Quotes About Diversity

If there is an optimistic aspect of preferential doctrines, it is that they may eventually make so many Americans so sick of hearing of group labels and percentages that the idea of judging each individual on his or her own performance may become more attractive than ever.

The question as to whether flesh-and-blood people of indigenous ancestry today would have been better off had the Europeans not invaded can scarcely be asked, much less answered, because most flesh-and-blood contemporary American Indians would not exist if the Europeans had not invaded, since they are of European as well as indigenous ancestry. Nature is remarkably uncooperative with our moral categories. There is no way to unscramble an egg.

The swirl of their buzzwords—"access," "stigma," "progressive," "diversity," "crisis," etc.—shows a discernible pattern. What these innumerable buzzwords have in common is that they either (1) preempt issues rather than debate them, (2) set the anointed and the benighted on different moral and intellectual planes, or (3) evade the issue of personal responsibility

Geography is not egalitarian.

The actual track record of promoting separate group identities, whether called "Balkanization" or "diversity," has been appalling, in countries around the world.

The massive ethnic communities that make up the mosaic of American society cannot be adequately described as "minorities." There is no "majority.

Because this report considered "commitment to multicultural social studies education" to be crucial, it called for "extensive staff development" which would "address attitudes"—i.e., indoctrination—and which would extend even to the schools' clerical staffs and bus drivers.7 In short, the call for cultural "diversity" is a call for ideological conformity.

Whether the elite public high schools of New York were overwhelmingly Jewish in one era or overwhelmingly Asian in a later era, their lack of demographic "diversity" seems not to have adversely affected their educational performances or their graduates' achievements in later life. And that is what such schools are there for, not to present a tableau that matches fashionable preconceptions.

languages as Asians, who outnumber them nearly four to one.121 Linguistic diversity is not only a sign of cultural isolation and fragmentation, it contributes to the barriers

As late as 1876, there were more than a hundred foreign industrial workers in the Japanese railroad industry alone and, of these, 94 were British.

This mutual receptivity to each other's culture in the Middle Ages is now very much part of a long gone past. One revealing sign of today's lack of cultural receptivity to Western culture in the Middle East is that in today's Arab world— about 300 million people in more than 20 countries23— the number of books translated from other languages has been just one-fifth of the number translated by Greece alone, for a population of 11 million people.

An estimated one out of every five Africans is a Nigerian.

This has often been carried to the point of encouraging lagging groups to proudly cling to their own culture, or even resurrect it in some cases, with little concern that these groups' economic and educational lags might be— at least in part— a result of the cultures they were being encouraged to cling to.

Whether people are united by navigable waterways or cut off by rugged mountains or other geographical barriers has enormous cultural as well as economic and political significance.

Table 6.1 Median Family Income of Ethnic Groups in the United States, Ranked by Percentage of the National Average, 1969 Jewish 172% Japanese 132% Polish 115% Chinese 112% Italian 112% German 107% Anglo-Saxon 105% Irish 103% National Average 100% Filipino 99% West Indian 94% Cuban 80% Mexican 76% Puerto Rican 63% Black 62% Indian (American) 60%

While some theorists may tend to discuss people in the abstract, actual flesh-and-blood human beings differ enormously in their behavior, not just from individual to individual, but from group to group and from one culture to another. Various tests of honesty reveal very striking differences.

Despite beliefs in some quarters that education makes people more tolerant of other cultures and groups, it has been precisely individuals from newly educated groups, often lacking marketable skills, who have promoted group polarization, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Western

Many rubber estates kept records of the daily output of each tapper, and distinguished between the output of Chinese and Indian workers. The output of the Chinese was usually more than double that of the Indians, with all of them using the same simple equipment of tapping knife, latex cup and latex bucket. There were similar or even wider differences between Chinese, Indian and Malay smallholders. .

It is a painful irony that people who are promoting the make-believe equality of inclusion and diversity in schools are attacking charter schools that are producing the real equality of educational achievement.

that does not distinguish Germans from Europeans in general—or from human beings in general, when it comes to vile or vicious things being said or done to any number of ethnic or other minorities in countries around the world.

The era of mass education and the standardization of the English language left such expressions as marks of uneducated people in the American South

In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally. Fernand Braudel

Una sociedad que puede aprovechar todo tipo de talentos de todos los segmentos de su población tiene obvias ventajas sobre sociedades donde sólo se permite que los talentos de los pocos preseleccionados determinen su destino.

but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.