If Not Diversity, Then What?

It’s not just that history is written by the victors, but that there are winners and losers in history. Whether it was a war or vote, colonization by a group with superior power or a culture dying on its own, someone prevails. That someone ends up better off than the other someone. It may not be “fair,” but it’s history. And life goes on from there.

At The Atlantic, Kimberly Reyes writes one of the more clear and compelling arguments in favor of reparations rather than diversity, using critical race theory as her vehicle. The tone is well set by her opening anecdote.

I was a 16-year-old student at the Bronx High School of Science, scribbling Concrete Blonde lyrics at my desk, when my English teacher abruptly called on me, without a heads-up or any preparation, to explain my thoughts on the word nigger in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Truth be told, I didn’t have an opinion, at least not a sophisticated, nuanced one, because I was a teenager reading Twain for the first time. I was there to learn like everyone else. But suddenly, as one of two black students in the class, I was expected to enhance the learning experiences of my mostly white counterparts. I’ll never forget the terrifying and confusing feeling of going from a part of the classroom to a classroom accessory.

If the justification for affirmative action was diversity, as has been upheld by the Supreme Court in Bakke and its progeny, her complaint would ring hollow. After all, she brought a different perspective to the classroom as one of two black students. When asked to provide her perspective, she didn’t merely come up empty, but was offended.

It’s understandable that she had nothing to offer. It’s a heavy burden to put on a 16-year-old, and not having thought about it, how was she supposed to know? But what she did know, or knows now and imputes to her 16-year-old self, is that she was not a “classroom accessory,” there to enhance the learning experience of others.

This is a trope of critical race theory, recognizing one’s burden while tacitly ignoring the fact that everyone in the class is there to enhance the learning experience of each other. Yes, it was a burden on her. So too was every question asked of every student a burden, and sometimes she was the sideshow, sometimes the main event. Just as any student enjoys the benefit of learning from any other student, she was there to contribute to the experience of the entire class like everyone else. She felt “othered”? She was. So was the Chinese kid, the disabled kid, and gay kid.

But not the white “normal” kid, because there has to be a normal, by definition, and it wasn’t Reyes.

In its reasoning, the Court suggested that the point of affirmative action was to foster a more varied classroom environment for “leaders,” thus shifting the intended beneficiary of the program from the historically discriminated against to the nation that had discriminated against them. And who are these “leaders”? The future, Powell implied, perhaps without realizing it, depends on white students’ exposure to the supposedly unique ideas and mores that qualified minorities should offer.

The Court didn’t “suggest” this, but held that diversity was the only rationale for affirmative action that passed constitutional muster. Much as critical race theory would reject this notion, twist it so that “token” blacks would be there to expose “leader” whites to their “unique ideas,” the Equal Protection Clause cut both ways. If it prohibited arbitrarily favoring whites, then it also prohibited arbitrarily favoring blacks. Diversity was the difference, that there was an identifiable benefit for all involved in the spreading of ideas, of experiences, that would benefit society.

But as Reyes argues, it’s just a “white man’s” excuse to paper over the historic harms.

Amnesia, defensiveness, and a lack of focus on any one issue as many of us scramble to address the current, nonstop assault on progressive values. What’s the practical solution? I’d rather publicly dissect Twain than pretend I can solve an almost insurmountable problem I didn’t create; I just know that not having a proper conversation about the purpose of affirmative action is dangerous. And there have been ideas percolating around restorative justice and reparations for a long time.

The real purpose, she contends, is reparations. The status that white people enjoy was built upon the backs of others, even though we deny our privilege and believe that we worked for it, we earned it. While we may have “earned” that top rung of the ladder, we started halfway up the ladder while others had to start at the bottom. That was a free climb for us at their expense.

Somehow, advantages of this sort are often invisible to the general public. And if they’re made visible, the most coddled people in American society tend to get their feelings hurt—and insist on their self-worth.

It’s not that she’s wrong to argue that there are “coddled” people in America. But are you? Am I? Did our ancestors get off the Mayflower? Did every black person’s ancestors get off a slave ship? How do we calculate reparations? Who owes? Who is owed? How much? And what happens when they get paid and invest poorly? What happens when you pay and are now hungry?

The problem isn’t that people’s feelings get hurt, although denigrating one’s opposition is very much a part of the trope, that no one disagrees with critical race theory and reparations except whiners who only care about keeping their privilege. The problem is that all of history is built upon winners and losers, majority and minority, what eventually becomes our “normal” must necessarily be premised on something, and it’s never been, or going to be, the outlier. Tails don’t wag dogs.

Most of us want very much to move beyond America’s “original sin” of slavery. Most of us want a society that offers equality. But this isn’t reparations, but opportunities. History has already been written, for better or worse, but the future has not. We can’t undo slavery, but we can compel equal opportunity. It may not be satisfying, but there is no other practical solution.

If Not Diversity, Then What? curated from Simple Justice