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Title: Diversity Perversity
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URL Source: http://www.lewrockwell.com/williams-w/w-williams77.1.html
Published: Apr 9, 2011
Author: Walter E. Williams
Post Date: 2011-04-09 10:41:48 by christine
Keywords: None
Views: 235
Comments: 12
The terms affirmative action, equal representation, preferential treatment and quotas just don't sell well. The intellectual elite and their media, government and corporate enthusiasts have come up with diversity, a seemingly benign term that's a cover for racially discriminatory policy. They call for college campuses, corporate offices and government agencies to "look like America." Part of looking like America means if blacks are 13 percent of the population, they should be 13 percent of college students and professors, corporate managers and government employees. Behind this vision of justice is the silly notion that but for the fact of discrimination, we'd be distributed equally by race across incomes, education, occupations and other outcomes. There is absolutely no evidence that statistical proportionality is the norm anywhere on Earth; however, much of our thinking, laws and public policy is based upon proportionality being the norm. Let's look at some racial differences whilst thinking about their causes and possible remedies. While 13 percent of our population, blacks are 80 percent of professional basketball players and 65 percent of professional football players and are the highest paid players in both sports. By contrast, blacks are only 2 percent of NHL's professional ice hockey players. There is no racial diversity in basketball, football and ice hockey. They come nowhere close to "looking like America." Even in terms of sports achievement, racial diversity is absent. Four out of the five highest career home-run hitters were black. Since blacks entered the major leagues, of the eight times more than 100 bases were stolen in a season, all were by blacks. The U.S. Department of Justice recently ordered Dayton, Ohio's police department to lower its written exam passing scores so as to have more blacks on its police force. What should Attorney General Eric Holder do about the lack of diversity in sports? Why don't the intellectual elite protest? Could it be that the owners of these multi-billion-dollar professional basketball, football and baseball teams are pro-black while those of the NHL and major industries are racists unwilling to put blacks in highly paid positions? There's one ethnic diversity issue completely swept under the rug. Jewish Americans are less than 3 percent of our population and only two-tenths of 1 percent of the world's population. Yet between 1901 and 2010, Jews were 35 percent of American Nobel Laureate winners and 22 percent of the world's. If the diversity gang sees underrepresentation as "probative" of racial discrimination, what do they propose we do about overrepresentation? Because if one race is overrepresented, it might mean they're taking away what rightfully belongs to another race. There are other representation issues to which we might give some attention with an eye to corrective public policy. Asians routinely get the highest scores on the math portion of the SAT while blacks get the lowest. Men are 50 percent of the population and so are women; yet men are struck by lightning six times as often as women. The population statistics for South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana and Vermont show that not even 1 percent of their populations is black. On the other hand, in states such as Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, blacks are overrepresented in terms of their percentages in the general population. There are many international examples of disproportionality. For example, during the 1960s, the Chinese minority in Malaysia received more university degrees than the Malay majority – including 400 engineering degrees compared with four for the Malays, even though Malays dominate the country politically. In Brazil's state of Sao Paulo, more than two-thirds of the potatoes and 90 percent of the tomatoes produced were produced by people of Japanese ancestry. The bottom line is there no evidence anywhere that but for discrimination, people would be divided according to their percentages in the population in any activity. Diversity is an elitist term used to give respectability to acts and policy that would otherwise be deemed as racism.
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#4. To: christine (#0)
To understand the current state of affairs for the racial perspective, I believe, education needs to be looked at, as does the importance of trauma events during early childhood. Here's a post about a recent documentary with a good look (not exhaustive nor complete) I made on CL: Waiting for Superman (2010) < 58andfixed > 04/09 00:05:18 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/ Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim reminds us that education "statistics" have names: Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily, whose stories make up the engrossing foundation of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN. As he follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth, Guggenheim undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying "drop-out factories" and "academic sinkholes," methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems. **** The American public school system is in crisis, failing millions of students, producing as many drop-outs as graduates, and threatening our economic future. By 2020, the United States will have 123 million high-skill jobs to fill—and fewer than 50 million Americans qualified to fill them. Educators, parents, political leaders, business people, and concerned citizens are determined to save our educational system. Waiting for "Superman" offers powerful insights from some of those at the leading edge of educational innovation, including Bill and Melinda Gates, Michelle Rhee, Geoffrey Canada, and more. Waiting for "Superman" is an inspiring call for reform and includes special chapters that provide resources, ideas, and hands-on suggestions for improving the schools in your own community as well as throughout the nation. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Waiting-for-SUPERMAN/Karl- Weber/e/9781586489274 http://sfbay.craigslist.org/forums/?ID=186733732
Interesting material, 58. While watching the trailer the obvious struck me; kids with concerned INTACT families have a shot at breaking the poverty cycle. Unfortunately in Washington, DC, app. 70% of school aged kids are being raised by a female, as their biological father is gone and government has taken his place. Fix the broken black family, sans a new government program, and perhaps some progress can begin.
Exactly. In the 50's when blacks were making their move toward equality less than 30% were raised out of wedlock or in broken families. Welfare was not instituted in the black community for their benefit it was instituted to do exactly what it did - make it financially rewarding to have children out of wedlock. Welfare, then and now, penalizes intact nuclear families. Combine that with the intentional dumbing down of skools and the full extent of the program, and it is a program, starts becoming evident. Destroy families reward non-production geld education inflame differences through unfair practices and justify it by calling it "diversity" What you wind up with is a dysfunctional society, and it now extends well beyond just blacks. It has simply been at work on them longer as in the early years of the "Great Society" it was much easier for blacks to get welfare than for whites, and I believe that was intentional. Oh, and make it harder to get higher eduction through increasing costs. At one time college students could get food stamps but that was made against the rules. Thus making it harder for poor kids working their way through school to do it without going into massive debt. When I was teenager looking at college you could, if you had a skill like welding, make enough in the summer to support yourself through the school year and pay tuition and books. That is no longer possible due to increased costs and taxes.
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#5. To: 58andfixed, 4 (#4)
#9. To: Jethro Tull (#5)
Fix the broken black family, sans a new government program, and perhaps some progress can begin.
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