But Who’s Counting?

A reader recommended this article by Jim Sollisch, a creative director at an advertising agency, from the Christian Science Monitor, and a good recommendation it was. Read the whole thing, but meanwhile here’s an excerpt:

My wife’s daughter Kaley just graduated from Cleveland Heights High School, a fine school in one of America’s best inner-ring suburbs. She’s our third child to graduate from Heights High. During the first two graduations, I found myself engaged in an odd activity, best described as counting.

The sentimentalists among you will assume I was counting my blessings. And we, as a family, have many to count. The parents of overachievers will assume I was counting the honors my children have won and calculating their place in the academic hierarchy. Nope. I was counting the numbers of whites, blacks, and Jews receiving diplomas….

It’s a conditioned response to sending your white, Jewish children to large public schools that are predominantly black. Conditioned by neighbors who are planning to move to a community with “better” schools. By empty nesters who wonder what happened to the schools they sent their children to. By the local media who mention the racial makeup of the schools every chance they get….

And so we all count, wondering where the tipping point is amid an influx of low-income black families. Many middle- and upper-middle-class families, both black and white, flee the schools early on. Others keep their kids in the elementary and middle schools, where there’s more racial balance, then bail out at ninth grade.

Many of my white friends who have kept their children in the schools are self-described liberals who desperately want to be colorblind but find themselves counting, like a tic, against their will….

Mr. Sollisch goes on to discuss some of “the many rewards our kids have received from experiencing minority status,” the main one of which was “getting to know black culture.”

They certainly got to know black American culture. Unlike their counterparts in mostly white suburbs, our kids know that black culture is far from monolithic. Blacks are as diverse as whites. (And by extension, I hope our children have learned that the same is true of every minority group). They come in all the same shades of rich and poor, artsy and athletic, religious and nonreligious, nerdy and cool, gay and straight, with collars that are white and blue.

This idea, that blacks aren’t a homogenous group, seems so obvious. But for most whites who’ve led segregated lives, it’s something they understand only intellectually, which is to say they don’t understand it very well at all.

The article is well-written, sensitive, humane, humorous in places. I recommend it. But when I read the above implicitly self-congratulatory passage I could almost imagine the bumper sticker: “My child is a sensitive, diverse student at Cleveland Heights High School!”

I also was struck by the similarity of the above argument (and make no mistake; it is an argument) for “diversity” to the argument for double standards in university admissions to promote the “diversity” said to be essential for the white students who otherwise would not be exposed to the “diverse” blacks and Hispanics. Even more specifically, it is similar to the University of Michigan’s argument that it was essential to admit not just some blacks, i.e., the number who would have been admitted without preferences, but a “critical mass” of blacks, enough so that whites could experience the “diversity” among blacks themselves.

As I’ve pointed out before on more than one occasion, what Michigan did, and would still do if the citizens of Michigan hadn’t put a stop to it, is deny admission to a bunch of whites and Asians who would have been admitted under a race-neutral, colorblind policy so that other, more fortunate whites and Asians could be exposed to the “diversity” offered by the preferentially admitted minorities who would not have been admitted under that race-neutral, colorblind policy.

But wait a minute. The benefits to his children of learning about black culture, etc., that Mr. Sollisch describes so well occurred in a high school that is “predominantly black (the high school is 80/20 with a tiny fraction of Jews).” At Michigan, by contrast, the “critical mass” of minorities admitted every year hovered right around 12% or so (but of course was not a dreaded “quota”). By the logic of Michigan’s defense of “diversity,” confirmed by the experience of Mr. Sollisch’s white/Jewish children at 80% black Cleveland Heights High School, the white/Asian students at universities like Michigan were and are being seriously deprived, since a paltry 12% or thereabouts of minority students is not nearly large enough to reveal to the non-minorities how “diverse” minorities really are.

Since Michigan et. al. obviously have no principled objection to denying admission to some whites/Asians in order to provide the benefits of “diversity” to other whites/Asians, and since they believe these benefits are essential to a good education, universities that really are committed to “diversity” should expand their “critical mass,” “goals,” or “targets” (certainly not “quotas,” which none of them would ever have) to the 75%–80% range, which would provide the even more elite and fortunate whites/Asians who remained with an even better education, like the one received by Mr. Sollisch’s children at Cleveland Heights High.