{"id":114571,"date":"2018-07-16T12:01:01","date_gmt":"2018-07-16T11:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=114571"},"modified":"2018-07-14T15:50:30","modified_gmt":"2018-07-14T14:50:30","slug":"the-con-of-diversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/07\/the-con-of-diversity\/","title":{"rendered":"The Con of Diversity"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Mr. Fish \/ Truthdig<\/p><\/div>\n

8 Jul 2018 – <\/em>In 1970, when black students occupied the dean\u2019s office at Harvard Divinity School to protest against the absence of African-American scholars on the school\u2019s faculty, the white administration was forced to respond and interview black candidates. It asked James Cone<\/a>, the greatest theologian of his generation, to come to Cambridge, Mass., for a meeting. But the white power structure had no intention of offering Cone a job. To be black, in its eyes, was bad enough. To be black, brilliant and fiercely independent was unpalatable. And so the job was given to a pliable African-American candidate who had never written a book, a condition that would remain unchanged for the more than three decades he taught at Harvard.<\/p>\n

Harvard got what it wanted. Mediocrity in the name of diversity. It was a classic example of how the white power structure plays people of color. It decides whom to promote and whom to silence. When then-Maj. Colin Powell helped cover up<\/a> the 1968 massacre of some 500 civilians at My Lai in Vietnam he was assured a glittering career in the Army. When Barack Obama proved obedient to the Chicago political machine, Wall Street and the Democratic Party establishment he was promoted to the U.S. Senate and the presidency.<\/p>\n

Diversity in the hands of the white power elites\u2014political and corporate\u2014is an advertising gimmick. A new face, a brand, gets pushed out front, accompanied by the lavish financial rewards that come with serving the white power structure, as long as the game is played. There is no shortage of women (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Donna Brazile), Latinos (Tom Perez and Marco Rubio) or blacks (Vernon Jordan, Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson) who sell their souls for a taste of power.<\/p>\n

Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/a> in his book \u201cWe Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy\u201d writes that \u201cBarack Obama is directly responsible for the rise of a crop of black writers and journalists who achieved prominence during his two terms.\u201d But this was true only<\/em> for those black writers like Coates and Michael Eric Dyson<\/a> who were obsequious cheerleaders for Obama. If, like Cornel West<\/a>, you were black and criticized Obama you were isolated and attacked by Obama surrogates as a race traitor.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor those who didn\u2019t support Obama it was the lonely time,\u201d said Glen Ford<\/a>, the executive editor of the Black Agenda Report<\/a>, when we spoke recently. \u201cIt\u2019s like A.D. and B.C. Before Obama time, my politics reflected that of a black commentator, probably within a respectable black political spectrum. I\u2019m looking at a fax, \u2018NAACP September 8, 2007. NAACP regional leader.\u2019 I got this after giving a keynote speech in Little Rock, Ark., in commemoration of the events in Little Rock in \u201957<\/a>. You see what I\u2019m saying? I could do that, even as late as 2007. Then Obama happened. It was a wonderful time for people who endorsed Obama. If you didn\u2019t endorse Obama, you were verboten in the community. All of a sudden you were ostracized.\u201d<\/p>\n

The absence of genuine political content in our national discourse has degraded it to one between racists and people who don\u2019t want to be identified as racists. The only winners in this self-destructive cat fight are corporations such as Goldman Sachs, whose interests no American can vote against, along with elite institutions dedicated to perpetuating the plutocracy. Drew G. Faust, the first woman president of Harvard University, whose appointment represented a triumph for diversity, upon her retirement was appointed to the board of Goldman Sachs, a role for which she will receive compensation<\/a> totaling over half a million dollars a year. A new and \u201cdiverse\u201d group of Democratic Party candidates, over half of whom have been recruited<\/a> from the military, the CIA, the National Security Council and the State Department, is hoping to rise to political power based on the old con.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an insult to the organized movements of people these institutions claim to want to include,\u201d Ford said. \u201cThese institutions write the script. It\u2019s their drama. They choose the actors, whatever black, brown, yellow, red faces they want.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think a black left should be investing any political capital or energy into getting Barack Obamas into a Harvard,\u201d Ford said, \u201cor believing it can transform Harvard or any of these ruling-class universities from the inside out, any more than it can transform the Democratic Party from the inside out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ford points out that \u201cdiversity\u201d has been substituted by the white power elites for \u201caffirmative action.\u201d And, he argues, diversity and affirmative action are radically different. The replacement of affirmative action with diversity, he says, effectively \u201cnegates African-American history as a legal basis for redress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once the Supreme Court in its\u00a01978 Bakke decision<\/a> outlawed \u201cquotas\u201d for racial minorities, ruling institutions were freed from having to establish affirmative action programs that would have guaranteed a space for those traditionally excluded. The Trump administration\u2019s recent reversal of an Obama-era policy that called on universities to consider race as a factor in admissions is an attempt to eradicate even diversity. President Trump and his racist enablers, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are resegregating America.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, \u2018You are free to compete with all the others,\u2019 and still justly believe you have been completely fair \u2026 ,\u201d President Lyndon Johnson said in 1965 to the graduating class of Howard University. \u201cThis is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity\u2014not just legal equity but human ability\u2014not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson\u2019s call, along with that of Martin Luther King Jr., was swiftly sabotaged by white, liberal elites, who divorced racial justice from economic justice. White liberals could live with laws prohibiting segregation but not with giving up some of their financial and social privilege.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhite liberals are not seeking justice,\u201d Ford said. \u201cThey\u2019re seeking absolution. Anything that absolves them of responsibility for what this society has done, they welcome it. They\u2019re hungry for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe legal, as well as moral, basis for affirmative action lay in the culpability of the United States and all of its layers of government in the enslavement and Jim Crow \u2018hobbling\u2019 of African-Americans\u2014a unique history of oppression of a specific people<\/em> that requires institutional redress,\u201d Ford has written<\/a>. \u201cOtherwise, the legacies of these crimes will reproduce themselves, in mutating forms, into infinity. Once the specificity of the Black American<\/em> grievance was abandoned, affirmative action became a general catch-all of various historical wrongs. Stripped of its core, affirmative action morphed into \u2018diversity,\u2019 a vessel for various aggrieved groups that was politically versatile (and especially useful to the emerging Black deal makers of electoral and corporate politics), but no longer rooted in Black realities.\u00a0The affirmative action of Dr. King and President Johnson was a species of reparations, a form of redress for specific and eminently documentable harms done to African Americans, as a people<\/em>. It was understood as a social debt owed to a defined class<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2018Diversity,\u2019 \u201d Ford wrote, \u201crecognizes no such debt to a particular people, or to any people at all. Rather, its legal basis is the \u2018compelling interest\u2019 of public institutions in a diversified student body (or faculty).\u201d<\/p>\n

Diversity does not force the white power structure to address racial injustice or produce results within the black underclass. This feint to diversity was abetted, Ford points out, by black elitists who found positions for themselves in the power structure in exchange for walking away from the poor and marginalized.<\/p>\n

Ford calls these black elitists \u201crepresentationalists\u201d who \u201cwant to see some black people represented in all sectors of leadership, in all sectors of society. They want black scientists. They want black movie stars. They want black scholars at Harvard. They want blacks on Wall Street. But it\u2019s just representation. That\u2019s it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The plague of diversity lies at the core of our political dysfunction. The Democratic Party embraces it. Donald Trump\u2019s Republican Party repudiates it. But as a policy it is a diversion. Diversity has done little to ameliorate the suffering of the black underclass. Most blacks are worse off than when King marched in Selma. African-Americans have\u00a0lost over half of their wealth<\/a> since the financial collapse of 2008 because of falling homeownership rates and job loss. They have the highest rate of poverty at 27.4 percent, followed by Hispanics at 26.6 percent and whites at 9.9 percent. And 45.8 percent of black children under 6 live in poverty, compared with 14.5 percent of white children in that age group. Forty percent of the nation\u2019s homeless are African-Americans although blacks make up only 13 percent of our population. African-Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites.<\/p>\n

Diversity does not halt the stripping away of our civil liberties, the assault on our ecosystem or the punishing effects of mandated austerity and deindustrialization. It does not confront imperialism. Diversity is part of the mechanics of colonialism. A genuine revolutionary, Patrice Lumumba<\/a>, was replaced with the pliant and corrupt Mobutu Sese Seko<\/a>. Both were black. But one fought the colonial tyrants and the other served them. A political agenda built solely around \u201cdiversity\u201d is a smokescreen for injustice.<\/p>\n

The victory by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez<\/a> over the powerful Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley in a Democratic primary in Brooklyn last month is not a victory for diversity, although Ocasio-Cortez is a woman of color. It is a victory of political substance over the empty rhetoric of the Democratic Party. Ocasio-Cortez defied the party establishment as an avowed member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She could not even get a pre-election endorsement from Bernie Sanders, her mentor, who is playing Faust to Chuck Schumer\u2019s Mephistopheles. She calls for Medicare for all, the abolishment of ICE, a federal jobs program and an end to the wars in the Middle East and has denounced Israel\u2019s massacre of unarmed Palestinians. She stands for something. And it is only when we stand for something, including reparations for African-Americans, that we have a chance to dismantle corporate tyranny.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always felt, in the early \u201960s when I was just a kid, that the silent partner, sometimes reluctant although still a partner, in the civil rights movement were the corporations who wanted a unified market,\u201d Ford said. \u201cJim Crow was a big anomaly in terms of creating a more unified market in the United States. You can\u2019t have an Atlanta skyline, with its magnificent elevators, with Jim Crow. Not only would Atlanta not be an international city, it couldn\u2019t be a national city with Jim Crow. The corporate forces wanted to break down Jim Crow and explicit color discrimination. It standardized the market. This is what capitalists do. The Democratic Party is not behaving any differently than the corporations over the past 50 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not worried by the Trump phenomenon,\u201d Ford said. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t scare me. It\u2019s disconcerting. But it doesn\u2019t scare me. I\u2019m far more afraid of the space that it gives to the corporatists. It\u2019s to their advantage. Trump defines the white man\u2019s party\u2019s space. It\u2019s big. It\u2019s no joke. It can win presidential elections. It can win again. It needs money from corporate Republicans, but it doesn\u2019t need anything else from them. The white man\u2019s party more clearly defines the space the Democrats claim. It\u2019s everybody who is not an overt racist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think Trump will ever beat Obama\u2019s records in terms of deportation<\/a>,\u201d Ford went on. \u201cWe should be fighting U.S. immigration policy. But that isn\u2019t Trump. We should be organizing against Amazon taking over a whole city. But that isn\u2019t Trump. Will Trump\u2019s next pick for the Supreme Court be different from any pick that a Republican would make? In fact, because he\u2019s crazy, he might fuck up and make a bad pick for himself. He ain\u2019t deep enough to pick the worst guy. He hasn\u2019t read the Federalist Papers.\u201d<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for <\/em>The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and<\/em> The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at <\/em>The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper\u2019s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the <\/em>Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The <\/em>Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges\u2019 original columns in <\/em>Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009 and again in 2011. The LAPC also granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his <\/em>Truthdig essay \u201cOne Day We\u2019ll All Be Terrorists<\/a>.\u201d Hedges is a senior fellow at <\/em>The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 truthdig.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8 Jul 2018 – Racial diversity in the hands of the ruling elites\u2014political and corporate\u2014is a tool for preserving white privilege, wealth and power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":81932,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}