byShelby Steele

Robert J . and Marion E. Oster Senior FellowHoover Inst itut ion

d e l i v e r e d a t :College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Monday October 11, 2010

“Is Diversity a Threat to Our Common Values”

The

Glen H. Hiner Distinguished Lecture

About Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He joined Hoover in 1994 and is known for his writings on race and social issues both in American society and the larger world.

Steele received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990 for his book The Content of Our Character. Other book publications include White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, and A Bound Man. He has written extensively for major publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, and Fortune, and was, for many years, a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine. He has appeared on national current affairs news programs including Nightline, 60 Minutes, Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers, and C-Span with Brian Lamb.

Steele has also written and narrated two documentaries: “Jefferson’s Blood” for Frontline (WGBH, Boston, 2003) and “Seven Days in Bensonhurst” for Frontline (1990), which received an Emmy, the Writer’s Guild Award, and the San Francisco Film Festival Award.

In 2004 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal, and in 2006, he received the Bradley Prize for his contributions to the study of race and social policy in America.

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“Is Diversity a Threat to Our Common Values?” Dr. Steele: Thank you very much for that warm introduction.

Glen and I are actually neighbors. We live about two houses apart out in California. I can tell you that Glen is indeed a West Virginia fan. When West Virginia loses, people come to me and say, “Is he OK? You think he’ll get through the afternoon?”

Thank you, Glen and Ann, for inviting me and showing such wonderful hospitality all weekend. We saw the game the other day. It’s been a wonderful trip that we won’t forget. So, thanks to both of you very much for including Rita and me in all of this.

I want to talk about a difficult subject, diversity. Is diversity a threat to our common values? If my reputation has preceded me, then you will know that my answer to this question is yes, diversity is a threat.

How did we, as a culture, as a society, arrived at a policy like diversity? Why do we have a need for it? Policies of diversity are pervasive in one institution after another in American life today: the corporate world, the academic world, government agencies, and so on. It is a very entrenched “ideology” at this point. And, I think, one that ends up not serving us very well. So where did it come from?

First, some quick criticisms. “Diversity” promises many things. It promises intellectual stimulation. Yet it functions as a dogma, as an ideology, one that works by coercion rather than by reason or persuasion. If you want a career today in most American institutions, you have to sign on to diversity whether you understand what it is or how it functions. You simply can’t move forward unless you sign on to it.

Diversity is very rarely openly discussed in institutions; it is very rarely debated. If one has reservations about it, one can very quickly find oneself stigmatized as a racist, as a sexist, or as homophobic. The pressure to prove one’s innocence is so profound that people sign on to it involuntarily.

However “diversity” does not achieve intellectual stimulation. Instead, it suppresses intellectual stimulation. It breeds a kind of fearfulness and uniformity.

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Diversity promises to bring mutual respect between different groups, races, ethnicities, the two genders, and so forth. But in reality, it breeds a kind of low-level resentment because it functions by coercion rather than by persuasion. Ironically, rather than bring people of different backgrounds together, it often times causes one group to feel resentful of what seems to be an advantage given to another group.

Diversity promises to bring open-mindedness. And yet, it brings a kind of political correctness that is the opposite of open-mindedness. It acts as a dogma – a repressive ideology – that one again is coerced into supporting.

Diversity promises to bring fairness, but often it creates unfairness. People sense that to execute a policy of diversity one must often create a double standard, where one group may be preferred over another group. Therefore, diversity often leads to the opposite of fairness.

I think that diversity inevitably lowers standards. The only way you can be inclusive in the way that diversity is usually practiced is by lowering standards — by not having a single standard, but having a double standard.

I also believe that diversity often encourages a victim-focused identity in the people it claims to want to help. My advantage is not my talent as an individual, but the fact that I belong to a group that has a history in this country of being victimized. Policies of diversity establish an incentive to cling to a victim identity because that identity becomes one’s advantage.

Of course, to think of one’s self in this way is self-defeating.

I think diversity also tends to stigmatize the very people it is tries to help. There is often the suspicion that the beneficiaries of diversity have somehow gained admission to a corporation or an educational institution by a double standard, by a group preference of some kind. When that happens, people are stigmatized with precisely the inferiority they are laboring to overcome.

I remember writing an essay some years ago on affirmative action. I went around to several campuses in California. I remember a student I talked to on one campus who told me he was a math major. He said, “You know, I’m really good at math. I’m good at math, but in my math class, I feel like I have an AA stamp on my forehead. People think I’m there because I’m black, not because I’m a good math student, but I’m really a good math student.”

This was painful for me to hear because he probably is a very good math student. Why has a policy that breeds self-doubt into this young man? Here was somebody who was trying to overcome, was trying to develop, and was not able to get credit for his talent as an individual. Nothing he did erased the stigma of inferiority.

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I can tell many stories like this. But, how did we come to this place as a society? How did we become a people who could disregard some of our most sacred principles and human dignity itself?

The answer begins with the fact that civilized societies — and America is certainly a civilized society — are also moral organisms. Civilized societies have an inherent moral accountability in the same way that individuals do. The sins of one generation not only stigmatize subsequent generations but also make these ensuing generations responsible for reforming their forbears’ misdeeds — misdeeds they never even committed.

The proof that a society is a moral organism — that it is civilized — is that it is capable of hypocrisies. You have to be civilized to be hypocritical. You have to know that what you say you believe is not what you do.

Let me share a couple of examples of hypocrisy. Thomas Jefferson, certainly one of our greatest presidents, wrote the immortal words, “All men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights.” Immortal words. There had to have been a long moral evolution across the entire history of western civilization to arrive at words like that.

There had to have been a Renaissance, which there was, in Europe. Then, there had to be a Protestant Reformation, during which men put reason into competition with God. These movements were enormous evolutionary steps forward in the human condition.

There had to be Enlightenment, a movement that also celebrated reason. And out of that celebration came science, and the scientific method.

When Thomas Jefferson sat down to write those immortal words, so much human and moral evolution had happened that he could see what was right, what was good. And he said, “All men are created equal.” Yet, Thomas Jefferson never lived a single day of his life without being supported by the sweat of slaves. Every day of his life.

The way Jefferson lived is a stunning example of hypocrisy precisely because Thomas Jefferson knew better. Knew better. He could not have written those words if he did not know better. All of the founding fathers knew better but they went along with slavery anyway. Thus from the very beginning, we had this terrible hypocrisy at the core of American society.

Germany offers another example of hypocrisy. Germany was a part of the long evolution of civilization – the renaissance, the Protestant reformation, the enlightenment. It produced great scientists, great artists, great musicians, and yet in the middle of the 20th century the Germans said, “Oh, you know what we’ll do? We’ll round up all the Jews and we’ll kill them.” Germany knew better and Germany has never been the same.

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Societies can quietly live with their own evil because these evils are rationalized away. America lived with three centuries of slavery and another 100 years of racial segregation. White male supremacy was the ideology — the rationalization — that allowed Americans to live innocent of their inhumanity to blacks.

Societies only become accountable to practices of evil when they finally openly acknowledge their misdeeds. The acknowledgement of the misdeed is what establishes the hypocrisy. The irony is that just when a society has the moral courage to acknowledge its wrong doings is when it loses moral authority and the very legitimacy of the society comes into question.

Everybody knew that segregation was wrong. Yet, most Americans lived comfortably with this injustice. What Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement tried to do was to establish the historical mistreatment of Black Americans as an hypocrisy. King wanted to have this historical injustice seen as a betrayal of the principles of a civilized nation. He achieved that in the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. The Civil Rights Bill was, in fact, the acknowledgement of the evil that America had committed against blocks for centuries and the acknowledgment of American hypocrisy.

I think of the 1960s as the most transformative decade in all of American history. I call it the “era of the great acknowledgement” where America, for the very first time in its history, acknowledged its racism, its sexism and its mistreatment of other minorities – Hispanics, Asians, and homosexuals. For the first time in its history, America had to openly live with its hypocrisies.

Hypocrisy was seen everywhere. American youth in the 60s rebelled against the Vietnam War as an hypocrisy. The war was not about the containment of Communism but was motivated by materialism, by the pursuit of American wealth and greed.

America’s approach to the environment began to be seen in the 60s as an hypocrisy. Here we were as an enormous industrial power and we were strip mining, and we were polluting rivers, and rivers were catching on fire.

The sexual revolution began in the 60s — again, another rebellion against our puritanical background and we were seeing it, too, as another American hypocrisy.

Even in the corporate world, there was the idea of the hypocrisy of conformity – the grey flannel suit and mindless conformity.

When America suddenly acknowledged this long list of hypocrisies in the 1960s, it had a compounding effect. It was stunning to see so many hypocrisies come to light in that short a period.

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When America in the 1960s openly acknowledged its past misdeeds, it made America morally accountable. Many young people seemed to come to a particular conclusion about their country — they believed that there was, in the very soul of America, a characterological evil. They judged that there was something wrong with America, something fundamentally bad. This was a country with the greatest constitution ever written, the greatest articulation of freedom in the entire history of the human race, and yet it did these things, it committed all of these hypocrisies. Hypocrisy is pretending to be what you are not. And America was now stigmatized with hypocrisy.

Well I liken this to the fall. The 60s really were a moral fall for the United States. America joined Germany as a fallen country that had to be held to account. When evil is a feature of the collective character of a nation, moral accountability for that evil is permanent—whether or not the evil is active or latent. If the evil is not overt, then we presume it to be just beneath the surface.

When a country acknowledges its hypocrisies, it begins to lose legitimacy. It begins to lose its moral authority as a society. How are you going to tell me about the values of freedom, individual responsibility, and individual initiative, and all of these wonderful values that come to us from our tradition of freedom — how are you going to present them to me when you violated all of them with the full knowledge of what you did?

Therefore, in the 60s, the very legitimacy of the government itself was called into question. There were riots from one end of the United States to the other, beginning with the Watts Riot. Cities like Detroit and Newark never recovered from the violence. There were assassinations across that decade beginning with John Kennedy and then continuing to Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy.

There were youth rebellions of every kind: political, sexual, lifestyle. You could see in people disrespect for the authority of the United States.

That introduced desperation into American life that had never been here before, an urgency to recover moral authority, to recover legitimacy. We had to do something and we had to do it quick. People were rioting; they were flaunting the authority of this country that had acknowledged all of its many hypocrisies. There needed to be a moral activism of some kind that was highly visible to restore our legitimacy.

So right away in 1965, we get the Great Society. President Johnson announced that we’re going to end poverty in our time. We’re going to do these grand things. We’re going to spend vast amounts of money. I myself worked in four different Great Society programs when I was a student and quickly thereafter.

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The Great Society did not happen because we had really made a determination to end poverty. That’s a difficult, if not impossible thing to do. We did it as a display of moral activism that would bring back our moral authority, make our society legitimate again. We not only acknowledged what we did wrong, but here’s what we’re going to do on a positive side of the ledger.

I think that, out of this desperation, we created what I call the “idea of the good.” Up to that point, our policies in America had always been based around individual freedom. They had been freedom focused.

But in the 1960s, we got a government that started to focus on doing something good. We’re going to have poverty programs. We’re going to have the Peace Corps. We’ll show ourselves to be unlike that America that we acknowledged we were, that hypocritical America. We are going to have an America we can believe in and ideas of the good are going to get us there.

My own sense of it is that almost all of these big ideas ended up being ideas of the bad. Their announced purpose was only a pretext. Their real purpose was to make a display of moral activism that would restore legitimacy and allow a society to remain stable and move ahead.

So, we got ideas of the good like school busing, which most people recognize has gone a long way toward seriously injuring public education in the United States. Our school system is not the same as it was before busing. Busing failed to bring integration. It failed on every level and was a destructive idea of the good at the very least.

In the late 60s and early 70s, another idea of the good was welfare. This was mainly directed at blacks. We’re going to give you a slightly better than subsistence living. We’re going to give it to you indefinitely, and we’re not going to ask a single thing of you, not even that you raise your children. You’re just going to get this subsidy.

One Condition: You can’t be married. That policy did more to destroy the black family in the United States than segregation ever did. And today, in black America there is a 72% illegitimacy rate. Only 28% of black babies born have fathers.

Black women marry at half the rate of white women and divorce at twice the rate. That comes from an idea of the good.

Affirmative action has done similar things with the black middle class. The worst thing it has done is to take blacks, the best and the brightest blacks, out of competition with their peers, with whites and others. You’re not allowed to compete by merit, by excellence, with your peers. You’re going to be judged and evaluated by a separate and lower standard.

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A people trying to overcome four centuries of oppression and underdevelopment, trying to develop, trying to fall in love with excellence, and you prevent them from competing. Can’t do it. Won’t allow it. We need you on our campus. We need your dark skin on our campus.

Most Ivy League schools have to have about eight percent black students. That’s sort of the acceptable number – seven, eight, or nine percent. Without affirmative action, without lowering standards, it would probably be about two percent. It’s almost a kind of exploitation of the most talented blacks, of the best and the brightest. We won’t let them compete and be enhanced by the self-esteem that comes from successfully competing with their peers.

You will notice that in areas of life where there is no affirmative action — sports and music come to mind — no one cares if you come from a single parent home. It doesn’t matter. No mercy. You compete head on with everybody. We dominate in these areas because we get credit for what we do. We are, in fact, equal.

Academically, why are we always so behind? We can’t close the gap. Well, the incentives are all wrong. We’re rewarded for being inferior and having a grievance, not for developing our talents and competing.

Another idea of the good is multi-culturalism, which is really cultural relativism. All cultures are the same. They’re all equally good. No, they’re not. That’s not to say that people and the value of human life is different, but certainly some cultures are vastly more evolved than others are. And down on the ground, we reward people who are able to join modernity.

So, multi-culturalism is an idea of the good, an idea that is designed to show that we’re no longer that old America of racism, sexism, bigotries of one kind or another.

I think the last one is obviously diversity. We will engineer people into institutions so that we’d have some sort of a balance of colors and numbers without any regard to who those people are and what the terms of admission really are, what the standards really ought to be. Again, why do we do that? We do it out of this same desperation that I’ve been talking about — to restore our legitimacy, to prove that we are no longer that old racist country.

Ideas of the good always come at the expense of our more enduring values, values of freedom, individual freedom, individual opportunity, initiative, responsibility, so forth, competition by merit, a sound idea that enhances everybody. Ideas of the good always undermine those values.

They also undermine our freedom. I don’t think of myself as free yet because when I was a kid growing up in segregation, I couldn’t put my name on a job application because I knew that my race would be held against me.

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Today, I put my race on an application and it’s going to give me an advantage. In no case am I taken as Shelby Steele, as an individual based on my own talents or lack thereof. So I haven’t enjoyed that day yet, that kind of freedom. My race is punished in one part of my life and exploited in another part of my life.

I think that what’s wrong with ideas of the good is that they flatten people out into groups. I’ll give you a quick little story to illustrate that.

There were two great philosophers: Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. They had a falling out, a famous falling out after the war. They were both to the left politically. They thought they were going to support Communism. Jean Paul Sartre did support Communism; he became a communist, and even supported Joe Stalin. People asked both Sartre and Camus how they could support Communism. “Joseph Stalin has killed more people than Adolf Hitler did. Stalin’s means to his ideal society is to kill all opposition-real or imagined. How can you support that?”

Sartre said, “I can support Joseph Stalin because basically he’s moving in the right direction. Marxism is the future and I want to be a part of history. So the world is not a perfect place. Therefore I will overlook the fact that he’s killed maybe 60 million people.”

Camus said, “Your ideology stops at my mother’s nose. My mother is a human being and I reject any ideology that excuses evil in the name of fulfilling itself — that says it’s OK to kill people — to kill off your opposition.”

Sartre was capable of flattening people out, of seeing them only because of their ideological loyalty, of dehumanizing, not being able to see them as individual human beings.

Camus said, “I have a mother. She’s a human being. She’s an individual and if you touch a hair on her head, then no Communism for me.” He was a humanist. He believed that, first, we were human beings and our human dignity had to forever be held sacred and reinforced. Therefore, while he might like a classless society, it would not be acceptable if it crossed paths with his mother.

Well my point is that ideas of the good do the same thing. They flatten us out. They make us into just colors. They make presumptions that all black people are like this. And if you put enough of them in a room, you’ll get a more interesting conversation. What if they’re all boring black people? What if they can’t contribute to the conversation? How do you know that because they’re black, they’re going to be able to deliver all of the wonderful things you’re talking about, all of these idealistic things, a classless society and so forth? How do you know that? You don’t know that.

Diversity causes you to fail to see the human being, the individual, and what talent that person has or what talents they may not have, what they need to develop and so forth. It becomes a pernicious, dehumanizing policy.

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And, of course, it always enforces itself by a kind of correctness, a political correctness, a language that you have to utter. Just as people in Communist countries had to utter statements that showed their ideological loyalty.

Diversity, I think, works in the same way and keeps us, therefore, apart. It keeps minorities down, not up. It neglects our real problem. Our real problem is that we need development. We need skills. We need education. We need all of the things that enable you to truly compete with other groups in the society. We can get preferences all day long, but it’s not going to develop us.

There is what I call it the “M&M track,” the minority and mediocrity track. It’s a track where we bring minorities in. They’re not as well developed. Their test scores are not often as high. And so they take certain classes. And they self-segregate and they feel much better with their own because they know, they sense, other people are judging them. So you deepen racial divisions. And you deepen the insecurity in the people you’re trying to build confidence in.

In conclusion, what would I rather have instead? To oversimplify it, what I would rather have in American institutions is a single standard that is flexible, that is fair, and that accounts for people only as individuals. There are never any circumstances where race can be used as a proxy for anything else. It is not a proxy for anything else.

If our institutions were devoted to that, to creating a single standard, I think we could begin to get somewhere in society. We could make relations between the races easier and more fluid because we would be relating as individuals not as just representatives of a victimized group. Blacks would then get credit and esteem for what they actually achieve. That’s what I would advocate.

I think I’ve probably used my time so I will stop there and take questions. Thank you.

About Glen H. Hiner and the Lectureship

The Glen H. Hiner Distinguished Lecture Series is named in honor of the outstanding alumnus and business leader who, in 2005, established an endowment to support the deanship of the College of Engineering and Mineral Resources at West Virginia University.

A native of Morgantown, West Virginia, and one of the most exceptional alumni of West Virginia University, Glen H. Hiner graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering in 1957. He then embarked on a successful and innovative 35-year career with the General Electrical Company. In 1992, he became chief executive officer of Owens Corning, where he introduced new products, built new manufacturing facilities around the world, and oversaw many major initiatives.

Glen has been an exceptionally loyal alumnus of WVU, serving on several College of Engineering and Mineral Resources advisory committees, sharing his expertise with students as a visiting professor in the WVU College of Business and Economics, and serving as a member of the WVU Foundation Board of Directors.

In 2005, Glen established an endowment to support the deanship of the College of Engineering and Mineral Resources. The terms of the endowment provided for the establishment of the Glen H. Hiner Distinguished Lecture Series, which brings business leaders to share their experience and knowledge with students and faculty.

About the College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

The West Virginia University College of Engineering and Mineral Resources is a state and national leader in engineering education, offering eleven undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Learn more at www.cemr.wvu.edu.

O f f i c e o f t h e D e a n

College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

P.O. Box 6070, 367 Mineral Resources BuildingMorgantown, WV 26506-6070