Diversity Inc. Is Becoming Even More DangerousApplying “equality†to selecting brain surgeons and airline pilots. Mon Sep 23, 2019
Bruce Thornton Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.Back in the Eighties when “diversity†and “multiculturalism†were starting to invade the universities, critics like me used to ask proponents if they wanted to apply “diversity†to selecting brain surgeons and airline pilots. Seems our common sense was naïve. According to an op-ed by Stanley Goldfarb, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, medical schools are under pressure to include in its curriculum “social justice†shibboleths like gun-control, climate change, and eliminating racial disparities.
We are reaching new levels of dangerous absurdity when the study of medicine––perhaps our most practical, science-based discipline with concrete outcomes easily visible even to laymen––is being diluted to satisfy progressive ideology and dubious scientism.
Yet we should have expected that this day would come. From the moment that the Supreme Court in the 1978 Bakke case enshrined into federal law a concept the vagueness of which was exceeded only by its complete lack of empirical evidence that it provided any measurable benefits. More important, “diversity†as progressives understand it, is an ideological and political weapon divorced from reality.
To start, true diversity is a fact of human history, one oversimplified and corrupted by our continuing reliance on the modern concept of “race,†which was given scientific pretensions by “scientific racism†starting in the late 19th century. A term like “white†is useless, for example, when it comes to the ancient Mediterranean where Western civilization began. Europe at the time of Roman expansion was fragmented into hundreds of tribes with distinct languages and dialects, cultures and mores, religions and cults, geographical circumstances and available resources. Constant warfare, enslavement, and trade promoted continuous intermingling of these peoples and the creation of hybrid cultures that belie the notion of a unified, distinct “race.†To say all those peoples were “white†is to say nothing meaningful for understanding them.
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/diversity-inc-becoming-even-more-dangerous-bruce-thornton/
