Diversity Policies--A Human Oregano?

George Will turns a wonderful phrase when dealing with racial "diversity" policies. Exmaining the K-12 diversity cases handed down by the Supreme Court last week, Will asks:

How did we get from this:

"Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere" (the NAACP's brief, written by Thurgood Marshall, in the
1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case), to this: Local public education establishments routinely taking cognizance of race in assigning children to schools?

How indeed. By having rich white people make determinations about what is good or not good for children's education.

[Justice Stephen] Breyer said that last week's decision abandons "the promise of Brown." Actually, that promise -- a colorblind society -- has been traduced by the "diversity" exception to the Equal Protection Clause. That exception allows white majorities to feel noble while treating blacks and certain other minorities as seasoning -- a sort of human oregano -- to be sprinkled across a student body to make the majority's educational experience more flavorful.

This repulsive practice merits Clarence Thomas' warning in his opinion concurring with last week's ruling: Beware of elites eager to constitutionalize "faddish social theories." Often, they are only theories.

As Roberts said, Seattle and Louisville offered "no evidence" that the diversity they have achieved (by what he has called the "sordid business" of "divvying us up by race") is necessary to achieve the "asserted" educational benefits.

Evidence is beside the point. The point for race-mongering diversity tinkerers is their professional and ideological stake in preventing America from achieving "a colorblind mentality."

As I have hinted at before, "diversity" is a creation of a majority who feels guilty for being a majority and for the majority's past, even when they themselves had nothing to do with that past. Diversity is designed to make good on prior societal ills (read assuage my racial guilt) and not to actually improve education.

As I noted earlier, the Seattle/Louisville cases are really an extension of the results in Brown,

Bakke

and Grutter cases, that invididual rights mean something and that these decisions are not a conservative backlash, but a continuation of the Brown case and the diversity cases are

actually a continuation of th[e Brown] Court's focus on individual rights. If the Warren Court was about raising up the rights of the minority and downtrodden in our society, the Rehnquist and now Roberts Court's are as much about enforcing the Warren concept of equal rights for everyone as any decision of Earl Warren and his peers. If the liberals have spent decades trying to show that everyone should have the same rights, then everyone has the same rights and it is up to the Courts to respect those rights.

What seems to be missing from the liberal argument about the diversity cases is the realization that racial discrimination is perpetuated by the left's continuing insistence to look at minorities not as individuals, with individual needs and rights, but as "human oregano," a spice to be added to their view of a proper program of education.