Diversity's Betrayal

with John McWhorter

One of the tragedies of “diversity” as it’s now understood in university administration offices is that it trivializes and constricts what should be one of the most challenging and enriching aspects of higher education. An 18-year-old college freshman leaves home and finds herself suddenly amidst thousands of new people whose experiences are nothing like her own. She encounters ideas that she has never before encountered. She reads books that she would never have otherwise read. Exposure to that diversity of people, ideas, and texts has the potential to transform the student, to broaden her world, to open her mind.

Experiences like these can be uncomfortable. To a certain degree, they should be uncomfortable. If you want to grow as a human being, discomfort is the price you pay, and it’s well worth it. So when, in the name of “diversity,” universities bend over backward to shelter students from that transformative discomfort and to assure them that they’ll only have to consort with “people who look like them” if they so choose, what else can you call it but a perversion of the university’s mission? If students are not only allowed but encouraged to seek out only those ideas and experiences that reflect what they already know, the college experience risks becoming little more than an exercise in narcissism.

In this excerpt from a live event in New York sponsored by the University of Austin’s Mill Institute and moderated by Ilana Redstone, John McWhorter and I discuss why seeking out “people who look like you” undermines what college—and indeed the world—has to offer. When universities nudge students into identitarian cliques in the name of “diversity” it not only debases the term, it risks debasing the intellectual and existential journey universities ought to be nurturing.

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ILANA REDSTONE: So let me switch gears a little bit to this question of representation. And John, I know you wrote about this not that long ago for the New York Times. One of the questions around affirmative action or one of the arguments has to do with this idea of, well, I guess two things. One is diversity being a good on its own and having a value on its own. And the other idea with representation is that there's a benefit to people seeing other people in positions of power and authority that look like they do.

And so I'm wondering if you can speak to that idea that people need to see people who look like them in order to feel inspired or accepted or motivated or whatever. How do you think about that?

GLENN LOURY: Okay, I'll go first. I mean, there's a social scientific proposition, or psychology or something like that, which would turn on the question of whether or not individuals are motivated in their own aspiration and behavior by identifying with others that they can see along certain dimensions that look like them. And then we could try to measure that. I'm not qualified to address that. I don't know the literature very well, so I'll leave that to others. But I want to step up a minute from the question and ask, what do we look like? We're all created in the image of God, goes a certain line. So there, I suppose, what we're looking at is not the texture of the hair or the shape of bones in the face or the color of the skin. We're looking at something about the intrinsic humanity of the person. 

Is that what we're supposed to see? Are we supposed to see another human being? “Looks like me.” Male? Heterosexual? Do I have to see someone who is over 70 years old before I can take inspiration from their behavior? I don't mean to make fun of something because there's a very important message here. When I tell a kid, “If you don't see another black person, you don't have any inspiration,” I'm telling them that this [points to face] is what they are. That's not what they are. Who are they supposed to identify? They're supposed to identify with other Africans? Or are they supposed to identify as the most privileged young people on the planet with others who have this great privilege? Are they supposed to identify as American citizens? Are they supposed to identify as Christians, Jews, or Muslims? So I think it begs many questions to put that in that way, “to see others who look like me.”

And I think the reflexive answer [is], it's a bean count. “I've seen enough black lesbian women that I know, as a black lesbian woman, that I'm in a place of belonging” trivializes the great questions of, who are we? Which is what you come to a university to learn how to explore.

JOHN MCWHORTER: I never understood that line. I never got it. That you need to see teachers who look like you, you need to have other students who look like you. I had to be taught that that was the way I was supposed to feel. I know what I look like. I can look in the mirror. I had parents. They were black, too. Had a family, had friends, mostly when I was a kid, black friends. I didn't need to see black people in my books. You looked at TV and by the 70s there were enough black people. Probably not as many as now. Definitely not. But I didn't miss it, because if I look somewhere, I don't wanna see me. I wanna see the world. I wanna see something else. I don't go on a walk in the woods in order to see blackness. I go in order to see a squirrel or a creek or something. I don't look at TV thinking I want to see people doing things that I've seen my relatives do it. You want to see something else.

And yet, no. That's not right. And I know that there's that Times piece. I don't read the comments, but in this case, I didn't need to. Every second comment was, “John McWhorter thinks he's so special. He thinks he's so smart. He likes teaching himself languages. But that's not what everybody's like.” But no. That business that to be a curious black person who doesn't need to see themselves is somehow disloyal, that's only because in, say, 1932, you couldn't see yourself in popular culture, and black people just dealt with it. Your blackness was you and your life, and then you went and you saw a movie like Dinner at Eight, and that was pretty much all there was. And no one really complained. Of course, it's better to have the representation that we have now. But that idea that you're being deprived by not seeing yourself in your education, in your popular culture. 

I'm reading a book right now where there's this wonderful chapter on Du Bois. He would've been horrified. He's learning German, he's talking about Kant, et cetera. Nobody told him that he wasn't black enough. That didn't come up. The only people who said that to him, frankly, were white people. And yet here in our post-1966 age, you have that line.

I've never heard a Chinese-American kid say it. They don't need to see Chineseness in their teachers. And they weren't saying it even when there weren't so many Chinese-American students around them. And I know that because I went to college when there were very few. That's something that black people and Latino people are trained to say, and I don't know if we really believe it. 

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Or if we're that afraid of white people, we can't be comfortable until we see one of our own? Again, nobody was told to think that way until 1966. Here, Glenn, I think it's a pose that we're encouraged to take. “White people make me nervous. I need to see black people.” No white people don't make you that nervous. In 2023, you're told that you're supposed to say that they do, because it gives you a sense of identity. But it's an act, and it's a dangerous one because it stanches curiosity, and curiosity is what makes a human being human.

I wanna do this thing that I do when John and I talk, which is steelman and try to see if I can't articulate the best of the other side. 

JOHN MCWHORTER: This is gonna be like we're doing one of our things! 

So I am a black lesbian woman, say. That's not a joke. I'm just saying, it's counterfactual, but suppose so. And I'm wondering whether the institution is accommodating of people like me, because I have encountered in my life rejection and prejudice and racism and hatred and homophobia in other settings, and I wonder whether or not I will. My anticipation of that ill treatment can paralyze me. It causes me pain and discomfort. It keeps me from doing the best that I can do. 

So I look up, and I see that there are a few black lesbian openly identifying people like me who have positions of influence in the institution. I feel more comfortable. And in that comfort, I can relax and be myself. I can stop balling my fist up and shielding myself against anticipated injury, and I can flourish. So if the institution wants people like me to feel comfortable in their company, then what would be wrong with accommodating my desire to see someone, within reason, who looks like me?

JOHN MCWHORTER: Well, black lesbian, I understand where you're coming from, and certainly it's better if there are people who you feel are one of your own around you. Definitely. But if you really are balling up your fist, if you're really that uncomfortable when you don't see people like you around you—in our times, as opposed to a distant day—if you're that uncomfortable, then there's something dysfunctional going on, and you need to find some kind of compassionate help.

Now these days, we're supposed to feel that when it comes to race and identity issues, I'm not supposed to say that. I'm not supposed to say that you need to be trained out of that reflexive crouch. But no, I see no exception at all in the twenty-first century, given the sorts of things that you are likely to face, or I should really say not face, I don't see that you need to be that nervous about not seeing yourself in this setting. And given that you're going to go out into the world and find that people like you are rare in many settings that you're going to go into, I think you should be prepared. Life is not always comfortable, and that's part of what college is for.

So with all compassion, I say, if you're that nervous, then you need cognitive behavioral therapy that will make you happier. Because you're not always gonna be surrounded by people like you. 

ILANA REDSTONE: It actually makes me think that your example, your attempt to steelman that position, which is great. 

JOHN MCWHORTER: Glenn is so good at that.

ILANA REDSTONE: You are very good at that. You kind of proved your own point in the sense that you're putting on the hat of a black lesbian. Part of the problem, you were saying just a few minutes ago, that it's a question of how we fundamentally see ourselves. So the fact that she feels that way is fundamentally, at least in part, a result of the way that she has internalized to see herself, in this hypothetical person. And her existence is a result of the problem that you just defined a minute ago. 

Yeah, and cognitive therapy. I mean, I'm mentally ill because I'm ... ?

JOHN MCWHORTER: CBT works. You go sixteen times, and you're a new person. 

It seems to me that this issue could be raised in many settings. It could be raised in an employment setting. You come into a company and you look up and down the corridor and you don't see anybody who looks like you. You don't know if you're welcome there or not. It's especially important in the educational setting, about the pedagogy, about what do you read. Do I read books by people who look like me? What do you study? Do I study languages that are spoken by people who look like me? And who are your heroes? Are my heroes restricted to people who have a biography that parallels my own? Can I get outta my own time? Can I get outta my own century? Can I commune, like Du Bois did? 

How does he put it in The Souls of Black Folks? He admires Shakespeare, and Shakespeare winces not. You know, I may be an outcast amongst the Jim Crow-segregated Americans whom I have to encounter on a daily basis. But let me sit with the master, Shakespeare. Let me get command of the English language. Let me make it my own and he winces not and I am a more fully realized as a human being when I do so. I don't think James Baldwin, for that matter, restricted himself in his reading of literature to black authors. I don't think Ralph Ellison, for that matter, was concerned mainly to devote his intellectual development by attending to the things of people who looked like him. And I know that wasn't true about Frederick Douglass. I know it wasn't true about W.E.B. Du Bois, and so on and so forth. 

In other words, bottom line, suppose your goal is to advance the wellbeing of the race of people who look like you. You inhibit yourself from realizing fully your potential to advance that goal by restricting your attention to the doings of people who look like you.

JOHN MCWHORTER: I would add also to someone who's listening to us and thinking, “Yes, but those were people from the past. Most of the pictures are in black and white. That's a long time ago. They're smoking and drinking martinis. And here we are now, and it's different.” And so a modern black person is supposed to only read Alice Walker and Walter Mosley, even though they read Tolstoy. They were old fashioned. 

That doesn't cohere. That doesn't make sense. The only way that would make sense is if racism is worse. Now, what is it that we know now that Ralph Ellison didn't? I think only a serious partisan would deny racism is not as bad now as it was in 1950, so we can afford even more than them to read Joyce Carol Oates as well as Gayl Jones, et cetera, not less. And so if W.E.B. Du Bois read all over the place, we can even more. Lynching was legal in the prime of his life. We live in very different times. So we can't reject those people because the photos are black and white. It's better now. We have a widened opportunity.

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