A Dull Diversity

This year’s freshmen are the most racially and economically diverse first-year students ever. One-fifth are Asian, one-tenth Hispanic, another tenth black. Two-thirds receive financial aid. To highlight this variety, the Freshman Dean’s Office tomorrow will hold “Community Conversations”—discussions in which freshmen will “situate [themselves] within this diversity.”

This is superficial diversity. If freshmen resemble their elders—four-fifths of whom voted for President Barack H. Obama—most lean left. Diverse backgrounds do not necessarily mean diverse perspectives. Unfortunately, the readings the FDO has assigned—specifically those by Beverly Tatum, president of Spelman College, Frank Wu, a professor at Howard University, and Felice Yeskel, co-founder of Class Action—reinforce this misconception. The authors offer different experiences but identical conclusions: Groups define individuals.

Tatum, for instance, praises a white man for recognizing the “inescapability of his privilege” over blacks. When her son asks her how they—middle-class African-Americans—are underprivileged compared to working-class whites, she tells him, “‘as a young black male, you are underrepresented, and that is a different kind of disadvantage.’” Her assumption that blacks’ representation must match their percentage of the population strips individuals of the ability to make their own choices.

For example, though blacks are 13 percent of the national population, they are less than one percent of Montana’s population. They can move there if they wish. But “to ‘level the playing field,’ should we bus blacks into the state?” asked Walter Williams, a professor of economics at George Mason University. “I damn sure don’t want to go to Montana.”

Wu commits a similar error. He condemns comparing Asians, who earn higher incomes than whites, to blacks, who earn lower incomes, because “Asian Americans and African Americans have different group histories.” But later, he concludes, “[I]t is foolish to believe all Asian Americans are anything—except perhaps individuals.”

His essay is a lesson in cognitive dissonance. “He quickly comes to the defense of affirmative action, which is based on group preferences,” said Ward Connerly, former regent of the University of California. “Why then does he discount this classification when talking about Asians?”

Because it hurts the case for discrimination. Japanese-Americans, who lived in internment camps in the 1940s, earned as much as whites by 1959; their experience suggests that discrimination is less of a barrier, that race is less of a determinant of individual well being, and that political power is less of an antidote to societal ills than is frequently thought.

Instead, culture may be more of a determinant than race. Williams explained: “If you look at West Indian Americans, they are slightly more represented among professionals than Americans in general—yet they were enslaved. Does a racist employer care whether an African-American’s ancestors came from the West Indies?”

Culture also may be more important than class. In her essay, Yeskel warns, “Economic class is much less fluid than most people think.” She notes, “The richest one percent of the population now have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.” But she assumes that people stay in these statistical groupings for life. In fact, individuals move. A study by the University of Michigan found that only five percent of families in the bottom quintile in 1975 were still there in 1991.

Discrimination is tough to overcome and poverty is hard to escape, but race and class are not the determinants of individual well being the authors portray them to be. Freshmen should not presume that because their peers look different, they think differently too. Diversity—the intellectual kind—is a rarity. And students should strive for it tomorrow by questioning the authors’ assumptions. Otherwise, the only thing they will situate themselves in is intellectual complacency.


Brian J. Bolduc ‘10, a Crimson editorial editor, is an economics concentrator in Winthrop House.