‘Good’ Racism?

For the past few months, Amherst College has been embroiled in an escalating debate over the value of diversity. Before a special referendum was held late last semester, the student government’s constitution contained a provision for “diversity senators” to serve in the student government. Conservative students objected to the notion of granting so-called diversity seats to groups that “feel their community’s voice has been silenced.” The parsing of diversity is all too often skin deep, and the conservatives at Amherst understood that these seats were devised with certain groups in mind, namely groups defined by race and sexual preference. Accordingly, the conservatives adopted a radical approach in order to illustrate the hypocrisy of the left and explicate the connection between diversity seats and the logic of determinism: they sought a conservative diversity seat.

Of the 1,600 undergraduates at Amherst, nearly 100 are members of the College Republicans, the foremost conservative group on campus. There is currently only one registered Republican on this year’s faculty (and she teaches Greek). Conservatives on campus are harassed, are hesitant to present their views in class for fear of reprisal from their professors and classmates and have even been victims of physical violence because of their orientation. If the preceding sentence had begun with “African-Americans” instead of “conservatives” there undoubtedly would be stirrings of national outrage. However, when an ideological minority is silenced, even at an institution supposedly committed to fostering different intellectual views like Amherst, such repression is belittled and ignored.

Mistreated as they are, conservatives were confident that they could make a strong case for obtaining a diversity seat, and they applied. The liberals who dominate the student government (as well as the campus) were thrust into the uncomfortable position of having to eat their own words. Apparently it wasn’t too difficult; the senate denied the conservatives a diversity seat but recognized senators for Latino, Asian, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender and international students. During the Senate’s debate, senators berated conservative speakers for their audacity. Some justified their stance by saying that one’s political ideology had less to do with personal identity than one’s race or sexual preference. It’s unfortunate that the language used to deny conservative students a diversity senator was so steeped in racism.

One would hope that our society has evolved beyond the point where anyone would argue that there exists in an individual qualities that can be imputed as a result of his or her race. To justify the placement of a value—positive or negative—on a person based on skin color or sexual orientation requires resorting to the flawed logic of determinism. According to this paradigm, a person exists first not as an individual, but rather as a member of a homogeneous group, and exhibits specific characteristics directly as a result of this categorization.

This odious notion of racial or sexual determinism is the primary source of conservatives’ objections to diversity senators, as well as to the larger idea of “diversity” as an inherent social good. The assumption that a black person (or white for that matter) has a certain social value, simply because of his or her skin color, is patently racist. If, for example, a black family were denied access to a “restricted” community because it was believed that their moving in would detract from the social value, we would immediately denounce such a racially motivated policy. Why then should the response be so different when the argument is made in the reverse: that a black person—any black person, regardless of merit or capacity—is an organizational asset?

To say that Hispanics, Asians, gays and foreigners need their own senate seat is also a paternalist slap in the face to those students; it assumes that they need special treatment in order to achieve. Can’t a gay man run on his own merit? Or a Hispanic woman? Of course. For the most part, preferential diversity seats aside, Amherst is a fair place. The Amherst student government is composed of individuals who ran for election and were voted into office on their own individual merit. The student senate may think that it is leveling some phantasmal playing field, but equality cannot be achieved through unequal treatment.

Diversity seats have less to do with ensuring that all voices are heard than with assuring that the political deck is stacked to favor the leftist majority. To the liberals, diversity deals with the existence of certain visceral qualities and has little to do with individual character. Amherst should pride itself on being a marketplace of ideas—an academy in the classic sense that fosters diversity of thought—not merely a colorful microcosm that highlights different shades of black and tan.

Some might find irony in the fact that schools that once discriminated against blacks and gays now take pride in discriminating for racial and sexual minorities, but we are not laughing. This “diversity” movement is the kindler, gentler Social Darwinism of the left, operating on the flawed assumption that a person’s thoughts and beliefs can be ascertained by knowing the color of his or her skin or the sex of the person to whom he or she is attracted. More than two generations after the fall of Jim Crow and almost forty full years since Dr. King wished for the day that character would triumph over color, the left still doesn’t get it.

Grant T. Mandsager is the communications director and Theodore S. Hertzberg is the chair of the Amherst College Republicans.