What, after all, does “affirmative action”

really mean? It means “discrimination on the basis of race, sex,

or some other agreed-upon attribute.” What do you suppose the

pollsters would discover if, instead of asking whether people

favored “affirmative action,” they asked “Do you favor

discrimination on the basis of race?” That is the issue here,

and, adopting the high dudgeon of our Paper of Record, we believe

that the Times should stop sacrificing truth to political

expediency and attempting to appease its left-wing supporters and

“start leveling with the American people about race.” The Times

wants a certain percentage of its favorite minorities

(or, in the

case of women, its favorite majorities) installed … well,

everywhere. If that doesn’t happen naturally, through

the

meritocratic process of competition, the Times wants it imposed

by fiat.

And as for “turning back the clock,” we believe that the

racialist assumptions behind “affirmative action” belong to the

ash-heap of discredited efforts at social engineering. For the

last decade or so, the racialist juggernaut of affirmative action

has proceeded under the aegis of “diversity.”

We offer two observations about this contemporary mantra. In the

first place—although it seems decidedly heterodox to admit

this—it is by no means clear that “diversity” is always and

everywhere a good to which we should aspire. If diversity is in

some situations a desideratum, in other situations unanimity or

oneness is worth pursuing. In Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,

his devastating answer to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, James

Fitzjames Stephen noted

that by confounding the proposition that

“variety is good with the proposition that goodness is various,”

Mill’s teaching tended to encourage a shallow worship of mere

variety, diversity for its own sake with no regard for value of

the specific “diversities” being celebrated. That same

shallowness is fostered by the cult of “affirmative action.”

Secondly, if diversity is sometimes and in some circumstances a

quality worth cultivating, it should be responsible

intellectual diversity, real diversity of opinion and outlook,

not the spurious diversity of skin color. The last time we

looked, many of the court houses in the United States featured

statues of Justice, blindfolded and holding a pair of scales.

The idea—need we say it?—was that true justice is impartial: it

is blind to the accidents of individual status, social or ethnic

origin, sex, and wealth. True justice begins not by awarding

extra points to someone because he is black, or rich, or socially

prominent. It judges the case according to its merits—how novel

that sounds to our ears!—by attempting to apply the law equally

to all who come before it. By making a fetish of spurious

diversity, the partisans of affirmative action help perpetuate

the double standard they pretend to oppose. Isn’t it time that

liberals woke up to this fact?