MELTING POT OR DIVERSITY?

Victor Bloom MD

Two recent news stories have captured my attention. In one, a federal judge ruled that the University of Michigan Law School's use of the concept of diversity in the admission process was unconstitutional.Replica Balenciaga Handbags In the second story, this one from the state of California, it said that the recent census count showed that for the first time there were more non-whites than whites in the state.

Why are we keeping count of these things? Why do we put people into these vague and ambiguous categories and then make social policy? How can we tell who is black and who is white? By looking at their skin? We see many shades from all-white (albino) to many shades of pink, to tan to brown to black. If we want to get even more perspicacious, we can include various shades of beige to café-au-lait.

The fact is that scientists have no reliable way to determine, biologically, a person's race. Every person is quite a mixture,www.qcute.org given what we know about conquests and migrations in the last three thousand years.

These black-white distinctions don't take into effect the fact that many Italians, Egyptians and Indians are quite dark, and completely exclude the supposed red of our Native Americans and various shades of yellow for oriental people, which include Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese and Philipinos, just to name a few.

Hitler and his Nazi propaganda machine extolled the virtues of the so-called Aryan race, as being a Master Race, one which should seek the purity of inbreeding, a process which goes against most eugenic principles. Hitler's plan for a New World Order was one which would undertake the extermination of the so-called inferior peoples, such as the Gypsies, Slavs and Jews, Communists and the mentally defective. Millions were systematically killed by members of the so-called Aryan master race. The Master Race was not master after all, nor were they pure. Neo-Nazi skinheads still call for preservation and purification of the white race, as if Caucasians are a race of purebreds, and rail against what they call mongrelization and miscegenation.

Many otherwise thoughtful and intelligent people are caught up in fantasies of superiority. They think they are better than other people. Interestingly, there is a strong tendency for social subgroups to rationalize social or genetic superiority. Minority groups tend to be scapegoated. Jewish villages in Eastern Europe were subject to pogroms and Blacks used to be openly and regularly harrassed in the post Civil War South, and less openly, but just as definitely in the North. There used to be lynchings of 'uppity blacks' below the Mason-Dixon line in the early part of the 20th century, and even today African-Americans have been racially-profiled and are over-represented in our jails and death-rows.

Civil rights legislation, ending 'separate-but-equal' came out of the second half of the 20th century and did much to improve the lot of the 'people of color.' But residual prejudice and discrimination continues and so those engineering social justice have developed a philosophy called 'political-correctness,' which includes 'affirmative action,' which has also been called 'reverse discrimination.' Civil rights suits were filed that stated, in effect, that if we are all to be equal under the law, guaranteed by the constitution, that reverse discrimination is not allowable either.

Many people have felt for a long time that political-correctness and affirmative action have had negative as well as positive effects. It is true that there are more minority doctors and lawyers now, some of them excellent and others not, just like it is in the favored majority. Time will prove whether or not the end justified the means. The downside of categorizing people in terms of vague distinctions, such as African-American, Hispanic, Latino, Native American, Oriental and Causcasian, has been to emphasize differences and distinctions, rather than commonalities. We all want to be treated fairly. We do not want members of another group to be arbitrarily given some advantage over us because maybe our ancestors exploited their ancestors a hundred years ago. This reasoning can go back hundreds and thousands of years, and leads to never-ending conflict.

It makes more sense for the census to exclude questions of race, ethnic origin or nationality. The main thing is that we are all Americans. We should be working toward being united instead of divided. Our common language is English, and a wonderful language it is. Whether or not a child is forced to be bilingual should be a decision of the family, not the school or the government.

Another downside of multiculturalism and diversity, the polarization of racial distinctions, has been to encourage even more separation between so-called black and so-called white students. Despite the history of injustice residing in 'separate-but-equal,' the policy of diversity and multiculturalism has spawned student lounges in the University of Michigan which are all black, others which are all Catholic or Jewish or Moslem. Because of the emphasis on racism and anti-racism, polarization has increased, not decreased. Unfortunately, some politicians have been attempting to exploit the antagonism between the races and the conflict between the haves and have-nots.

Wasn't the melting pot of the early part of the 20th century a better concept for America than the divisiveness of multiculturalism and diversity, and its byproduct, affirmative action? Let's hope the U of M Law School will go back to the fairness of meritocracy and the promise of high academic standards. Hopefully the census takers will stop bean-counting and number crunching which color is in the majority and what group has the advantage. Why ask about race when we are all really a mixture?

Dr Bloom is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Wayne State University School of Medicine. He is a member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and on the editorial board of the Wayne County Medical Society. He welcomes comments at his email address--- vbloom@compuserve.com, and visits to his website--- www.factotem.com/vbloom.