Diversity: History’s Pathway to Chaos
September 1, 2016 12:02 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
America’s successful melting pot should not be replaced with discredited salad-bowl separatism.
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history.
The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls, and myriad other African, Asian, and European communities spoke Latin, cherished habeas corpus, and saw being Roman as preferable to identifying with their own particular tribe. By the fifth century, diversity had won out but would soon prove a fatal liability.
Rome disintegrated when it became unable to assimilate new influxes of northern European tribes. Newcomers had no intention of giving up their Gothic, Hunnish, or Vandal identities.
The propaganda of history’s multicultural empires — the Ottoman, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the British, and the Soviet — was never the strength of their diversity. To avoid chaos, their governments bragged about the religious, ideological, or royal advantages of unity, not diversity.
Nor did more modern quagmires like Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Rwanda, or Yugoslavia boast that they were “diverse.” Instead, their strongman leaders naturally claimed that they shared an all-encompassing commonality.
When such coerced harmony failed, these nations suffered the even worse consequences of diversity, as tribes and sects turned murderously upon each other.
For some reason, contemporary America believes that it can reject its uniquely successful melting pot to embrace a historically dangerous and discredited salad-bowl separatism.
Is there any evidence from the past that institutionalizing sects and ethnic grievances would ensure a nation’s security, prosperity, and freedom?
America’s melting pot is history’s sole exception of e pluribus unum inclusivity: a successful multiracial society bound by a common culture, language, and values. But this is a historic aberration with a future that is now in doubt.
Some students attending California’s Claremont College openly demand roommates of the same race. Racially segregated “safe spaces” are fixtures on college campuses.
We speak casually of bloc voting on the basis of skin color — as if a lockstep Asian, Latino, black, or white vote is a good thing.
We are reverting to the nihilism of the old Confederacy. The South’s “one-drop rule” has often been copied to assure employers or universities that one qualifies as a minority.
Some public figures have sought to play up or invent diversity advantages. Sometimes, as in the cases of Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal, and Ward Churchill, the result is farce.
Given our racial fixations, we may soon have to undergo computer scans of our skin colors to rank competing claims of grievance.
How does one mete out the relative reparations for various atrocities of the past, such as slavery, the Holocaust, the American Indian wars, the Asian or Catholic exclusion laws, indentured servitude, or the mid-18th-century belief that the Irish were not quite human?
Sanctuary cities, in the manner of 1850s Richmond or Charleston invoking nullification, now openly declare themselves immune from federal law. Does that defiance ensure every city the right to ignore whatever federal laws it finds inconvenient, from the filing of 1040s to voting laws?
The diversity industry hinges on U.S. citizens still envisioning a shrinking white population as the “majority.” Yet “white” is now not always easily definable, given intermarriage and constructed identities.
In California, those who check “white” on Orwellian racial boxes are now a minority. Will white Californians soon nightmarishly declare themselves aggrieved minorities and thus demand affirmative action, encourage Viking-like names such as Ragnar or Odin, insert umlauts and diereses into their names to hype their European bona fides, seek segregated European-American dorms, and set up “Caucasian Studies” programs at universities?
Women now graduate from college at a higher rate than men. Will there be a male effort to ensure affirmative action for college admissions and graduation rates?
If the white vote reaches 70 percent for a particular candidate, is that really such a good thing, as it was considered to be when President Obama was praised for capturing 95 percent of the black vote?
It is time to step back from the apartheid brink.
Even onetime diversity advocate Oprah Winfrey has had second thoughts about the lack of commonality in America. She recently vowed to quit using the word “diversity” and now prefers “inclusion.”
A Latino-American undergraduate who is a student of Shakespeare is not “culturally appropriating” anyone’s white-European legacy, but instead seeking transcendence of ideas and a common humanity.
Asian-Americans are not “overrepresented” at premier campuses. Their high-profile presence should be praised as a model, not punished as aberrant by number-crunching bureaucrats.
African-Americans who excel in physics and engineering are not “acting white” but finding the proper pathways for their natural talents.
Being one-half Southeast Asian or three-quarters white is not the touchstone to one’s essence and is irrelevant to one’s character and conduct.
No one is impinging on anyone’s culture when blacks dye their hair blond, or when blondes prefer to wear cornrow braids.
Campuses desperately need unity czars, not diversity czars.
Otherwise, we will end up as 50 separate and rival nations — just like other failed states in history whose diverse tribes and races destroyed themselves in a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog war with one another.
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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion or Shipmate…You Can’t Have Both! by Brent Ramsey
Diversity, Equity And Inclusion Or Shipmate…You Can’t Have Both!
By Brent Ramsey
December 3, 2023
Views: 2194
According to widely accepted research including that of the military services themselves, organizations that are effective have common values, teamwork, unity, cohesion, and a shared vision of what it takes to be successful. The literature is full of training that stresses these values. DOD as required by Congress does annual surveys to determine how things are going. The very first question asked in the 2022 survey is about cohesion! The second question asked is about connectiveness. The third question is about engagement and commitment. The fourth question is about fairness. Despite these known factors, and despite the urgent problems that threaten the Navy’s ability to perform its mission, what appear to be the Navy’s priorities? What we see is a leadership obsessed by race and politics that only serve to divide people into categories of skin color or gender or sexual preference. Emphasis on race and politics is a recipe for division and disunity, not the traits that lead to effective organizations. STARRS has recently published hundreds of testimonies from serving and retired Airmen, Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines expressing their opposition to the identity politics ideology that now is widespread in the military. Those accounts can be found at STARRS. Examples abound of things the Navy does that creates a lack of unity and cohesion.
As the figures above prove, the Naval Academy is already tremendously diverse. There is only a tiny variance between the above statistics to national racial or ethnic demographics. So, why devote the manpower and financial resources to staffing a Diversity office at the Naval Academy?
For the Navy to be successful, teamwork and cohesion must be paramount. A unique concept has been at work for centuries and that concept is that of shipmates. The concept is explored in depth in my article Shipmates: A Dying Breed. In a ship at sea going in harm’s way impacts every sailor in the exact same way. If the ship sinks, everyone’s life is at risk. That is why in bootcamp, sailors are trained the way they are….to be part of a team. Everyone is treated the same…the same uniform, the same berthing accommodations, the same chow, the same training. You are trained to have your shipmate’s back and he or she has yours. Your race, your ethnicity, your gender, your sexual preference does not mean a thing. When aboard ship you will be a cog in a vast and complicated machine and every cog needs to concentrate on its part, its duty to keep the ship safe and functioning. Individualism goes out the window. The only thing important is to be an effective part of the team to keep the ship safe and to allow the ship to complete its mission. Unity of thought and behavior is paramount. The needs of the ship and safe navigation come first or lives are threatened. For the Navy to emphasize race and ethnicity through its Diversity and Equity ideology is a big mistake as it erodes the concept of a shipmate.
CAPT Brent Ramsey, (USN, ret.) is a writer on Defense matters. He has been featured in Washington Examiner, Real Clear Defense, Armed Forces Press, CD Media, American Thinker, and Patriot Post. He is a Vice President with the Calvert Group, a Board of Advisors member for the Center for Military Readiness and STARRS, and a member of the Military Advisory Group for Congressman Chuck Edwards (NC-11).