Walter Williams: We Need Diversity

I’d be remiss if I didn’t excerpt Walter Williams’s tongue-in-cheek column on Townhall, “We Need Diversity.”

The obsession with diversity is focused on increasing the representation of racial minorities in any given arena. It almost never goes the other way. No one seriously demands that the NBA or NFL be more racially diverse. The only thing that matters is how well an individual can play. It just so happens that individuals of African descent are better, on average, than others. (Are Samoans counted as “black”? They’re definitely not “African American.”)

“According to the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport report titled ‘The 2008 Racial and Gender Report Card,’” Williams writes, “the percentage of black male basketball players in Division I was an all-time high at 60.4 percent. It was 45.9 percent in football and 6.0 percent in baseball.

“Diversity is worse in professional sports…One can understand the absence of concern for diversity in professional sports; they are in it just for the money. But one is left flummoxed by the lack of sports diversity in college sports. After all, you can’t listen to any college president or provost speak for more than five minutes before the word “diversity” drops from his lips. Colleges take diversity seriously and they spend tens of millions of dollars on it. Juilliard School has a director of diversity and inclusion; MIT has a manager of diversity recruitment; Toledo University, an associate dean for diversity; Harvard, Texas A&M, California at Berkeley, Virginia and many others boast of officers, deans, vice presidents and perhaps ministers of diversity. But, in what appears to be the height of deviousness and deceit, these diversity-driven administrators allow sports, the most visible part of the college, be the least diverse and least inclusive.”

For those who say black players dominate certain sports teams because they’re better than whites, imagine the same statement turned around: whites dominate certain professions because they’re better than blacks.

“It should be remembered that diversity creed holds that we are all equal and would be proportionately represented by race across all activities but for the fact of discrimination and oppression.”

Using that logic, whites and Asians are underrepresented in American basketball and football because of discrimination and oppression. If you think that’s ridiculous, some assume blacks are being oppressed and discriminated against because they’re underrepresented in certain professions.

“But La Shawn, that’s different.” How?

Consistency is the bane of PC’s existence.

Williams lists disparities among lighting-struck victims, job-related deaths, cervical cancer rates, and more. Diversity advocates serious about their jobs will have their hands full making sure a range of colors, sexes, nationalities, body types, etc., are represented in these groups.

(You have to laugh at this stuff to keep from tearing your hair out at the disingenuousness of diversophiles.)