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| From the October 2003
Anthropology News, p 8
Diversity as Ideology Peter Woods Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion for the majority in Grutter v Bollinger, et al elevated a particular concept of “diversity” to the status of a Constitutional principle. By stipulating that Michigan had a “compelling state interest” in pursuing “diversity,” O’Connor gave colleges and universities—and potentially many other institutions—the authority to employ racial preferences in a manner that subordinates evidence of actual intellectual ability. I believe the Court’s decision to be foolish and likely to lead to very unhappy consequences for the nation as a whole. To the extent that American colleges and universities have already embraced the “diversity” doctrine in admissions and curricula, however, the immediate effects in higher education will probably be limited to a scramble to meet the cosmetic requirements set down by the Court: racial quotas have to be phrased in the obfuscating idiom of “critical masses,” and admissions offices at large universities will have to set up a façade of giving “wholistic” consideration to each of many thousands of individual applications rather than automatically adding points to the applications of minority candidates. These are, however, minor procedural matters. The essential point is that American higher education is free to do openly what it has been doing in semi-secrecy for a long time, which is to reify the folk categories of racial and ethnic division in the US. In doing so, universities have derogated intellectual standards and basic fairness. One consequence is that universities have become among the most racially polarized places in American society—sometimes with the help of anthropologists, many of whom work to advance an ideology that denies the legitimacy of grievances of “majority” students, while fueling the insecurity and resentment of minority students. Anthropology was not always complicit in this ideology. The anthropology that came to life in the first decades of the 19th century in association with the anti-slavery movement in Britain fought and won a tremendously important intellectual battle against the “polygenesists” who ascribed separate origins and contrasting natures to the world’s “races.” By the early 20th century, Franz Boas’ deep skepticism about the significance of “race” gave American anthropology a long lasting anti-racialist spirit. Anthropologists were the first to develop compelling theories about the symbolic construction and mutability of ethnic boundaries. Nor have anthropologists exactly abandoned this 200-year history of scientific recognition of the underlying unity of our species and the relative arbitrariness of ethnic divisions within social hierarchies. But with a kind of intellectual jujitsu, we have theorized ourselves into a perfect inversion of anthropology’s basic insight. We still uphold the idea that humans are a single species, but now think that it is just and good to turn minor sub-cultural differences into a system of social privilege. We still think race is arbitrary and socially constructed, but now we also think that we can harmlessly deploy it to compensate for past and present social ills. The shift in anthropological thinking is especially visible in the concept of culture. Back in the 1950s, when the Jamaican anthropologist M G Smith countered the tradition of seeing cultures as unitary wholes by emphasizing cultural “pluralism,” anthropologists mostly shrugged. Structuralism, which put deep cultural unity at the center of its theoretical enterprise, dominated the next two decades. But by the early 1980s, anthropology’s confidence that cultures were essentially unified fell under the simultaneous assaults of Foucaultians, feminists, neo-Marxists, and various brands of deconstructionists. “Culture” became a “contested” site where people fought for identity and power. The shattering of a unified idea of culture gave anthropologists a way of buying into the “diversity” doctrine, hatched in 1978 by Justice Lewis Powell in his opinion in the Bakke v U of California Board of Regents case. We could be in favor of the diversity that inheres within cultures, and we could be cheerleaders for the underdog factions in that perpetual contest. But this anthropological version of multiculturalism ironically allies the discipline to political movements grounded in old-fashioned racial essentialism. The diversity doctrine endorsed by the US Supreme Court in June of this year has nothing to do with a deconstructed theory of culture. It is based on a view of “blacks,” “Hispanics,” and “Native Americans” as meaningful, unified and enduring categories. The wealthy African-American physician’s daughter, by the Court’s theory, is every bit as much a rightful recipient of racial privilege in college admissions as an impoverished son of a black hospital orderly from the inner city—and much more so that the impoverished daughter of a white coal miner in Appalachia. We are now, as a profession, deeply entangled in these hypocrisies and deceits. The AAA, by signing on to the American Council on Education’s (ACE) amicus brief in the Michigan cases, helped to turn this collective folly into Constitutional law. We now stand as a profession officially in favor of classifying people by race and distributing social goods according to a hierarchy of group victimization. By having done so, we have betrayed 200 years of public advocacy of enlightened laws and theoretical insight into the human condition. Peter Wood, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Boston U, is author of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (2003), and “Diversity? That’s a New One” (Washington Post, June 29, 2003). |
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