WALSH: Diversity Is Not Our Strength

Yesterday I wrote about a racist screed in The New York Times lamenting the fact that white people live in New Hampshire. Our self-appointed social engineers have set out to dilute the general whiteness of New England, just as they’ve tried to do everywhere else in society, and the result will likely be as disastrous in this case as it has been in every other.

There is nothing wrong with organic diversity. If a city, a state, a school, an institution, etc., becomes more racially diverse over time, naturally, then there is no reason to complain. I still would not call this diversity an objective improvement, because there was nothing objectively wrong with the racial homogeneity that existed before it. People are people. If a bunch of white people live in some mountain town in New Hampshire, that’s fine. If white people and black people live in the town, that’s fine, too. Races are not commodities. You cannot have “too much” or “too little” of one kind.

Organic diversity can be harmful, too, if it isn’t accompanied by some level of assimilation. If the diverse peoples are living next to each other in a city, or working next to each other in a company, or learning next to each other in a school, yet they have nothing else in common, and do not share similar values and priorities, and perhaps cannot even speak to each other because of a language barrier, then it is hard to see how the division and confusion of this new diversity could be considered an improvement over the unity and commonality it replaced.

As a nation, we have focused so much on diversity, and so little on assimilation, that we can hardly be considered a diverse nation anymore. We are diverse, certainly, but a nation? Japan cannot become a diverse Japan if it ceases to be Japan in the process. It is easy for us to see how that is the case with Japan, or with any other non-western country. Why do we struggle to apply this same formula to ourselves? Nothing is ever improved by diversity per se. If diversity will improve something at all, it must be an assimilated diversity. In other words, it must be a diversity that allows the thing being diversified to retain its identity.

Here we have spoken only of organic diversity, which at least has a chance to result in something positive. But diversity is no longer organic in our culture. It is almost always engineered, and engineered diversity is never good. Engineered diversity is the work of bureaucrats who stand above the mass of common people and declare from on high that certain races have exceeded their allotted percentages. Other races must be shipped in and installed to fix the problem, they decree.

All of this is utterly arbitrary, of course, and dehumanizing. It strips people of their humanity and reduces them to statistics. A white person in New Hampshire is not a person, according to The New York Times. He is a faceless representative for his race, which is running a surplus. The White Person supply exceeds the White Person demand. There must be a White Person clearance sale so that we can clean our shelves and restock them with more valuable merchandise. This is essentially how our social engineers view the problem, which is only a problem in the first place because they have decided to call it a problem.

If we are really worried about fighting racism and inequality, then the goal should be a society where a person can live where he wants, work where he wants, and go to school where he wants, without anyone caring about his skin color or his ethnic background. He would be judged on his merits alone and he would climb as far in life as those merits will take him. But that is not how our society operates because that is not what the proponents of forced diversity want. They want division, resentment, and racism. And that is what they have gotten.