[Ringside at Reckoning] Affirmative action and its principal (if not at this point its only) legal justification -- "diversity" -- have been written about a zillion times. The most important thing I can add at this point takes root in what I used to do as a federal prosecutor, namely, to try to see what's really going on beneath the high-minded language, strip away the window dressing, and call things what they actually are.I have an example to work with. In criminal law, the fashionable trend is what the MSM calls "criminal justice reform." That's an opaque and vaguely appealing name, used to avoid saying what it actually is -- shorter sentences and earlier release for criminals, including not a few violent criminals who're going to do some robbing and mugging and killing when they get out. The reason "criminal justice reform" is deceptively named is, thus, easy to see: If it were called what it is, only a very few quite odd people would buy it. As public policy, it would go nowhere.
Therein lies the key to analyzing affirmative action's key "diversity" rationale. What "diversity" actually means is this: Based squarely on race, colleges will deny admission to whites and Asians -- admission they would get under normal, achievement-geared criteria -- and give it instead to less qualified blacks. In other words, it's rank racial discrimination. Without a pleasant-sounding disguise, it too would go nowhere. There's a reason its defenders use "holistic" and other antiseptic (if slightly mysterious) words in talking about it.
So the first among many things wrong with "diversity," and the tip-off to most of the others, is that it's dishonest. Like anything else that's being sold to you through dishonesty, your reaction should be to refuse to buy it on that ground alone. If the seller understands he needs to disguise the product in order to make the sales pitch, he's telling you all you need to know about his own assessment of it. You’d best understand.