A Little Racism, as a Treat?
9th May 2022
As Peter Wood expertly describes in his essay, “diversity” really means exclusion, “equity” really means discrimination, and “inclusion” means segregation. In other words, our modern incarnation of affirmative action is simply a riff on old-fashioned race discrimination. And the justifications for such discrimination are not much different than the defenses offered by the segregationists in the 1950s. In the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, attorneys supporting the segregationist cause claimed in court filings that segregation afforded blacks a better “opportunity to participate,” made blacks feel “inwardly more secure,” and actually “promote[d] cross-racial understanding.” In other words, discrimination was good, right, and salutary in their minds, and now good again in the minds of modern woke policymakers, business leaders, and educrats.
Today, as we confront the neo-segregationists and their banners of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” we must remember that there are no half-measures. The only “good” amount of racial discrimination, the only just amount, is none. Even a little bit of race discrimination, however seemingly benign or beneficial, cannot exist in an American system devoted to equality under the law, individuality, and an equal shot at the American Dream. As Justice Scalia wrote, concurring in the decision regarding the University of Texas’s affirmative action program, “I think the lesson of history is clear enough: racial discrimination is never benign.” Instead, race discrimination, even in a small dose, is pernicious and odious to notions of a free society, and, most critically, its application has no logical stopping point. Proponents of race discrimination will always have a new justification for its use to meet their righteous ends.