DIVERSITY By now we know that Supreme Court Justice Sandra O’Connor has decided that diversity is terrific and that every college should have some. By that, she means a mixture of races, not genders, not ideas, not nationalities but RACES. She wrote that such a mix promotes “cross-racial understanding, helps to break down racial stereotypes and enables [students] to better understand persons of different races.” Justice O’Connor grew up in the boondocks of an Arizona ranch where diversity meant whether she played with a steer, a cow, a pig or a chicken. From there she went to the then all-white environs of Stanford from whence she has been cocooned in law offices, a very small-time state legislature and the Supreme Court for the rest of her life. O’Connor herself is the beneficiary of diversity. President Reagan appointed her to the Court so as to be the first to nominate a female justice. She is about to retire, is promoting her new book and hopes to work in academe post- retirement from public service. Think she wants to be well-thought of? Admired by the Washington Post et al? You got it; finally. Recently I wrote about the media that while they are certainly not stupid, they are ignorant of life in these United States as lived by other than elite Americans. So too with O’Connor. Her opinion is child-like in its belief that diversity is other than quota dressed up in a newer word. She appears to be unaware that on every American campus the races voluntarily segregate into their own groups. Races and sometimes ethnic groups do that off campus too, both in this country and in every other country I know. Integration is still far off and the issue isn’t money. People like it that way; that’s why the Founders wrote freedom of association into the First Amendment. Those old, dead, white men knew more than the O’Connors of this world willingly admit. Do we see black schools, like Grambling, rushing to load up on whites in proportion to their representation in the general population? Or Smith College admitting men of any hue? Nope; they want no part of the benefits of diversity. Why? Because there aren’t any benefits. Nobody wants anything to do with diversity unless they are able to use it as a lever to gain what they otherwise cannot earn. Diversity, as practiced by the elites, is a political construct to make themselves feel good. And whom do they hurt? Asians, blacks and Hispanics. Asians because they lose out to less qualified applicants; blacks and Hispanics because they are still stigmatized as the dumb ones who got in because of their race, not their qualifications. This is fitting as O’Connor was not nominated because of her superior legal mind; her reasoning is, in fact, banal. She was nominated because of her gender. I remember that she was hailed as a breakthrough nominee, comparable to Jackie Robinson in baseball. There was one difference: Robinson was demonstrably good at playing baseball. Ah well. O’Connor suggested that in another 25 years, all will likely be well and we won’t need the federal government imposing quotas - ooops, diversity - on public universities. As for those thousands of students stigmatized or denied until then, O’Connor says nothing and cares less.
The New York Times headline read: “Court Remakes Law”. I thought the Court’s mission was to apply the law to the facts of a case. I also thought “remaking” law was the mission of the legislature. Am I missing something here? The Court has effectively said that race matters in law schools as without the correct number of blacks, Hispanics and Indians in a class, that class is deprived of the “critical mass” of diversity necessary for, inter alia, the breaking down of artificial racial barriers. Yes; one needs to discriminate so as to end discrimination. But there’s more. The number of blacks in a class is to be greater than the number of Hispanics, even though there are more Hispanics in the United States than blacks. The number of Indians is arithmetically insignificant which is insulting in and of itself. These justices should write for Jay Leno. DEATH IN LOS ANGELES The Los Angeles Times is outraged - again; the Police Commission is seeking changes in policy and the City Council has voted a million dollars to the family of a “victim”. As usual, this is a police shooting, this time of a homeless woman brandishing a 12 inch screwdriver. You might wonder where the “family” was while the woman was homeless; you might ask why the Police Commission changes policies which it knows rarely change results and you might ask by what alchemy the Los Angeles Times elites have any clue about what goes down on the street. I ask it the other way around. Where are the elites when another cop is killed in the line of duty; why doesn’t the Police Commission demand changes in law on those occasions. But even I don’t even think of asking the City Council to vote a million dollars or anything at all to the family of a dead cop. Show me one case, just one, where any city, county or state government voted to award compensation for a police officer killed in the line of duty. They couldn’t care less; none of them. NOW THIS IS REALLY FUNNY Remember the American bounty hunter who captured the rapist in Puerto Vallarta in June? He was arrested for a number of “crimes” in Mexico. Here’s what the trial judge, Jose de Jesus Pineda, had to say: “This should serve as a precedent to avoid having foreigners come here without regard for Mexican laws.” Maybe we should bring Judge Pineda to California to assist in deportation cases? AL GORE AND THE MEDIA Al Gore, said now as one word “AlGore”, is splashing about seeking to spend other people’s money on a new media network. (AlGore has a lot of experience spending other people’s money.) Al says that there are a bunch of media which are “truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party”. He refers to Fox News (3 to 4 million listeners), the Washington Times (125,000 subscribers) and Rush Limbaugh (20 million listeners per week). AlGore forgets the Big Three networks, over 30 million daily viewers, and the major city newspapers which are almost all part and parcel of the Democratic Party. He also referred to conservatives as “fifth column” types. Were Rush to say that, it’d be hate speech.
The Associated Press blared: “America’s prison population grew again in 2002 despite a declining crime rate.” Isn’t that bassackwards? Should it not read: “America’s crime rate declined as the prison population grew”?
The other day, Bob Graham, one of the Nine Dwarfs seeking the Democrat Party nomination, said that he had “served two terms as president of Florida”. Have you read that? Imagine if Dubya had said that during his campaign in 2000. He’d have been pilloried endlessly as was Dan Quayle for misspelling potato. Am I paranoid or are only Republicans called to account by the media for slips of the tongue or lapsis memoriae? WHERE DOES OUR OIL COME FROM? America’s chief oil suppliers are: 1. Canada 1,864
barrels per day
Notice the elite
media despises Clarence Thomas, calling him a traitor to his race
among other choice epithets. The left cannot stand a conservative
black man. Isn’t that ironic? The champions of diversity cannot
accept the notion that blacks may have diverse opinions. They demand
conformity, not diversity. |