...Fifty-five years ago this month, on an otherwise indistinguishable Wednesday in Washington, August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King threw down to America, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a moral gauntlet that we as a nation have yet to pick up: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Character not color, and by extension character not gender, character not ethnicity nor religion nor social nor educational status....
...Admirably, liberals want races and genders to be treated equally but, simultaneously (and not so admirably), they seek to provide special treatment for some, thereby sharpening and institutionalizing divisions. They are like the old Stalinists who insisted that the state would eventually wither away, but in the meantime the state needed to be made stronger than ever before. This new racialism is less reprehensible than the old racism because it is not expressly founded on the unjust principle of one race being superior to another, but that doesn’t mean it is innocuous. Just as a 19th century racial theory would argue the inherent worth of one race over another, the new theory insists that there exists some unproven inherent worth in enforcing racial proportionality. This belief is uttered so frequently and with such utter surety that few anymore even stop to consider whether there is any basis for it. For example, in the Washington Post, over the course of only a few weeks this past winter, a number of editorials (dressed up as news articles), expressed concern about the lack of diversity in the Winter Olympics (but not professional basketball!), among public school teachers, and at the Federal Reserve. These articles take it as a given that diversity is always and everywhere a good that must be attained and that any lack of diversity is somehow a betrayal of our Founding principles.
Here in Fairfax County, Virginia, where I live, the school superintendent insists that “we need teachers who reflect our students.” By this he does not mean that they should inspire our students as dedicated, hard-working, and intelligent role models. Rather, he merely means that they need to have the same complexion as those they teach; that only people of the same color or background can serve as proper role models for students. During my own high school days my most inspiring teachers were a black history teacher and a nun who taught English. I don’t think I suffered any psychic harm from not having white, male role models as teachers and neither do students today unless the school system indoctrinates them with a phony need for such role models. In New York City, where this irrational yearning for diversity has reached greater depths of silliness, the mayor, Bill de Blasio, is distressed that Asian-Americans disproportionately excel at academics, so he now seeks to scrap an entrance test that governs admissions to eight specialized high schools. The school entrance test, he explains with all the Orwellian logic we have come to expect from some liberal politicians, is “a roadblock to justice, progress, and academic excellence.”
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