Here is a re-post my post from Gene Ex on the “diversity essay,” which includes the actual promts.

U of Michigan adds “diversity” essay
In response to the Supreme Court’s decision essentially upholding quotas (but not the 20-point bonus for “underrepresented” minorities), the University of Michigan is replacing with the 20-point bonus with something I see as even worse: a required essay that students must write on diversity.

Students will have the choice between two prompts:

“At the University of Michigan, we are committed to buiding an academically superb and widely diverse educational community. What would you as an individual bring to our campus community?”
Or
“Describe an experience you’ve had where cultural diversity—or a lack therof—has made a difference to you.”

Not only did the Michigan decision do practically nothing to erode affirmative action, it has made things worse, at least at the University of Michigan. Now students are going to be forced to write an additional essay that essentially must be from a leftist perspective (could anyone seriously write a non-leftist response to these questions and not get hurt in admissions)?

See the full story at the LA Times (registration required).

Posted by Matt W. at 02:00 PM 8/29/03

If colleges really believe in achieving a critical mass of each minority group, then they will have to face the fact that their current approach is a guaranteed failure in the case of Native American Indians. They are too few in number, hence they are spread thinly across the hundreds of colleges they attend.

To truly achieve the critical mass of Indians, the colleges will have to collude in such a way as to segregate them into a subset of all colleges so that they can have critical mass at those colleges.

Do you suppose these colleges will react warmly to this idea? Or do you suppose that “critical mass” is not truly their concern in the first place, and they are quite happy to spread Indians thinly across the nation’s colleges? Do you suppose “critical mass” is just the latest in a long line of smokescreens for quotas under some other name than quotas?

Perhaps the ideas above could form part of some applicant’s diversity essay and be submitted to the University of Michigan.

Thanks to Matt W. for bringing out the actual diversity questions from the Michigan admissions application. This is sickening. If I were applying to Michigan, I would answer the second question and turn it on UM’s head, for example, talking about how the rhetoric of diversity is radically different from the reality. After all, the question does leave open the possibility of criticizing diversity.

I really don’t understand why so many people have bought in to the “diversity” racket. What’s so great about diversity anyway? OK-maybe some people (myself included) prefer dates/mates of another race, but this is a tiny percentage of the population [1]. People may have friends of other races, but I don’t see why any political agenda is required for that. Then there’s the ethnic food, but I can’t see that as having a major political effect on anyone. I can see why some leaders might want to take advantage of it for political reasons, but this doesn’t expain Diversity’s hold on middle America.

Even if one saw diversity as some great thing, it does not require mass unskilled immigration, affirmative action, anti-assimilationism, or any of the gobbledygook that the left, and unfortunately many so-called conservatives such as our president, support.

I have read that the majority of people support greatly reduced illegal immigration and some reduction in legal immigration, but if this is the case, most of these people must not feel strongly about their views, since the politicians the elect are overwhelmingly pro-mass unskilled immigration and soft on (if not outright in favor of) illegal immigration.

My only explanation for the large support of the left’s racial agenda is ignorance. The elites are largely sheltered from the realities of “diversity” (their main exposure to people (of all racial groups) is to people who are like them in income, education, and ability—thus a belief in equality of ability, both racial and individual). As for middle America, the average person is either too busy, too gullible, or too apathetic about politics to oppose the left’s radical racial agenda.

[1] Interracial marriage is rare; 97% of non-Hispanic whites are married to other non-Hispanic whites.

Why has everyone bought into ‘diversity’, Matt W. asks? There is a simple answer.

In the famous court case Bakke vs. Regents of the University of California, the majority of the court decided that a racial quota system in medical school admissions was not constitutional. However, the court always likes to hedge its decisions in these cases and throw a bone or two to the losers of the case. In an opinion of his own, Justice Lewis Powell wrote that, while achieving racial quotas is not a compelling state interest, he could see that achieving diversity in the student body could be a compelling state interest.

Even though no other justices joined his concurring opinion, it inspired a new smokescreen for racial quotas: “We are not aiming for some racial balance, we are aiming for diversity! Sure, that’s it!” From that point (1977 or 1978) onward, the call for quotas was replaced by the call for diversity. Justice Powell’s words were cited as justification in countless court cases, admissions policies, corporate policies, etc.

In other words, the whole hoopla over diversity is a scam.

The reason diversity is important to liberals is deeper than the discussion so far implies. In all of human history there have been (largely implicit, which is to say traditional) social authority structures in place other than the bureacratic state and economic markets. One well known example is the family, which is certainly under attack itself. Another is ethnic loyalties. In order to destroy an authority structure you celebrate and promote its opposite as a paramount good. In order to destroy ethnic loyalties (in order to get them out of the way of the bureacratic state and markets) you celebrate “diversity”, an enforced equality of all ethnicities and cultures in all places.

The notion in the end isn’t to celebrate any particular ethnicity that has particular ties to particular people and that those people treat with respect as an authority in their lives. “Diversity” isn’t about celebrating diverse ethnicities, it is about killing them off, just as celebrating “diverse” families isn’t about celebrating the family but rather is about killing it off. If diversity trumps any particular ethnicity and culture then particular ethnicities and cultures are nothing; and one more impediment to the universal liberal order of equal freedom under a bureacratic state and global markets has been removed. Ethnicity and culture become just one more product in the global market that you can choose for yourself (or not) like a handbag or pair of bluejeans, shrink-wrapped right off the assmbly line in whatever color you like.

“Diversity” is just the name now given to the bulldozing of race and culture to make way for the universal liberal utopia. Same old bulldozer, nice new more powerful engine and a different paint job.

Matt wrote,

” ‘Diversity’ isn’t about celebrating diverse ethnicities, it is about killing them off, just as celebrating ‘diverse’ families isn’t about celebrating the family but … killing it off. If diversity trumps any particular ethnicity and culture then particular ethnicities and cultures are nothing; and one more impediment to the universal liberal order of equal freedom under a bureaucratic state and global markets has been removed. … ‘Diversity’ is just the name now given to the bulldozing of race and culture to make way for the universal liberal utopia.”

Extremely well stated. Truer words were never written.

Matt’s stat (he, he) appears inaccurate although I am sure he is accurate. I see a lot of white men with younger Hispanic women. Maybe because I am very sensitive about the issue, I simply notice it more than others.

One caveat about the interracial marriage stat: I think it includes all marriages. *New* marriages may be somewhat more likely to be interracial. Still, I’m sure even new marriages are overwhelmingly (over 90%) intra-racial.

Anyway, what’s the worry about interracial marriage? Whites married to other whites seem no less irrationally leftist on racial issues than whites married to nonwhites. In fact, many true conservative/race realist writers are married interracially— I believe Bell Curve author Charles Murray is married to an Asian woman, as is John Derbyshire. VDare writer Allan Wall is married to a Mexican woman.

Once a person is married to a person of another race, or has in-laws or grandchildren of another race, it becomes extraordinarily difficult for him to identify with the white race or defend it when it is attacked, since any consciousness of whiteness is experienced as a rejection of one’s spouse or in-laws or grandchildren. For example, Maggie Gallagher, whose husband is an Indian immigrant, has written that it is “hateful” to think of oneself as white. Also, many people in interracial marriages begin treating interracial marriage as the ideal, and old-fashioned intra-racial marriage as backward and prejudiced. Children of such marriages have no identity at all, whether majority or minority, and are often resentful.

The more intermarriages there are, the harder it becomes to maintain any historic majority culture and national identity.

The woman who heads Canada’s Council on Race Relations - an “independent” organization with a $24 million federal endowment - was quoted in the paper today. We need to redouble our efforts to teach children that “it’s normal to be different”, she said. (Different from what? The norm?)

Of course she meant it’s “normal” to be non-white. (Abnormal to be white?) The code is so elaborate and tedious: “visible minorities” = non-whites; “the dominant culture” = white people; “difference” = total ideological conformity + national costumes + new holidays… When will they finally drop the double-talk and simply declare their hatred of whites and western civilization? It would be such a relief to have it out in the open, instead of always having to respond to these veiled threats and being told ‘Oh no, no, that’s not really what they mean, they’re just well intentioned but naive’…

Mr. Auster wrote:
“Once a person is married to a person of another race, or has in-laws or grandchildren of another race, it becomes extraordinarily difficult for him to identify with the white race or defend it when it is attacked, since any consciousness of whiteness is experienced as a rejection of one’s spouse or in-laws or grandchildren.”

This the case because liberalism is the dominant ideology though. (It may also be true because of an overall increase in the number of interracial marriages; when exceptions are truly exceptional they aren’t much of a problem). It used to be that a woman gave up her identity and took the last name of the man she married. She in essence gave up her old name - and in an interracial marriage gave up her old race - and fully and unequivocally became a part of the new. Same when a white family would adopt a nonwhite child.

We can’t have that in the liberal order though. There can’t be any exceptions to the norm under liberalism because everyone is free and equal. So under liberalism the norm must be abolished, and if the norm is abolished there isn’t anything for the new wife or the adopted child to give up, and there isn’t anything new for them to become.

In a traditional order a limited number of exceptions to the norm are fine, precisely because everyone involved and society at large views them as exceptions to the norm. In a liberal order the exception to the norm must be treated as holy and superior to the norm in order to achieve the ultimate goal of abolishing all norms.

To continue on my previous post:

One of the dominant feelings under the self-contradictory regime of liberalism, at least for me, is irony.

In a traditional order a few exceptions to the norm - in this case specifically a few interracial marriages - are a positive good. They promote understanding between peoples, make overt conflict less likely, diffuse bigotry, and do all of the things that liberals claim are (but are not in fact) goods in the liberal order. But they do all of this precisely under their status as _rare exceptions_. An after dinner glass of port tops off a meal wonderfully, but it is not the meal. The liberal social meal of “diversity” is like taking everything you would eat and drink over the course of a week, putting it in a blender, and, um, ingesting it in the form of an enema. And yet somehow this is supposed to be interpreted as having a special appreciation for the port.

Irony, as I said. It its relentless efforts to force nothing at all to be treated as better than anything else liberalism turns the wonderful ontological diversity of races into a destructive evil force to abolish that diversity. The social good - and it is without doubt a social good - of a few very exceptional mixed-race marriages is turned into the suicide bullet.

I strongly recommend Peter Wood’s book, Diversity, which explains the history and absurdity of the concept (although he’s no traditionalist.) I also regularly visit John Rosenberg’s website Discriminations (http://www.discriminations.us/) which points out the endless logical idiocies of our new diverse world.

No one at the university where I teach knows my political leanings, but (white) students who I’m helping apply to professional or graduate schools often come to complain nervously about the need to make up victim stories in their essays. One student a couple years ago, a poor white southern girl, told me she thought of it as discrimination against people like her who have to work during the summer, while other students have their rich daddies send them to Haiti to do charity work and give them ideal topics for essays about how sensitive they are. Others are proud of how they’ve risen above their backgrounds and are resentful about having to use painful memories of their past in a crass and calculating way.

Mr. Auster is right that this is not just about giving students the opportunity to identify themselves as preferred minorities to allow the admissions people to discriminate in their favor. It is about forcing everyone to pay obeisance to the Diversity gods and to recognize his place in the system of the new masters. Race norming and naked preferences are far better policies.

Matt’s interpretation of the current leftist “celebration of diversity” is that it is a step along the way to denying race and ethnicity altogether in the future liberal utopia. That is certainly possible, but there is at least one other possibility. It could be that only the white race is to be done away with, not all races.

The proof of the matter would come when whites become a minority in this country and remain a minority for generations. Would all talk of race really disappear, or would there still be group rights and race-based privileges for non-whites as we see today?

My suspicion is that preferential treatment for non-whites who underperform economically (thus excluding non-whites such as East Asians) is pretty much a permanent fixture of liberalism. If whites were only 25% of the USA, but were outperforming Latinos and blacks economically, then I don’t know that the political left would declare that race doesn’t matter any more. Full egalitarianism would not have been achieved yet.

Thomas Sowell has made the point that no nation has achieved the following simultaneously:

1) Peace, harmony, and relatively high degree of economic freedom (by historical standards of the West).

2) A fairly large ethnic minority that economically outperforms the majority, by a noticeable and significant margin.

3) Freedom of speech and universal suffrage.

His point is that, given freedom of speech to racial agitators among the majority who resent the economic success of the minority, and given universal suffrage, the underperforming majority will bring to an end the peace, harmony, and property rights enjoyed by that minority. One nation he studied was Malaysia, where the Chinese minority far outperforms the Malay minority, and the key missing element is freedom of speech. No racial agitators are permitted free reign. On the other hand, in Sri Lanka, racial agitators enjoyed the British legacy of freedom of speech, and have since destroyed the country via ethnic civil war. In the 1950’s, the USA was actually lectured about the fact that there was greater racial harmony in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon) than in the USA. Now, the major ethnic groups are literally killing each other in the streets.

With immigration, we are headed towards “Malaysia with free speech and universal suffrage”, in which the white minority will outperform the Latinos and blacks and will be pretty much helpless to do anything about it when the voters who outnumber them, assisted by agitators taking advantage of our freedom of speech, will be pushing openly for policies that are far more confiscatory than our present welfare state.

(A little irony for the neocons who are Jewish: Did not your Jewish ancestors in Europe learn the hard way about being the high-achieving ethnic minority who were resented by the majority? Do you really want to stage a repeat performance in America?)

In such a society, we would all wish that the present “celebration of diversity” had led to a disappearance of racial consciousness, so that no one would focus on our combination of wealth and whiteness, but I think we will find that racial consciousness is alive and well.

Mr. Coleman writes:
“Full egalitarianism would not have been achieved yet.”

Indeed, and it can’t be even in principle. As always one has to distinguish between what liberals think they are doing and what is likely to actually happen in reality. Since what liberals think they are doing not only can’t be done in reality, but actually can’t even be _postulated coherently in our minds_, what happens in reality will never under any circumstances reflect what liberals think they want to achieve.

Liberals believe that the free and equal new man — the ubermensch — will emerge having transcended the discrimination and tyranny of the old order. Mr. Coleman is speculating on what is likely to actually happen in reality, and I agree that his scenario is plausible. My description is of the liberal dialectic; Mr. Coleman’s is a reasonable speculation on its latest encounter with reality.

Also I agree that it is bizarre that Jewish people, out of all of us, are almost unanimously throwing meat to the demon that will later eat them *again*.

Another comment:

Mr. Coleman wrote:
“It could be that only the white race is to be done away with, not all races.”

It is true that the white race is the current oppressor-untermensch, having taken the place of the Jew or perhaps having been lumped together with the Jew. But it would have been a mistake to think that the Jew was the _only_ untermensch in the sights of the Nazis just because he was the highest priority target. Whatever tyranny stands in the way of the free and equal new man, whose will reigns supreme, eventually becomes a target. The difference between one form of liberalism (including its close cousin Naziism) and another is really just urgency, priorities, and tactics.

Is “Matt W.” bizzaro Matt? I was stunned by Matt W.’s comment.

Normal Matt and the other commentators have provided a sufficient response.

I would just like to answer. There is nothing immoral about interracial marriages. A Hispanic woman can charm me.

To imply that a white should be charmed by a Hispanic woman is superficial and snobbery. The implication might even be racist: those of the one master rainbow race being morally superior and oppressive towards those that dare to be different.

But I am grateful to Matt W. for raising the subject, because it needs raising over and over again until we all understand it better. (I have not meant to insult Matt W.)

Why I was stunned. I really thought Matt W. was Matt. I was not certain of my error until this evening, after reading the exchanges.

Who was that masked Matt?

Thanks to Matt for the confirmation.

And hopefully Matt W. will return with further issues.

Masked Matt?
Matt W. is my actual (abrieviated) name…sorry for any confusion with “regular” Matt.

My only real discomfort is with this continual assertion that I am “regular” or “normal” :-0

Welcome to VFR, Matt W.

Matt, those of us who enjoy reading your posts know better than that. You needn’t worry. ;-)

A few more thoughts on this:

Mr. Coleman wrote:
“It could be that only the white race is to be done away with, not all races.”

I replied:
“It is true that the white race is the current oppressor-untermensch, having taken the place of the Jew or perhaps having been lumped together with the Jew.”

and

“The difference between one form of liberalism (including its close cousin Naziism) and another is really just urgency, priorities, and tactics.”

So the white race is to present day liberals what the Jewish race was to the Nazis: the historical ethnic oppressor that must be eradicated in order for the free and equal new man to emerge.

There are some differences, though. The urgency is not as extreme, because the price of a loaf of bread isn’t doubling every day and the military and technological dynamics have changed dramatically. The priority is still essentially the same: first and foremost to eradicate the untermensch, in this case the white race; but the fact that the number of whites is far larger than the number of Jews changes the dynamic rather dramatically. Thus the tactics are quite different. Currently the untermensch is populous enough that he has to be recruited to be complicit in his own destruction; astonishingly the white race has become just that. Instead of rounding up the oppressor-untermenschen and killing them in concentration camps they are murdered in utero by the millions, while replacement populations are imported from elsewhere.

Another reason that the tactics have to be different is that Nazism has to be maintained as the “extreme right” boundary of legitimate political thought; so obviously whatever tactics are used they cannot overtly resemble Nazism.

The updated way is much more effective, don’t you think? 40 million plus untermensch have been exterminated, and the process has taken root as something that can go on indefinitely without serious opposition. In a truly stunning development, the very mothers of the untermensch children have been recruited, and are willingly complicit, in the extermination. So modern liberalism is a great improvement, in terms of its sustainability and effectiveness, over Nazism.

As a result it may even succeed in carrying out the final solution.

I like the questions. One can always make the case for intellectual diversity and turn it around on them.
““At the University of Michigan, we are committed to buiding an academically superb and widely diverse educational community. What would you as an individual bring to our campus community?””

AS a conservative, i would bring an underrepresented political viewpoint, exposing the students to intellectual diversity something not found when a collection of people of different colors all spout the same party line.

Matt, that’s an excellent analysis in your post of 11:45 PM.

Ron wrote:
“One can always make the case for intellectual diversity and turn it around on them.”

Yes, and then one can head off to the other university; the one that accepted him, because he didn’t “turn it around on them” on THAT application.

Thanks Unadorned, I do think that it is very helpful to view Nazism as just another form of liberalism. Nazism as Other (rather than as Brother) is part of what helps modern liberalism maintain its rosy picture of itself as a veneer covering over the mass murder.

Matt: Being still a relative newcomer I am not yet clear on your ‘untermensch’/’ubermensch’ terminology. If you have a moment to explain, or could point me back to a thread where the concepts were laid out, I’d appreciate that. :-)

Matt’s idea could be summed up very simply: We, the good and superior people (liberals, Africans, Bronze people, secular Jews, women, environmentalists, illegal aliens, paleocons, Arabs, Aryans), are being oppressed by the bad and inferior people (Republicans, Europeans, Anglos, believing Christians, men, corporations, nativists, neocons, Jews, Jews). Anything is justified in throwing off this oppression and crushing the oppressor. Humanity will then be returned to its proper state, a democracy of free and equal supermen.

Matt’s idea is sort of an analysis of the cult of victimology as used by liberals, Nazis, and so many others as Mr. Auster points out, as a political tool to enlist the gullible and naïve to their side.

Unadorned wrote:
“Matt’s idea is sort of an analysis of the cult of victimology as used by liberals, Nazis, and so many others as Mr. Auster points out, as a political tool to enlist the gullible and naïve to their side.”

Yes, but there is more than that. I think that the moderns who believe in these ideologies believe their own BS, if you will. It isn’t just a tool for duping the gullible: the modern liberal really does believe that a self-consciously white ethnicity has historically been an intellectually inferior but powerful oppressor (an untermensch), that freedom and equality (the emergence of the ubermensch) are stymied not by any flaws within themselves but by this oppressor, and that therefore self-consciously white ethnicity has to be exterminated. They really do believe that the world will be a better place when whites as a self-consciously distinct race are gone from the earth; that once that barrier to the emergence of the free and equal new man is gone the end of history in the liberal utopia will have finally arrived.

I quite agree with Matt on this. Liberals are the true religious fanatics. The whole belief system described is a religion - a counterfeit of Christianity which will bring us paradise now, just as soon as we liquidate the evil untermenschen standing in the way. The leftist vanguard of liberalism offers a parallel to the Wahabi vanguard of Islam. The difference is that they are much less honest and forthright about their ultimate goals than the Muslims and more patient - actively recruiting the gullible and naive.

It has been a good ten years since I was last a liberal (of the hawkish, libertarian-leaning still-believes-in-objective-morality kind that calls itself a “conservative”), but I remember it quite vividly. I am where I am after a long apostasy from liberalism, though by far the largest step was the initial repentance from viewing freedom and equal rights as the legitimate purpose of politics. I even went through a period of time in which I was grateful that I owned almost nothing; because I couldn’t justify the authority, backed by the guns of the police, to maintain ownership and keep out trespassers. So from a psychological perspective I’ve gotten a good look at liberalism from the inside, as it were, and I remember it well.

There is a line in the movie “Falling Down” (a rather bad movie overall as I recall) in which the Michael Douglas character stops for a minute in puzzlement and says “I’m the bad guy?” A rather awful and polemical movie, but I relate to that particular scene very well, though for quite different reasons than the Hollywood scriptwriter intended.

So the point is to get to my own personal view of the white race, as it were, at that time. I don’t claim that my own view was universal by any means, but it is important because it may help to clarify how someone can have a very radical Nazi-like view of the white race as oppressor-untermensch while 1) not at all thinking of himself as a radical, but in fact thinking of himself as a conservative Christian; and 2) actually being a member of the oppressor-class himself (I am a genetic mutt by all accounts, but mostly white European though not exclusively so. I have representative ancestors of many liberal victim classes: some who were persecuted and murdered by Catholics, by Protestants, by American colonists, by American Indians, by Yankees, by Confederates, you name it).

Anyway, the point is this: my view of _the white race_ at the time was that it was a historical oppressor that was already dead, that my generation had transcended that sort of offense against freedom and equality based on skin color, and that the fringe elements who talked about the white race as something important were dancing around a corpse (and good riddance anyway).

I think if you read the pages of National Review Online, for example, you will find a similar attitude. John Derbyshire is probably the most genuinely conservative of the writers there, and I confess that I have great affection for him. But at bottom, he is a liberal like the kind I once was, to wit:

http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire071003.asp

Derb’s are about the _least leftist_ of what are considered respectable opinion by any significant portion of the population.

So yes, liberals are the true religious fanatics. But at the same time liberalism dominates all respectable political discussion. You can’t say anything at all without the pinch of incense disparaging self-conscious whiteness, just as in Hitler’s Germany you couldn’t say anything at all without the pinch of incense disparaging Jews as a race.

Derbyshire says: “Beyond that one brief frisson of racial solidarity 30 years ago, I can’t say that being white has ever meant much to me.”

Derb’s column disparages whiteness studies as part of the multicult. It is worth disparaging whiteness studies for the right reason: that studies of the Anglo West already _ARE_ studies of the white race. Derb doesn’t oppose the muticult as the enemy of whites-qua-whites. No. A pinch of incense must be given.

“Beyond that one brief frisson of racial solidarity 30 years ago, I can’t say that being white has ever meant much to me.”

Indeed, and if being white does mean anything to someone then that someone doesn’t exist. The white race as oppressor-untermensch was killed decades ago; it is just a matter of waiting long enough for the body to decay.

Matt lays out the true dilemma we are in. Yes, psychologically and philosophically speaking, the white race qua white race has ALREADY been killed in the minds of whites, and that’s why there is no resistance to the ongoing attack on whiteness and white civilization. To speak of whiteness and the white West, as I do in my booklet Erasing America, marginalizes a person completely. People dismiss it, they don’t want anything to do with it.

But this only points to our task. Not to give up on the white race (because defending it seems hopeless), but to re-assert it against all prevailing opinion, and thus gradually move mainstream opinion back in a sane direction. However difficult this seems, there is simply no choice. It is a question of existence and survival.

Yes, thanks to Mr. Auster for that comment. The point of my posts isn’t to counsel despair; quite the contrary. My counsel is to know the enemy, and to utterly repent of his ways. If we don’t know him we can’t fight him; and if we don’t repent utterly of his ways we will be impaled on the gibbet of our own hypocrisy.

Matt also notes that Derbyshire does not protest the horrific “privilege walk” described in his article as an attack on whites, but sees it more as some multicultural absurdity. When I originally read the article I had missed Derbyshire’s revealing comment that ” … I can’t say that being white has ever meant much to me.” That’s a “right-wing” conservative speaking!

Mr. Auster wrote:
“When I originally read the article I had missed Derbyshire’s revealing comment that ” … I can’t say that being white has ever meant much to me.” That’s a “right-wing” conservative speaking!”

Oh, it is much, much worse than that! Derbyshire spends the entire first half of the article talking anecdotally about that one moment when his whiteness was important to him (but not really, you see, for the whole point of the opener is ironic). Derb’s moment of white solidarity was with a drunken loser who panhandled from him and said “that’s mighty white of you” as thanks for the gift. The whole point of the first half of Derb’s article is that whiteness doesn’t matter, so that he can thump the multiculturalists for acting as if it does.

Of course in objective reality race actually does matter, not all the time in all things but some of the time in some important things. So anyone who attempts to act as if it doesn’t - whether Derb or the multicults - will end up wrapped in contradictions.

People of one race have treated people of other races unjustly throughout history; it is true. It is far more difficult to be charitable and just than it is to make up a mindless rule like “race doesn’t matter” and attempt to follow it like a robot down its contradictory paths, that ironically always end in one form of unjust tyranny or another.

At the URL I posted my “response” to the Michigan diversity question. It sticks to the topic, is truthful (satirically), and is limited to 250 words.

I invite others who have web pages to do something similar.

Change of topic: In response to the above remark about critical mass of Native Americans, I once had a discussion with a local (California) Native American activist about a survey conducted at one of the local churches, regarding parishioners. It seems that an extraordinary number identified themselves as “Native American.” Apparently, a lot of the born-in-the-USA WWII generation Italians and Irish thought it was referring to them.

The activist was not bothered at all. He liked the idea of it creating the impression that there were a lot of Native Americans.