Sacrificing truth on the altar of diversity

August 30, 2006
 
You're A publisher of children's textbooks, and you have a problem. Your diversity guidelines -- quotas in all but name -- require you to include pictures of disabled children in your elementary and high school texts, but it isn't easy to find handicapped children who are willing and able to pose for a photographer. Kids confined to wheelchairs often suffer from afflictions that affect their appearance, such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy. How can you meet your quota of disability images if you don't have disabled models who are suitably photogenic?
 
Well, you can always do what Houghton Mifflin does. The well-known textbook publisher keeps a wheelchair on hand as a prop and hires able-bodied children from a modeling agency to pose in it. It keeps colorful pairs of crutches on hand, too -- in case a child model turns out to be the wrong size for the wheelchair.
 
Houghton Mifflin's ploy was recently described by reporter Daniel Golden in a Wall Street Journal story on the lengths to which publishers go to get images of minorities and the disabled into grade-school textbooks. A Houghton Mifflin spokesman claimed that able-bodied models are presented as handicapped only as a last resort. But according to one of the company's regular photographers, the deception is the norm. At least three-fourths of the children portrayed as disabled in Houghton Mifflin textbooks actually aren't, she told Golden. In fact, publishers have to keep track of all the models they use for such pictures, so that a child posing as disabled in one chapter isn't shown running or climbing a tree in another.
 
Faked photos of handicapped kids are just one of the ways in which truth is sacrificed on the altar of diversity. The cofounder of PhotoEdit Inc., a commercial archive that specializes in pictures of what it calls ``ethnic and minority people in all walks of life," advises publishers that images of Chicanos can be passed off as American Indians from the Southwest, because they ``look very similar." Similarly, Golden notes, a textbook photographer tells clients that since the ``facial features" of some Asians resemble Indians from Mexico, ``there are some times where you can flip-flop."
 
Yet pictures of authentic Hispanics who happen to have blond hair or blue eyes don't count toward the Hispanic quota ``because their background would not be apparent to readers." In other words, rather than expose schoolchildren to the fact that ``Hispanic" is an artificial classification that encompasses people of every color, publishers promote the fiction that all Hispanics look the same -- and that looks, not language or lineage, are the essence of Hispanic identity.
 


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So, in other words, all this "diversity" is pushed by -- pushing stereotypes, eh? "No, sorry, kid; you're not 'Black' enough; we need something darker than your coffee-with-cream flesh. And you, Mr. Sanchez, what kind of Mexican has blue eyes! Get outta here! Oh, and Mr. Cedric Smith, we won't be needing you at all.

 
Some images are banned from textbooks because they are deemed stereotypical or offensive. For example, McGraw-Hill's guidelines specify that Asians not be portrayed wearing glasses or as intellectuals and that publishers avoid showing Mexican men in ponchos or sombreros. ``One major publisher vetoed a photo of a barefoot child in an African village," Golden writes, ``on the grounds that the lack of footwear reinforced the stereotype of poverty on that continent." Grinding poverty is in fact a daily reality for hundreds of millions of Africans. But when reality conflicts with political correctness, reality gets the boot.
 

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Some stereotypes are more equal than others somehow.

 
So, on occasion, does historical perspective, as for example when a McGraw-Hill US history text devoted a profile and photograph to Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman pilot -- but neglected even to mention Wilbur and Orville Wright. ``A company spokesman," the Journal reports dryly, ``said the brothers had been left out inadvertently."
 

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This is what is so sickening: people of European descent don't usually go about thinking of themselves as "White people." They're Polish, or Italian, or English, etc., and tend to think of themselves that way, or as generically "European" -- a cultural affair rather than a racial one. But when people of European descent are being grouped as "White people," and ignored or demonized as such -- what are they to do? One thing they most certainly can't do is to act as "White people" -- to express any "pride" as "White people," or to form groups as "White people." That is automatic KKK material there, and the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ADL would be all over it like -- er, white on rice. So people of European descent are left defenseless. They can be attacked as "White people" (even though they don't usually think of themselves as such) -- but can't defend themselves as "White people."
 
An analogy I've used before is this: imagine a bus full of Cincinnati Reds fans and a bus full of St. Louis Cardinals fans. Both types of fan wear red hats, but otherwise have nothing in common and don't think of themselves as "Red Hat People." Now these two buses pull into a town filled with people who wear blue hats and green hats and who hate people who wear red hats, diss people who wear red hats, want government favors at the expense of people who wear red hats, write articles about the hateful red-hat people, etc. Suddenly, all of the red-hat wearing people have to think of themselves as "Red Hat Wearers" as a matter of survival. And now imagine that any defense along the lines of "We are proud red hat wearers and won't be dissed" is automatically considered a punishable offense. It's INSANE! To have to lump yourself into a group according to something as silly as the color of your hat, to be dissed for something so silly, and then to be unable to defend yourself.
 
And now the big question: why are people of European descent -- so-called "White people" -- being singled-out? Because they come from Christendom. It isn't race that's the issue at all; it's Christ. That's why all this divisive, hateful race-baiting continues.

 
It isn't only when it comes to texts that diversity has led to dishonesty, or even to the manipulation of photos. In 2000, the University of Wisconsin at Madison featured a group of students cheering at a football game on the cover of its admissions brochure. One of those students was Diallo Shabazz, a black senior who hadn't been at the game. University officials, desperately wanting the new publication to reflect a diverse student body, had lifted Diallo's image from somewhere else and digitally inserted it into the football shot. ``Our intentions were good," Madison's director of university publications said when the deception was exposed, ``but our methods were bad."
 
But the ``good" intentions of the diversity crusaders cannot be separated from bad methods they resort to, whether those methods involve racial quotas in admissions and hiring, the assignment of schoolchildren on the basis of color, or photographic fakery that puts healthy kids in wheelchairs. By reducing ``diversity" to something as shallow and meaningless as appearance, they reinforce the most dehumanizing stereotypes of all -- those that treat people first and foremost as members of racial, ethnic, or social groups. Far from acknowledging the genuine complexity and variety of human life, the diversity dogmatists deny it. Is it any wonder that their methods so often lead to unhappy and unhealthy results?