William Murchison’s “Color Me Kweisi” (Views, May 2000) brings to mind an aspect of the so-called “civil rights” movement which has played an active part in undermining this country. While the left has failed to achieve total collectivization through the democratic process, it has introduced a caste system that can circumvent both referenda and ethics via “civil rights” laws.

“Jim Crow lies six feet under” may be true on the surface, but the reality is that “Whites Only” in sections of the country has been replaced by “Diversity Only” throughout the country. And what a monotonous entity “diversity” is: a super flux that, like Clinton’s cabinet and postmodern art, generates constant sameness.

The real effect of having government in the business of determining intentions and the boundaries of free association has been to apply the exclusionary abuses of Jim Crow laws across the board. When Mr. Murchison writes that “Dallas’s business community, not the federal courts, ended segregation,” he provides a model of the way these things should go. Instead, we can see the real face of “liberalism” at work in the decrees of the therapeutic state. When we attempt to address cultural problems with political solutions, the state becomes the highest authority in every aspect of life. Thanks to the Department of Education, our colleges now function as an arm of the big business/big government oligarchy, where, in Mussolini’s words, “only the state can know which liberties are to be left to the individual and which arc too important to be entrusted to anything but the state.” Mr. Murchison exhorts the leaders of the NMCP to “get a life.” A good place for them to start would be to help eradicate this new caste system. What does “fairness” mean when everyone must be placed in a racial/ethnic/ gender/sexual orientation caste before we can even look at any other qualities he may have?

        —Tom Sheeley
Flagstaff, Arizona