I try to be open-minded about diversity. That includes, most importantly, admitting that I might well be wrong. So I wonder about my bias against bias.
Ironically, I am intolerant of intolerance. The problem is that the attempt to avoid assumptions about others, based on their background, requires the rejection of a common attitude. I’d prefer to be realistic. Perhaps my friends will regard what I have to say as controversial, but they know that inspires me all the more.
Opponents of racial diversity often style themselves as proponents of intellectual diversity. These positions are not mutually exclusive. No doubt there are advocates who wish to hear multiple viewpoints being expressed on campus without the speakers suffering adverse consequences, who are sincere in their beliefs. Racial diversity and intellectual diversity, however, are related. It is on the very issue of our differences, biological and cultural, real and imagined, that society displays the greatest range of opinions. Those of us who aspire to create institutions of higher education that offer access and equality, in more than rhetorical terms, should bear in mind the profound disagreement about what constitutes unfair discrimination.
I will explain in concrete terms. Here is a hypothesis that is descriptive, not normative: throughout history and even around the world today, it was not and remains not at all unusual to assume a person’s bloodline offers true insight into their probable behavior. That is a claim about the reality around us, not a statement that such conditions are ideal.
Yet that is the essence of prejudice and profiling. Whether to trust someone or not has depended on whether their “people” were friend or foe, from this village or that tribe. Each collection of human beings was said to have distinctive characteristics, corresponding somehow to their cuisines or the surrounding climate. In the next province, they would swear that those folks over there were properly renowned as hot-tempered as they themselves were sweet.
The American consensus, achieved through the civil rights movement if threatened in contemporary politics, is that such reactions are inappropriate. Persons should be treated as individuals rather than representatives of groups. Even if there is a bit of truth to the stereotype, it is a generalization that will cost more than it will benefit, including morally. Among the assertions that demagogues like to make is that they are honest, everyone else hypocritical. Grant them a “maybe.”
People who declare that they do not generalize or are “color-blind” are naive or willful. Everyone considers characteristics that are visible in assessing strangers. It may be rational. We shy away, instantly and some would argue instinctively, from someone who is moving erratically down the street, shouting obscenities, without pondering if she is afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome. She is presumed to be dangerous. Another person’s race is difficult to not notice and hard to forget. If she is ambiguous, we are curious, despite our awareness it would be rude to ask outright. Our hunches and intuitions, positive and negative, are right there beneath the surface.
