Diversity with only Face Value
The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision this week limiting race as a factor in school integration plans. The sky-is-falling, old school civil rights crowd who still thinks this is 1957 and not 2007, is yelling about how the clock is being turned back on civil rights and the usual blather. First of all, the court did not say you could not use race, but merely put some limits on it. As one Justice said, “you can’t beat discrimination with discrimination.” I personally find it offensive for Black people to say the only way Black children can learn is if they go to school with white children.
I am all for diversity in the classroom, but the way the “old school” crowd wants diversity is to just put a black face next to a white face and call it a day. I argue true diversity comes from differing opinions. And you get different opinions from different people from different backgrounds, and it’s not just race.
One of my best friends is a white guy from Kansas. We attended college together and were amazed at how much we had in common. But had the “old school” crowd put us together in the classroom they would have been happy with “diversity” because was white with long hair and I was black with a jerri curl. Never mind the fact we had similar views on the major issues of the day.
On the reverse, my cousin who grew up a few blocks from me in Chicago is the biggest tree-hugging, Birkenstock- wearing, vegetarian-eating, Black Panther-partying person you will ever find and we have nothing in common. But there is more diversity between the two of us than Martin Luther King, Jr. and David Duke.
The point of this is simple, we should have diverse, integrated schools. But true diversity comes from thought, opinion and perspective, not just race. It is a fallacy to think that you would get diversity simply because you put different people of different races in the same classroom. That kind of diversity only has face value and it’s worthless.
