Over the past two decades, the western world has been subjected to the ideas of diversity and multiculturalism. These ideas state that diversity is an amazing answer to so many problems we face and that we should do everything we can to be as diverse as we can. When this statement failed to have significant buy-in, laws were passed to make it so ranging from hiring / firing quotas to even having a certain number of contracts being awarded to ‘minority owned’ bidders regardless of experience or even price. No longer would the bidding war be about quality of service and the ability to deliver that service at the lowest price, now it also depended on the color of your skin or what you have (or don’t have) in your pants.
A great example is the website blackcareers.com which, when touts the ability to, “Find African American jobs, careers and employment advice…” A quick second search reveals that, no there is not a whitecareers.com ready to assist white people in their effort to find “European American jobs, careers and employment advice…” nor am advocating a site such as that if one exists with a different name. What needs to be stated is that diversity is not what is pushed, an “anything but white” agenda is.
Black radicals like Ronald McKinley Everett, who changed his name to Maulana Karenga, create a made up holiday called Kwanza after kidnapping, assaulting, and brutializing two females with whips, a soldering iron, and other various (read: diverse) forms of torture. After serving less than half of a ten year sentence for this he was out again pushing his anti-American views. He was with the Black Panthers, but it appeared that they weren’t black enough for him, so he created US Organization, now called Organization Us. It has a delightful website. Also, don’t miss the seminar coming up, “This year’s seminar will be organized around Dr. Maulana Karenga’s book, Kawaida and Questions of Life and Struggle, Volume II, which brings forth an ongoing synthesis of the best of African thought, paradigms and practices for reflection, discussion and actively addressing current moral and social issues. These issues include: social and economic justice, the Obama campaign, reparations, immigration, war and peace, womanhood, manhood and male/female relationships, police violence, environmental care and justice, shared wealth and the right and responsibility of resistance in New Orleans, Sudan, Haiti, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and everywhere.”
Responsibility of resistance in New Orleans is mentioned as if there were similar situations to Sudan or Haiti, or anywhere else. This is not someone who wishes to sit down and discuss how to go forward, he is interest in reparations and the ever changing idea of ‘social justice’. He also lumps in, not coincidentally, the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as needing to be resisted — just like in New Orleans. Anti-Americanism espoused as multiculturalism at its finest. How does our society deal with such worthlessness? We grant the idea of Kwanzaa as being a respectable holiday, we let this torturer (aren’t we against torture?) get a PhD in ‘social ethics’ (how does a torturer PASS the coursework?) from the University of Southern California, and give him the platform for seminars in downtown Los Angeles.
So on we march for diversity, but only of the most meaningless of kinds. There is no promise of diversity of opinion — the most important and vital kind of diversity — only of skin color, perhaps of sex, and maybe some other worthless measures. There’s an equally worthless idea mentioned here, “Diversity is the recognition that each of our employees and suppliers is unique. And that our workplace and supply chain should reflect –and celebrate –the shared and unshared differences that make us who we are.” I recall seeing in a lunch room a sign stating to “Celebrate our shared and unshared differences,” but I am completely at a loss how something shared is a difference, let alone how I should ‘celebrate’ that fact, if indeed it is a fact. My differences do not make me who I am, it is only a crude way to catalog me. My knowledge, opinions and life experiences make me who I am, regardless of how much I share or do not share with others.
Multiculturalism is failed idea, though the media and academia push it forward not for the sake of the other cultures so much but as to belittle and reduce the influence of western culture and Americanism in particular. Take African history as an example, it now seems racist to state that before Europeans arrived the state of most Africa was that of being prehistoric. The term prehistory simply means before written history, and since most of Africa had no method of recording history except via verbal communication until Europeans came to record it, there is nothing to study. Despite this fact, we have classes that explore Africa History before writing.
Except for western society, it is difficult to find any other cultures so anxious to trivialize their own society. If I, as an American, go to a foreign country with a different language, let alone culture, if I ‘force’ my language on them I am considered a pompous, arrogant, and annoying American, but if that same culture comes to America – especially if it is non-European – then we need to tolerate them or we are once again, pompous, arrogant and annoying.
Diversity and Multiculturalism is supposed to be great, wonderful, and of course, celebrated. The same people to push this agenda also want to condemn Europeans for the 1885 Berlin Conference which drew borders across Africa. While this does in fact eliminate the idea of self-determination, impose the rule of a country far removed from their own, and otherwise impose restrictions needlessly, it also did something else: it forced multiculturalism and diversity upon those populations, “Africa’s current borders were essentially established by the European colonial powers at the 1885 Berlin Conference. Borders between European colonial empires typically reflected European power relations, while those within these empires usually reflected interest group politics in the home country or administrative convenience; they did not recognize African divisions and rivalries. Consequently, as African states
became independent, many found that the inherited borders divided ethnic groups between two or more countries and enclosed diverse ethnic groups that, at best, had little experience of cooperation with each other and, at worst, had a history of strife…”
What Mark Katz, the author of the above quoted statement explains, is that when you put a bunch of people who have many ‘unshared and shared differences’ you tend to get civil war, intolerance and violence against each other. If diversity is such a wonderful thing, then why should ‘African divisions and rivalries’ matter more than the idea of having all these different people now able to be in contact with each other? Africa has been plagued with civil wars and intra-state violence. From Sudan to Rwanda, including civil wars in Algeria and Angola, Congo, Ethopia ans Somolia, we can see how well diversity works when it is not backed with the force (and guns) of the government. It fails… epically.
We then have a seemingly confused Attorney General, Eric Holder stating, “As a nation we have done a pretty good job in melding the races in the workplace. We work with one another, lunch together and, when the event is at the workplace during work hours or shortly thereafter, we socialize with one another fairly well, irrespective of race. And yet even this interaction operates within certain limitations. We know, by “American instinct” and by learned behavior, that certain subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks, at best embarrassment, and, at worst, the questioning of one’s character. And outside the workplace the situation is even more bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some fifty years ago. This is truly sad. Given all that we as a nation went through during the civil rights struggle it is hard for me to accept that the result of those efforts was to create an America that is more prosperous, more positively race conscious and yet is voluntarily socially segregated.”
There we have it: Diversity works when the power and force of the government makes us work together, but when the government can no longer force us to be together we all simply prefer to be with those who we relate to the most — just like in Africa with the arbitrarily drawn borders. Not understanding this is ‘truly sad’.
This is why we as a nation, need to celebrate not our differences, but our desire to keep America as the place where anyone in the world can come and do better for themselves and their family. America became great due to a simple Constitution and the idea that the government was to be small and kept in the background. America came forward with the idea of letting people’s opinions be their own (true diversity) and to let those with inferior ideas fail and be removed from society. America is a big enough places to permit many different thoughts and beliefs happen, but we should all be aware that when people come here from a different part of the world they should be able to leave much of their own cultural baggage at the door and come through ready to be an American without a hyphen, and without the pretense that their culture is on equal footing as America, because if it in fact was, why would all those people leave their birth countries in an effort to succeed?
Celebrate America.
Zeno Sees, Zeno Writes 