Courting diversity: two warnings ignored

The real news about the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on affirmative action and homosexuality was that they surprised and disoriented both the court’s conservative cheerleaders and its liberal detractors. And it wasn’t just the court that made June a cruel month for the ideologically driven: The many corporate CEOs and military commanders who filed briefs in favor of color coding thereby discredited most conservative and leftist maps of American politics.

The right’s culture warriors took the harder hit, of course, from a court many had assumed would vindicate them and the “silent” and “moral” majorities they claim to defend. Suddenly they had to explain why the creeping re-racialization of American life was being pushed not only by judges and tenured campus radicals but also by an impressive coalition of military and business leaders, accompanied, if belatedly and a bit lamely, by President Bush. Conservative opponents of preferences can’t now pray for just one more colorblind purist on the high bench; Bush may not even want one now that free market and military titans don’t.

Leftist “diversity” advocates, too, had some explaining to do. If the “politics of difference” was as progressive and transgressive as they’d claimed, why had it been co-opted so easily by CEOs and generals with reasons of their own for upending the dread straight-white-male consensus? Maybe the specter of resegregation wasn’t the only alternative to leftist identity politics after all. Maybe corporate capital was subtle, protean and absorptive enough to shed its old racist patriarchal strictures for a multiculturalism more fluid and malleable than anything leftist populists had envisioned.

Caught in these tidal shifts are Peter Schuck, a centrist maverick Yale Law School professor, and Peter Wood, a Boston University anthropologist and conservative. Both condemn racially scripted “diversity,” but from different vantage points and in markedly different styles. In “Diversity in America,” Schuck, fighting uphill at close quarters against left-leaning legal scholars, strives decorously but at times too strenuously and schematically to reason and document his way out of the “diversity” straitjacket so many of his Yale colleagues wear (and designed).

I expected Wood, a frequent contributor to the National Review and other conservative publications, to be more the ideologue, but his “Diversity: The Invention of a Concept” is a wonderful surprise, an essay with an authorial voice you can enjoy listening to and arguing with. The book has its slippery patches, but any liberal who claims to value intellectual as well as racial diversity and wants to engage the other side’s best arguments without shouting should try Wood.

Both books appeared before the June rulings, but both engaged the affirmative action cases, as if hoping to turn the court against the University of Michigan Law School’s race-inflected efforts to “enrich” classroom discussion with a mysterious “critical mass” or “groupness” of racial types. The law school’s goal is to spare bearers of a particular skin shade from feeling “isolated” for holding experiences or viewpoints which it presumes go along with the physiognomy that influenced that student’s admission.

This is silly and stifling, but it’s pretty much what the justices agreed to permit, rebuffing warnings like Schuck’s and Wood’s that law is too blunt an instrument to advance diversity and could plunge this country back into parsing people’s racial bona fides. Both authors foresee the cruel ironies: For the right, the cruelest is that the most powerful engine of evil identity politics is corporate capitalism. For the left, it’s that the most powerful engine of identity politics is ... evil corporate capitalism.

Worse yet for the right, the most effective and symbolic engine is the military, which makes affirmative action work only because it has the legal power and public resources to regiment the beneficiaries of racial preferences into no-nonsense remediation, on the taxpayer’s dime. Anywhere else, conservatives would call that socialism. Leftists can only wish they had socialism in universities, instead of only pretending to have it, as some do now -- with results that their admissions offices have been caught lying about, as Wood reminds us.

Both books show that diversity is a little like irony itself: great when you come upon it as the spice in a dynamic society but devoid of savor and possibly toxic when it’s a central organizing principle of one’s life or when it’s a permanent public posture mandated by law. That is very much Schuck’s argument, and Wood emphasizes that real diversity won’t flower among people with “vast differences” in their preparation and performance according to basic, agreed-upon standards. Both men show that universities have been fudging this for too long, and Wood, uncharacteristically for a conservative, acknowledges that there can be no true diversity amid vast inequalities in wealth and resources. Shuck makes that point stick, painfully, by detailing two failed judicial efforts to diversify communities by class as well as race.

But both writers add, and Schuck demonstrates exhaustively, that academic and economic inequalities can’t be overcome by judicial fiat or even by deep subsidy and other resource redistribution. Something more intensively political and moral is required. Government in a liberal democracy must guarantee civil rights and bar discrimination, of course, but regulation can’t nourish or protect true diversity and sharing. Only people who are roughly equal, and free to tell the truth as they see it, can do that.

Is that a conservative insight? It used to be a new-leftist one too, (and I can still hear civil rights movement veterans warning that color coding would displace and distract energies from serious struggles for equality). But the notion that diversity can’t be scripted by officials is a classically liberal truth on which Schuck and Wood agree. It’s their strategies and styles that differ, in response to what I take to be different intended audiences.

As Schuck’s subtitle suggests, he would leave most racial preferences in hiring, admissions and even immigration to private people and institutions that are far less constrained by official enforcement. But he mistrusts even private universities’ efforts to promote racial “diversity,” which he says has morphed from a celebration of supposed racial-cultural differences to an equally fraudulent way to show whites that “people of color” aren’t really so very different from themselves. Schuck, placing more faith in free-market dynamics and cultural shifts, would restrict government to antidiscrimination law, which he believes it could enforce more vigorously than it does now without violating most Americans’ commitment to personal responsibility and achievement.

Schuck, it seems to me, is trying too hard to do too much, too carefully, in one book. His summaries of how markets work and how liberalism, communitarianism and other political theories look upon color coding seem parboiled. But his accounts of affirmative action in universities and residential segregation are lucid and heartfelt, owing partly to personal witness and primary research. He exposes the costs of guilt-ridden liberals’ efforts to paper over abysses of black unpreparedness with color-coded attempts at racial redemption.

Surprisingly, though, it is not Schuck but Wood who explores candidly the corporate embrace of color coding. His chapter “Identity Business” reminds us that few executives have any ideas about society that aren’t really just reiterations of the imperative to improve profits and market share. It is for that reason, not civic or moral ones, that color coding has swept the business world, and Wood argues eloquently that the CEOs are wrong to urge it on colleges, which aren’t just feeders to corporate human resources departments. Wood concludes, wanly, that business has abandoned other fads -- Taylorism, efficiency experts, “total quality management” -- when they stopped raising the bottom line. So, too, he hopes, with “diversity,” which he claims is costing many companies more than it delivers and is retarding real integration. But he ducks the challenge of military affirmative action, and his conservative partisanship gets the best of him when he all but predicts that the court won’t follow Justice Lewis Powell’s 1978 endorsement, in Alan Bakke vs. University of California Board of Regents, of race weighting in college admissions.

The court has done just that, promoting what both writers consider a “diversity” emptier and more dangerous than the blooming, burgeoning kind they wish more energetic cultural and personal efforts would generate. Although there is much to credit in Schuck’s exhaustive (if sometimes exhausting) and Wood’s eloquent (if sometimes polemical) arguments against official micromanagement of diversity, their faith in “free markets” is a stretch. The conformism of most corporate life and the puerile consumer “choices” to which popular sovereignty is often reduced (1,000 ways to decorate your kitchen but no control whatever over the utility bill) suggest that “free” markets alone don’t sustain free people and may even degrade them. Someone has to step up to the plate politically, even if not judicially and bureaucratically, to strengthen the equality of basic resources and opportunities that make diversity creditable, not divisive. If that someone can’t be the race-besotted left, neither can it be conservatives who are moralistic warm-up acts for anomic private investment.