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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

It is surprising, and disappointing, that in 2010 we still need to have a conversation about whether diversity is important. I'm especially surprised to see this come up on Hacker News, rather than some fringe site.

This debate has been going on for 40 years now. I would think by now its been established that diversity has importance in its own right, not just in what it does for individuals who are included on campus for non-traditional reasons, but also for all the other people on campus. Certainly, diversity on campus is important for everyone who aspires to any kind of leadership position, since any leader today will be leading in a diverse environment.

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Few would argue diversity isn't important. It is not terribly well established that cutting along racial boundaries is the correct way to establish diversity.

Shouldn't we give affirmative-action style bonuses to conservatives, since they are grossly underrepresented on campus? After all, everyone ought to agree that students should be exposed to such common viewpoints; whether you think that's because student education is being limited for lack of exposure to their different viewpoints or whether you consider the ideas so transparently false that students can be safely exposed to the ideas so that they can be shown how transparently false they are, using the same racial-diversity logic says that we ought to be giving huge conservative bonuses for admission and tenure positions. What advantage is "diversity" if the result is merely a rainbow of people all identically singing the praises of the white-liberal-sourced diversity ideals?

The affirmative action for diversity logic does not trivially obviously cover skin color issues. It argues for ideological diversity, then slides in race as a proxy for ideology when you aren't looking. I consider the entire race-based affirmative action line of logic pretty offensively racist if you actually analyze it.

(I'm not arguing in favor of conservative affirmative action bonuses. Look more closely if you think I just did.)

A black person cannot hide his blackness. Black people are currently perceived as lower class. Making it easier for them to enter universities means that they get to be upper class easier (it's not easy to break the class barrier).

What this implies is that there will be a diverse range of skin color across all classes, reducing the perception that black skin implies lower class.

Doing so only for conservatives does nothing to help this goal.

You may believe that, it may be a good argument. But it isn't the usual argument advanced in favor of affirmative action, as it is entirely novel to me.

It may be novel to you, but that's the point of affirmative action. It's not to help a particular person, it's to help an entire segment of society.

The argument being advanced for diversity is around building a diverse campus environment and helping out disadvantaged individuals. You do not hear about it helping out races. For one thing, even if that's a goal it would be impolitic to outright admit the point of affirmative action is to help out races; advocates of affirmative action have a hard enough time dodging accusations that the whole process is fundamentally racist as it is (and it's getting harder every year).

The concept of affirmative action has never been about individuals. It's a RACE-based correction for RACE-based discrimination. I don't know what makes you think it's not racial.

Your solution for the societal crisis you face is to keep those at the bottom at the bottom, just so that your kids will have a 0.002% higher chance of entering one of a few colleges.

You have a large underclass of people whose parents were raised in institutionalised dicrimination. These people are the lowest caste of your society. There is a policy in place that favours a very few of these people to get into spots they would not otherwise get into.

Without this, the status-quo would continue to exist. The problem is this - the status quo is pretty bad. Blacks are less educated, less likely to get jobs, need more welfare, have higher crime rate.

To me, getting more into college seems like it would solve some of those problems.

If you can't see a distinction between a race and the members of the race, I would contend you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. I recognize this isn't the politically correct solution and I don't care.

"Your solution"

Wrong. I have not advocated a solution, only the proper questions.

I don't question the arguments. I question their temporal relevancy. So let me try asking you a question that nobody else seems to be able to answer: When are we done? What concrete criterion do we use to figure out when to shut off the counter-racism?

How about when the poverty rate of blacks in your country is not 25%? Or when the average black family has perhaps 80% or 90% of the income of the average white family, up from the current 60%?

If Diversity is such a strength, how come the homogeneous Chinese, Japanese, and Indians (ok, there is some diversity in India, but only due to a high population over a wide area) are kicking our "diverse" butts in so many fields?

They are in a few areas but never creativity.

America is very diverse, and it's the number 1 economy in the world, even though a place like china has 4 times as many people.

Europe, which is pretty diverse, is also massively successful.

Scandinavia?

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