One bizarre form of utopian leftism we encounter everywhere today is in the fictional world presented to us in films, television, and advertisements. To cite just two of many historically improbable examples, in the world of A Gentleman in Moscow, the 1920s Russian aristocracy somehow included black men with dreadlocks. And, in Mary Queen of Scots, the Elizabethan era ruler’s chief courtier is unaccountably a British black person.
Formulaic dramas and sitcoms abound in token representations of racial diversity that are unusual in real life, such as a person of subcontinental Indian descent appearing in a saccharine romance set in rural Appalachia. Advertisements feature, almost exclusively, racially diverse couples. Even advertisements by our local banks in the small towns of central Pennsylvania typically show their customers as whites happily married to blacks. Though white-black pairings account for less than 1 percent of all cohabiting couples in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, clearly they loom large in the imaginations of directors and producers.
Unlike my friends who insist that such scenes are about “social indoctrination,” I think that more is going on here. We are being shown an alternative world that has not been poisoned by so-called “systemic racism.” It is an egalitarian paradise in which past and present societies are imagined existing without the taint of racism. Although there may be natural affinities that draw people to those who are genetically close to and look like them, in this second reality, we gravitate naturally toward the Other. Whites prefer to be married to blacks, which it is suggested would be our normal condition in a world without prejudice.
This idea of a world without prejudice that the left is trying to impose on us is that, absent our history of prejudice and discrimination, the sexes and all the various racial groups would be represented more or less equally in all professions and social situations.
In this alternate universe, blacks over the decades or perhaps centuries would have been producing as many competent medical students or perhaps atomic scientists as whites and Asians, and women would have been furnishing as many combat officers as men. Vocational and financial disparities between groups, we are supposed to believe, are mostly reducible to the influence of bigots who make arbitrary decisions about who advances in society and who is allowed to associate with whom.
Because of this historically imposed obstacle, we today should not be allowed to judge people by objective professional criteria or permit them to associate with those whose company they prefer, until we can move closer to some imaginary ideal. It is one in which every group that has not done as well as some other group in a particular endeavor has been awarded sufficient handicap points to enable it to catch up to those who still enjoy an unfair advantage.
No one is denying that discrimination has existed against some groups more than others. But it’s a strange notion of justice if the state, a university, or a large corporation discriminates against an applicant who is allegedly a member of a “victimizing group” in favor of someone else who represents a “victim.” Here we are dealing with people chosen at random to carry out a ritual of atonement, which has nothing to do with the personalities involved, except in some symbolic way. How exactly do we make up for the discrimination that may or may not have been practiced against some unnamed black person by a similarly unnamed white person at some indeterminate point in the past by making a present-day white submit to a new form of discrimination?
Needless to say, the predominantly white people who have pushed DEI and misnamed recruitment programs have not suffered any setbacks because of the discrimination they practice against others—primarily white male heterosexuals. The discrimination they’ve unleashed is being inflicted on other people, who have nothing to do with hypothetical past wrongs, except through the ascription of blood guilt. As an academic for more than 40 years, I don’t recall any of my predominantly leftist colleagues ever offering to step down from his position and bestow it on a black woman. They, too, were engaging in a game of ascribed guilt. It allowed privileged whites to flaunt their egalitarian virtue at the expense of other whites, whose careers and livelihood would have to suffer in order to meet arbitrary racial and gender quotas.
Another silly aspect of what some call “reverse discrimination” is the refusal to recognize demonstrable differences between groups that affect their eligibility for certain positions. Why would I think that medical schools would have been swamped by applications from highly competent black students in 1900; or that women were just yearning to get into military combat 100 years ago? There are social, cultural, biological, and other differences among groups that historically account for one’s educational and vocational choices in life.
Thomas Sowell observed that median age is among the reasons for the relative levels of success among different demographics. For example, the average age of American blacks is considerably lower than that of American Jews, to take two groups that are on opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. A population whose median age is in their 40s and 50s, everything else being equal, will have acquired more wealth and professional success than the cohorts of a much younger, less well-educated demographic. It’s also too obvious to be stated that for biological reasons women are less prone to violence than men. They are on average smaller and endowed with less physical strength. Those who take sexual differences seriously should have no trouble understanding why men filled with testosterone are more eager than women to engage in physical combat.
What strikes me about the steady stream of advertising, television, and films offered by our commercial-capitalist class is how much they are invested in their mythic construct. They seem less interested in selling me their products than in converting me to their utopian vision.
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