Race Uber Alles

Advisory as to the content of the video.  The above video is a parody.  The below beginning of a story at The American Prospect is not, but it really should be:

On the staff of The American Prospect, I’m the only member of an ethnic minority. That’s not because I bring all the variety the magazine needs, or because the editors don’t think diversity is valuable. Everyone on the masthead of this liberal publication is committed to being inclusive—not just of racial and ethnic minorities but of women; gays, lesbians, and transgender people; and the poor.

It’s not just the Prospect. Journalism upstarts like Vox Media and FiveThirtyEight have come under fire recently for lack of diversity in their hires, but that’s largely because they are drawing from the milky-white pool of “existing talent.” In the corner of the publishing industry that caters to college-educated wonks—a slightly fuzzy designation, but I’ve included most of the publications my colleagues and I read on a daily basis—racial and ethnic diversity is abysmal.

Go here to read the rest.  Most contemporary liberals are just as obsessed with race as the most ardent member of the Ku Klux Klan circa 1924.    People are not individuals to them but members of groups, and certain groups are favored over others based on race, sex and sexual preference.  Other groups are disfavored.  For example, I assume that the lack of evangelicals or believing Catholics on The American Prospect staff would concern the author of the linked to article not in the slightest.

Playing favorites with certain groups and reviling others can obtain short term political power but it raises long term headaches when the favored groups begin to fight.  For example, a bill to bring back racial discrimination affirmative action on college campuses in California was killed by Asian legislators in the Democrat controlled legislature who realized their group would take it in the neck on college admissions for the benefit of Hispanics and Blacks.

Diversity is a slogan promulgated on the left to conceal a fairly gritty and old fashioned political spoils system, no different in reality from a Democrat big city machine operation circa 1935 deciding how many Irish,  Italian  and Polish cops there would be on the force.  The identities of the favored groups change, but the basic concept remains the same.  If one were truly concerned with diversity, diversity of beliefs, rather than skin color, would be front and center.  Instead, where the left gains control, a deadening intellectual orthodoxy is imposed, where people of all shades hold the proper politically correct positions and hate all the right causes and people.

The  hope of the Civil Rights Movement was that we would all be judged by “the content of our character”.  In today’s America, such a statement would be considered right wing and racist.   We are never going to get beyond this until all groups are treated as Frederick Douglass wished Blacks to be treated:

“What shall we do with the negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, — don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner-table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot-box, let him alone, — don’t disturb him! (Applause.) If you see him going into a work-shop, just let him alone, — your interference is doing him a positive injury.”

Those words were delivered in a speech almost 150 years ago.  How better our history would have been if we had heeded those words and applied them to all Americans.