The content of their character
Polansky’s latest and Martin Luther King Day have me thinking about diversity today, and about the ongoing failure to recognize the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of result. Deborah Howell and Howard Kurtz of the WaPo have been going on about the need for diversity in newsrooms and on editorial pages of late, and I always think that if this is how they’re looking to save newspapers, good luck. What the press corps faces, Jeff Jacoby points out, is not so much a lack of diversity as a decline in utility. Reporters have to provide more scoops, better and faster than ever before, and in the age of super-compressed online news cycles, that makes for an extremely competitive environment. Naturally, some sources just aren’t going to be up to it.
Howell even goes so far as to write — without irony — that “Too many Post staff members think alike; more diversity of opinion should be welcomed” and then, only a few sentences later, “The op-ed page still needs a healthy dose of gender, racial and ethnic diversity. There are too many older white men and not enough women and people of color.”
I don’t suppose she’s considered the possible tension between those ends, especially when a bunch of like-thinking people are making hiring firing decisions, or the respective importance to the reader (whatever his race, and whatever the color of his skin) of getting good analysis. Remember King’s immortal line about dreaming that one day his children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character?
Well, funny how “diversity” always seems to mean Roland Martin or Bob Herbert instead of Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, or any number of other black authors who are actually worth reading.