BrianGarst.com

La Shawn Barber has a great post on her views of a colorblind society and just what that means.

When I was young and na?ve, I used to believe in a ?colorblind society.? I envisioned a utopia-like world where everyone got along, despite differences in skin color, religion, height, weight, or other ?irrelevant? factors.

Having lived in the real world for a few decades now, I realize how silly I was. Human beings can?t ignore differences if we tried. The best we can do is condition ourselves to not allow those differences to divide us too sharply. If we can do that, we?re doing quite well.

Some people misunderstand the conservative position on ?colorblindness.? I should say my position on colorblindness, since I can?t speak for conservatives or black people. While humans will always make decisions based on what we perceive, the government should not. What conservatives and other anti-race preference opponents like myself believe is that government policy should be colorblind; that is, the government should not make policy, write laws, or base decisions on a citizen?s race, color, creed, or religion. We are to be judged and treated as individuals, not as members or representatives of a racial or ethnic group.

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The very first reply to her post, from a self described liberal, serves as an excellent example of just how it is a government comes to be obssessed with color.

To the extent that ?affirmative action? programs require quotas and the compelled hiring of certain groups of people, those are clearly wrong.

But I see nothing wrong with laws ? as well as business policies or education policies ? which seek to achieve diversity. Diversity does not mean preference of one group over another; in fact, it literally means the opposite.

Trying to achieve diversity, which in common usage actually means proportionality, is itself a form of quota regardless of whether the means to achieve that end utilizes quotas. Diversity, as typically used, is actually a misnomer. What is actually desired is uniformity. All jobs/institutions must have a uniform representation of all groups, making all such institutions virtual copies of each other. They would, amongst themselves, lack diversity.

On a recent episode of Numbers, the mathematician and star of the show was lecturing his students on random occurrences. He showed them two pictures of dark dots on a white background, in this case representing rain drops. One picture had dots fairly evenly spaced throughout the picture; the other had some close together and some far apart. When asked which better represented random rainfall, many incorrectly thought it was the picture of equally spaced dots, because people tend to erroneously associate even distributions with random behaviors.

Applying this to our current discussion, we see that many falsely associate workplaces or other institutions with exactly proportional group representations as nondiscriminatory, when the opposite is actually true. The only way for such proportionality to ever occur across the board is by interference. Instead, anything not exhibiting proportional representation is seen as evidence of discrimination. Based on this dubious conclusion, they force proportionality through legislation.

Fighting against discrimination is admirable, but the means we use to determine where discrimination is occurring are faulty. Even when disproportionate representation is indicative of a problem, it is often a much different one than race-based agitators assume. The dismal high school graduation rate of urban schools is a prime example of the types of factors that can contribute to those situations.

This well intentioned “diversity” for the sake of “diversity” has the end result of making everyone hyper aware of race. The cumulative effect of having these policies implemented in all levels of government and the work force, rather than the alleviation of discrimination and race conflict as proponents intend, is the exacerbation of social cleavages. A large part of the reason we still have so much racial tension in America today is due to constant appeals to group identity politics. And as long as politicians can find personal profit in pitting groups against one another it’s not going to change.

Update: This timely article from OpinionJournal highlights the dangers of unintended consequences from well meaning meddling.

race issues