Source: Originally published in American Renaissance, July-August Issue, 1997

The Myth of Diversity

Seldom have so many pretended to believe something so absurd

by Jared Taylor

The idea that "diversity" is one of the country's great strengths is now so firmly rooted that virtually anyone can evoke it, praise it, and wallow in it without fear of contradiction. It has become one of the great unassailably American ideas, like democracy, patriotism, the family, or Martin Luther King.

The President of the United States glories in diversity. In May, 1995, in a message recognizing the Mexican holiday, Cinco de Mayo, William Clinton said, "The Fifth of May offers all of us a chance to celebrate the cultural diversity that helps to make our nation great." A few days later, when he designated May as Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, he said, "With the strength of our diversity and a continued commitment to the ideal of freedom, all Americans will share in the blessings of the bright future that awaits us." In his 1996 speech accepting the nomination for President, he asked the audience to look around the hall and take heart in how varied the Democratic party was.

In his 1996 Columbus Day proclamation, he said, "The expedition that Columbus . . . began more than 500 years ago, continues today as we experience and celebrate the vibrant influences of varied civilizations, not only from Europe, but also from around the world. America is stronger because of this diversity, and the democracy we cherish flourishes in the great mosaic we have created since 1492."

Appeals to diversity are not just for domestic consumption. In a 1996 speech before the Australian parliament, President Clinton noted that both the United States and Australia were becoming increasingly diverse, and added, "And, yes, we [Australia and America] can prove that free societies can embrace the economic and social changes, and the ethnic, racial and religious diversity this new era brings and come out stronger and freer than ever."

Hillary Clinton feels the same way. In February, 1995, she spoke to the students of her former high school in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. She noticed there were many more non-whites among the students than when she was a student, 30 years earlier. "We didn't have the wonderful diversity of people that you have here today," said Mrs. Clinton. "I'm sad we didn't have it, because it would have been a great value, as I'm sure you will discover."

Diversity has clearly become one of those orotund, high-sounding sentiments with which politicians lard their speeches. Of course, the idea that diversity--at least of the kind that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton are promoting--is a great advantage for America is one of the most obviously stupid propositions ever to see the light of day.

Nevertheless there is one kind of diversity that is an advantage. A contractor, for example, cannot build houses if he hires only electricians. He needs carpenters, plumbers, etc.--a diverse work force. However, functional diversity of this kind is not what the Chief Executive is on about. He is talking about largely non-functional differences like race, language, age, sex, culture and even whether someone is homosexual. One might call this status diversity.

What advantages would a contractor get from a mixed work force of that kind? None. What are the advantages the United States gets from a racially mixed population? None.

The idea that status diversity is a strength is not merely a myth, but a particularly transparent one. Explaining why diversity is bad for a country is a little like explaining why cholera is bad for it; the trick is to understand how anyone could possibly think it was good.

In fact, diversity became a strength after the fact. It became necessary to believe in it because skepticism would be "racist." Otherwise intelligent people began to mouth nonsense about diversity only because of the blinding power of the race taboo. After diversity began to include sex, mental disabilities, perversions, and everything else that was alien or outlandish, to disbelieve in the power of diversity was to show oneself to be "intolerant" as well as "racist."

Of course it is only white societies--and white groups within multi-racial societies--that are ever fooled by guff about diversity. Everyone else recognizes the Clinton-Harvard-New York Times brand of diversity for exactly what it is: weakness, dissension, and self-destruction.

Immigration

Despite President Clinton's view that "diversity" started with Columbus, for most of its history the United States was self-consciously homogeneous. In 1787, in the second of The Federalist Papers, John Jay gave thanks that "Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs . . . ."

This is not exactly a celebration of diversity, nor was Jay an eccentric. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson were all explicit about wanting the United States to be a white country, and in 1790 the first federal naturalization law required that applicants for citizenship be "free white persons." Until 1965, it was very difficult for non-whites to immigrate to the United States and become citizens (an exception being made for the descendants of slaves). Immigration law was explicitly designed to keep the United States a white nation with a white majority. It was only in the 1950s and 60s that the country turned its back on nearly 200 years of traditional thinking about race and began its long march down the road to nowhere.

Once the country made the fatal assumption that race was a trivial human distinction, all else had to follow. Congress abolished not only Jim Crow and legal segregation but, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, put an end to free association as well. The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965, which abolished national origins quotas and opened immigration to all nations, was a grand gesture of anti-racism, a kind of civil rights law for the entire world.

As has been pointed out in such books as Lawrence Auster's The Path to National Suicide and Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation, the backers of the immigration bill were at pains to explain that it would have little effect on the country. "Under the proposed bill," explained Senator Edward Kennedy, "the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. Secondly, the ethnic mix will not be upset. Contrary to charges in some quarters, it will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area." The senator suggested that, at most, 62,000 people a year might immigrate.

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law, he also downplayed its impact: "This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or power."

The point here is not that the backers were wrong about the bill--even though in 1996, for example, there were a record 1,300,000 naturalizations and perhaps 90 percent of the new citizens were non-white. The point is that "diversity" of the kind that immigration is now said to bless us with was never even hinted at as one of the law's benefits.

No one dreamed that in just 20 years ten percent of the entire population of El Salvador would have moved to the United States or that millions of mostly Hispanic and Asian immigrants would threaten to reduce whites to a racial minority in California by 1998. In 1965, before the discovery that "diversity is our strength," most people would have been shocked by the thought of such population changes.

Today, the intellectual climate is different, but in entirely predictable ways. "Racism" looms ever larger as the greatest moral offense a white person can commit, and anyone who opposes the arrival of yet more non-whites cannot but be "racist." There is therefore no longer any moral basis for opposing the prospect of minority status for whites, and what would have been an unthinkable prospect before 1965 must now be seen as an exciting opportunity. Thus did diversity become a "strength," despite the suspension of disbelief required to think it so.

This is a perfect example of an assertion, for purely ideological reasons, of something obviously untrue. Like the equality of the races, the equivalence of the sexes, the unimportance of heredity, the normalcy of homosexuality, and the insignificance of physical or mental handicap, the strength of diversity is one of a whole series of monstrous absurdities on which liberalism depends.

Having started with race, diversity now includes just about anything. Feminists, angry people in wheel chairs, AIDS carriers, militant homosexuals, and people who would rather speak Spanish than English have all taken much of their style and impetus from the civil rights movement. Demands for "inclusiveness" almost always include the language of grievance and compensation pioneered by blacks. Fat people fight discrimination, ugly people struggle against "lookism," and at least one local government has required that the stage set for a strip tease show be wheel-chair accessible. Anyone who opposes the glorification of the alien, the abnormal, and the inferior can be denounced with much fanfare and a huge sense of superiority. The metastasis of diversity is a fascinating story, but the disease began with race.

Occasionally a mainstream author sniffs around the edges of the population problem. At some risk to his professional respectability, columnist Scott McConnell of the New York Post has pointed out that if it will be such a good thing for whites to become a minority, there is no reason to wait until the next century. We could throw open the borders right now and become a minority in just a few years. "Why deny ourselves and our children the great benefits of Third Worldism that we are planning for our grandchildren?" he asks.

Advantages of Diversity

On those rare occasions when people actually attempt to defend diversity, the one claim they make with any semblance of conviction is that its advantages will become evident as the world becomes more "international." It will be a great thing to have citizens from all around the world as nations have more and more contact; specifically, our "international" population will boost American exports. Of course, since this view is based on the assumption that people communicate better with people like themselves, it is an argument against national diversity. If it takes a Korean to deal with the Koreans, how are Americans supposed to get along with the Koreans who live in America?

If anyone really thought a diverse population is good for trade, we would presumably be adjusting the mix of immigrants in accordance with trade potential. There would be no point in admitting Haitians, for example, since Haiti is a pesthole and never likely to be an important trade partner. After Canada, Japan is our largest trading partner. Does this mean we need more Japanese? No one ever talks about immigration this way, because no one really believes immigration has anything to do with promoting exports.

The example of Japan in fact shows just how little racial diversity has to do with international trade. Japan is one of the most racially homogeneous nations in the world. By American standards, Japanese are hopeless "racists," "homophobes," "sexists," and "nativists." They even eat whales. Here is a country that should therefore be a complete failure in the international economy--and yet it is probably the most successful trading nation on earth.

Taiwan and Korea are close behind, with China now recording huge trade surpluses with the United States. These countries are even more closed and exclusionist than Japan. If they could ever be made to understand the American notion of diversity, Asians would politely wait until we had left the room and then die laughing. Germany is likewise one of the world's great exporting nations. Who would dream of thinking this was due to the presence of Turkish Gastarbeiter.

The fact that millions of Mexicans now live in the United States does not make our products more attractive to anybody--certainly not to Mexico, which already has plenty of the things Mexicans know how to make. "Diversity" adds exactly nothing to our international competitiveness.

Racial diversity is also supposed to bring cultural enrichment, but what are its real achievements? The culture of ordinary Americans remains almost completely untouched by the millions of non-white immigrants who have arrived since 1965. Perhaps they have now heard of the Cinco de Mayo festival, but even if they live in California or Texas how many Americans know that it commemorates a Mexican military victory against the French?

Immigrants do not teach us about Cervantes or Borges or Lady Murasaki and it would be silly to think they did. Chinese stowaways do not arrive with a curator's knowledge of Ming ceramics and copies of the Tao-te Ching in their pockets. The one cultural artifact immigrants bring with them is their language--which increasingly becomes an Americanized farrago that would astonish their countrymen--but the so-called "culture" of immigrant settlements is a tangle of peasant folkways, Coca-Cola, food stamps, T-shirts with writing on them, and truculence.

High culture and world history cross borders by themselves. Who in America first learned of Tchaikovsky or the Mayans from an immigrant? Nearly every good-sized American city has an opera company but it wasn't established by Italians.

What, in the way of authentic culture have Miami's dwindling non-Hispanic whites gained from the fact that the city is now nearly 70 percent Hispanic? Are the art galleries, concerts, museums, and literature of Los Angeles improved by the fact that its population is now nearly half Hispanic? How has the culture of Washington, D.C. or Detroit been enriched by majority-black populations? If immigration and diversity bring cultural enrichment, why is that the places being the most intensively enriched are the places where whites least want to live? Like the trade argument, the "cultural enrichment" argument collapses with a pinprick.

It is true that since 1965 more American school children have begun to study Spanish, but fewer now study French, German, or Latin. How is this an improvement? People can, of course, study any language they want without filling the country with immigrants. Virtually all Norwegians speak excellent English, but the country is not swarming with Englishmen.

Any discussion of the real advantages of ethnic diversity usually manages to establish only one benefit people really care about: good ethnic restaurants. Probably not even William Clinton would claim that getting an authentic Thai restaurant in every city is a major national objective.

Public Services

At a different level, it is now taken for granted that public services like fire and police departments should employ people of different races. The theory is that it is better to have black or Hispanic officers patrolling black or Hispanic neighborhoods. Here do we not have an example of one of diversity's benefits?

On the contrary, this is merely the first proof that diversity is a horrible burden. If all across America it has been demonstrated that whites cannot police non-whites or put out their fires it only shows how divisive diversity really is. The racial mix of a police force--touted as one of the wonders of diversity--becomes necessary only because officers of one race and citizens of another are unable to work together. The diversity that is claimed as a triumph is necessary only because diversity does not work.

The same is true of every other effort to diversify public services. If Hispanic judges and prosecutors must be recruited for the justice system it means whites are incapable of dispassionate justice. If non-white teachers are necessary "role models" for non-white children it means that inspiration cannot cross racial lines. If newspapers must hire non-white reporters in order to satisfy non-white readers it means people cannot write acceptable news for people of other races. If blacks demand black television newscasters and weathermen, it means they want to get information from their own people. If majority-minority voting districts must be set up so that non-whites can elect representatives of their own race, it means that elections are nothing more than a racial headcount. All such efforts at diversity are not expressions of the inherent strength of multi-racialism; they are admissions that it is a debilitating source of tension, hostility, and weakness.

Just as the advantages of diversity disappear upon examination, its disadvantages are many and obvious. Once a fire department or police force has been diversified to match the surrounding community, does it work better? Not if we are to judge from the never-ending racial wrangles over promotions, class-action bias law suits, reverse discrimination cases, acrimony over quotas and affirmative action, and the proliferation of racially exclusive professional organizations. Every good-sized police department in the country has a black officers' association devoted to explicit, racially competitive objectives. In large cities, there are associations for Asian, Hispanic, and even white officers.

Many government agencies and private companies hire professional "diversity managers" to help handle mixed work forces. This is a new profession, which did not exist before the idea that diversity is a strength. Most of it boils down to trying to bridge the gaps between people who do not understand each other, but since it concerns subjects about which management is afraid to ask too many questions, some of it is pure snake oil.

Maria Riefler has trained Nestle, Walt Disney, Chrysler and Chevron. She likes to divide employees into groups that represent the body and the "triune brain." This is supposed to help them understand how "stereotypes are hidden deep within the primitive part of ourselves."

It is a very peculiar "strength" that requires the constant attention of experts and other bumcombe artists. Like hiring black police officers to patrol black neighborhoods, "diversity training" is an admission that a mixed work force is a liability.

This is the merest common sense; it is hard to get dissimilar people to work together. Indeed, a large-scale survey called the National Study of the Changing Work force found that more than half of all workers said they preferred to work with people who were not only the same race as themselves, but were the same sex and had the same level of education. Even more probably felt that way but were afraid to say so.

These days there is much chirping about how diversity is going to improve profits. American companies are hard-headed about profits. A great deal of research, much of it quantitative, goes into decisions about product lines, new markets, establishing joint ventures, issuing stock or moving the head office. If there has been any serious research showing that "diversity" improves profits it would have been first-page news long ago. Not even the most desperate data massage seems to have produced a study that can make such a claim.

Just how big a headache diversity actually is for companies is clear from the endless stream of news stories about corporate racial discrimination. In just one month--November, 1996--"diversity" made quite a lot of news. Texaco agreed to spend $176 million on black victims of company "racism," and lawyers for the firm that sued Texaco were getting about ten calls a day from people asking how to file for discrimination settlements. Just a few days later, 22 former employees of the nation's largest printing company, R.R. Donnelley and Sons, sued over what they claimed was $500 million worth of racism.

In the same month, both the U.S. State Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms settled multi-million dollar class action discrimination suits brought by blacks. Likewise in November, three blacks brought a class action suit against an Avis Rent-A-Car franchise with outlets in North and South Carolina, claiming they had been turned away because of race. Within the month, the owner of Avis said it would break its contract with the franchisee, and hired a law firm to check up on other Avis operators. Every one of these cases, which are expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally damaging, is a consequence of racial diversity--and these were just the cases that made the news.

It would be edifying to count the number of public and private organizations that exist in the United States only because of its diverse population, and that are not needed in places like Japan or Norway. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Office of Federal Contract Compliance, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, and every state and local equivalents of these offices exist only because of racial diversity. Every government office, every university, every large corporation, and every military installation has employees working full-time on affirmative action, discrimination claims, and other "diversity" issues.

Countless outreach programs, reconciliation commissions, blue-ribbon panels, and mayoral commissions fret professionally about race every day. Not one of these would be necessary in a nation of a single race. There must be tens of thousands of Americans consuming hundreds of millions of dollars every year enforcing, adjusting, tuning, regulating, and talking pure nonsense about the racial diversity that is supposed to be our strength.

Indeed, Tom McClintock, a former candidate for controller of the state of California estimated that before the 1996 state ballot initiative was approved to abolish racial preferences, the annual cost just to administer California's affirmative action programs was from $343 million to $677 million. This figure did not include the cost of private preference programs or the cost of state and local anti-discrimination machinery, none of which was affected by the 1996 measure.

If diversity were a strength people would practice it spontaneously. It wouldn't require constant cheer-leading or expensive lawsuits. If diversity were enriching, people would seek it out. It is in private gatherings not governed by some kind of "civil-rights" law that Americans show just how much strength and enrichment they find in diversity. Such gatherings are usually the very opposite of diverse.

Other Races

Generally speaking, whatever timid opposition to diversity that ever arises is characterized as the whining of resentful, ignorant whites. Non-whites are thought to have a better appreciation of the importance of inclusiveness. This is just so much more nonsense. Now that immigration has added Hispanics and Asians to the traditional black-white racial mix, fault lines are forming in all directions.

Though we are told over and over that it is ignorance and lack of contact that cause antipathy, it is groups that have the most contact that most dislike each other. This is why "outreach" and "bridge building" do not work, as even the New York Times unintentionally revealed in a June 18, 1990 headline: "Ethnic Feuding Divides Parade for Harmony."

The idea that hostility is cured through contact is now enshrined as part of the diversity myth. George Orwell touched on this in his essay, England Your England:

"During the war of 1914-1918 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired."