“Diversity” is key to many disputes in this culture, but never more so than in what the word means.
It is diverse meanings of the same words given to them by different people that creates the confusion: to various people, “diversity,” “rights,” “civil rights” and “social justice” all mean something different, and mean something wholly opposed.
To conservatives, “civil rights” means bypassing race and bestowing rights to individual people. To liberals, it means stressing race more than ever, and giving rights largely to groups.
To social conservatives, only people have rights, and you cannot atone for a wrong done a person of one race in the past by giving favors today to someone quite different who fits his description.
To social liberals, a race (or a sex) is an organic unit, and a wrong done to one person in it can be avenged by favor done to another, even if they are generations apart, and the favor comes at the expense of a third person, who is an aggrieved and an innocent party himself.
To liberals, affirmative action erases a wrong, as the race is avenged, if not the original victim. To a conservative, it compounds the damage, as injustice is now done to two individuals, while the wrongs of the past stay unchanged.
Liberals think civil rights should be measured by outcomes, which sometimes are rigged, as the intent supplies the morality. Conservatives think that this tampers with justice and thus is immoral, and that civil rights consists of removing obstructions, and then letting people find their own way.
Racialists and minority racists find this too slow and too spotty, and tinker with rules to get a quick – and fixed – outcome. Conservatives say this is unfair to the people who are hurt by the state in the process, and point to the unforced integration of Catholics, Jews, and white ethnic minorities as proof this works out over time.
There are also mistakes over the meaning of terms such as “racist,” “racialist,” and “race neutral” (and/or color blind), as people on all sides of this conflict fling the term “racist” around.
A racist sees people in terms of their color, thinks his is superior, and feels contempt for those not in his cohort. A racialist thinks race defines people, but bears no ill will toward others.
One who is race-neutral (or tries to be) sees race as something that describes people but does not define them, such as ethnicity (being Irish, as opposed to Italian or German), or having brown eyes or red hair.
David Duke and Jeremiah Wright are racists. Harry Byrd and Strom Thurmond are recovering racists. Judge Sonia Sotomayor is not a racist, but she is race-conscious, (as are many in the political culture she comes from), as Newt Gingrich realized when he came to his senses. But many conservatives make the same kind of slip.
Conversely, many liberals call conservatives racists, as they see this as the only reason they can be cool to group remedies, as did Al Gore once in a hysterical rant to a black congregation, when he compared people who call themselves color-blind to hunters in a duck blind, lying in wait for their victims with guns.
Conservatives would be wise to use the Sotomayor nomination as the chance to lay out their case against the race-conscious, as a) polls show that the public supports them, and b) they can back the liberal racialists into a box.
Why are liberal women and non-whites above critiques of all manner, while liberals are free to attack non-whites and women who aren”t? Why are white men the only ones granted freedom of conscience?
Does “diversity” extend to minorities who are ideologically “diverse” within these minorities? And if “diversity” mandates political sameness, how can it then be “diverse?”
As a Latina who has been poor, would Sotomayer rather be judged by Linda Chavez and Illeana Ros-Laeten, with their middle-class lives and “rich” lode of experience, or by John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, and Edward M. Kennedy, with their millions, white skin, and inherited privilege?
They should control their surprise when she picks the rich men.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
