The folly of diversity policies

The ultimate purpose of this blog is to raise the issue of whether there is any point in diversity policies.

One thing that is worthy of question is whether the saying "any colour is the new black" should actually read "any colour but white is the new black".

A fundamental question is whether diversity policies are an abomination of the principle of racial equality. If racial equality really prevailed across the Western world, would we even care about diversity? After all, if the races were genuinely equal, would anyone stop to consider someone's race when deciding whether to give that person a job, university place etc?

What I propose is that we all abandon diversity policies, appoint people regardless of race and adopt a policy of giving people jobs, university places etc on the basis of merit alone.

There are many potential negative consequences of diversity policies. The obvious one is that they have the potential to turn away very well qualified caucasian males (the people least likely to benefit from such initiatives) and replace them with people, who cannot write their own name. The disadvantages of that to a company, for instance, are obvious. Diversity policies may also turn out to have a tendency to encourage laziness among the people they are intended to benefit, as they will then know that they don't have to work as hard as a caucasian male to achieve as much. They also encourage someone to ask "Is it because I is black?" and file lawsuits if (s)he doesn't get the job/place/whatever. The potential waste of time to companies is enormous. Furthermore, costs to a company can multiply if there is a shortage of qualified candidates among the race that they are forced to recruit from. For instance, the ratio of white accountants to black accountants is 80:1 in South Africa. If a company is forced to appoint a black accountant, the choice will be reduced dramatically.

Affirmative action with regard to company ownership is a similarly large folly. South Africa is currently trying to pursue such policies against its white population in revenge for what was done to them during the apartheid era. Would anyone complain if the UK were to start pursuing such a policy against its Indian population? The situation is the same:- Indians control most of the wealth in Britain. However, because Indians don't class as caucasian, it would be unacceptable to do such a thing. At least in South Africa, white people don't spend most of their lives shouting about how their adopted country has disadvantaged them so badly. One lesson that nobody seems to have learned from Uganda and the Ugandan Asians is that you cannot get rid of the wealthy members of society without hurting society as a whole. As we saw in Zimbabwe, the white farmers were keeping the country running:- the government then went and fixed something that was never broken in the first place by snatching the farms from the white farmers and passing them on to people, who didn't have the faintest idea about large scale agriculture, the result being food shortages and hyperinflation. It doesn't take a genius to work out that if the UK were to pursue such a policy against its Indian population, most of the country would be out of work. In South Africa since the fall of apartheid, at least 2 surveys have said that the white population has gotten richer and the black population poorer, despite all affirmative action measures, suggesting that it doesn't work.

Instead of affirmative action, the world should look to other solutions to solve the problems (e.g. blacks suffering from covetousness) that affirmative action is intended to solve. For instance, the focus should not be a Robin Hood one (robbing from the rich and giving to the poor), but should instead be on bringing up the standard of living of the poor. For instance, South Africa and Zimbabwe could pursue industrialisation policies so that people migrate away from rural areas to find work in urban areas, so that they are no longer green with envy about whites owning most of the land, as they will have abandoned agricultural aspirations to take up a secondary or tertiary job. Most of all however, a culture of self-help should be fostered. By this, I mean that the disadvantaged group should stop looking to the government to provide a solution and find one themselves. A small group of South Africans has done this and they have managed to do very well for themselves. People should also stop blaming the government for everything. One thing I just cannot understand is how blacks in Britain are still much poorer than most other sectors of society despite being subjected to Western educational advantages since the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 i.e. free schooling, the chance to get into world class universities (also for free and with grants). The question is whether it really is the government's fault that so many of them are below the poverty line.

With a culture of personal responsibility, people will understand that not everything is the government's fault, or the white population's fault etc. People of Jamaican origin account for 0.025% of the British population, but carry out 75% of London's shootings. Everyone is responsible for their own destiny.

I have read some American articles stressing the importance of diversity. I was informed of an example of a real estate company that sought a contract with a white-owned firm and was rejected on the grounds that it wasn't diverse enough. The company was in financial trouble and badly needed this contract, so the rejection was a huge blow. Sometimes, as in this case, companies desperately need contracts, but the rejecting company is not really one that I would want to do business with unless I were really desperate. My reason for this is that if I company rejects another one on the grounds that it isn't diverse enough, it suggests that the rejecting company has a very distorted sense of priorities. When you do business with a company, you are paying for the services provided and not the ethnicity of the staff.

Another example quoted was of an airline firm seeking a contract in China. It was said that the contract was achieved due to the presence of Chinese Americans on the negotiating team. Even extremely stupid people know that it is quite easy to get people of a certain ethnicity on your team (except in cases such as the accountants in South Africa one mentioned above). However, learning the language is much less of a cop-out. It is almost guaranteeable that if the sales team had spoken Chinese, the Chinese Americans on the negotiating team would have made no difference whatsoever and there would have been some jaws dropping wide open. If I were one of the Chinese people, from whom the contract was sought, I would think the company seeking the contract was a bunch of total morons if I worked out that they were trying to impress me by having Chinese-Americans on the negotiating team.

There is also a tendency to over-simplify when it comes to affirmative action. For instance, I remember some Americans I knew speaking about a rift between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. I have not yet verified this, but if this rift exists, it could be very costly to ignore it when seeking a contract in Mexico (¿Qué? *said with a blank & gormless expression on one's face*).