The Prejudiced "Diversity Consultant"

(Note: I will be purposefully ambiguous became of my position in the entire scheme of things.

I am a member of an alumni association of a large, state university. We have a minority affiliate organization to the main alumni entity which is focused upon Black issues as it relates to the university and the Black alumni and present student body.

Recently an alumni got promoted to a high profile office locally. He is White. This position is potentially strategically favorable to our interests and thus one of the affiliate members thought that it would be a good idea to be a signatory sponsor of an event that was being held in this White alumni's honor.

SOME Members of the minority affiliate chapter objected to the group sponsoring an event where a "White man" was being honored. "Why are we using our money to honor this White man?" was the general line of questions that were heard from those in opposition.

A few years ago we had our kick off meeting for our group in this particular metro area. The key focus was to organize our group with the goal of gathering together African-American alumni as a means of having a force of dues paying alumni to lobby the main university in support of the interests of minority students. Our university has switched from their Affirmative Action based policy of "bringing bunches of Black students in" from regional large cities and putting them into remedial education courses so that they could be "mainstreamed" in 2 years. Instead they chose "targeted recruitment". They now find high performing Black high school students and offer them scholarships. The university's research shows that students with strong high school backgrounds have a much higher graduation rate than the students received in via the remedial program.

Our group was crafted to seek to reverse this policy and others. I was honestly surprised at the number of people in the meeting who had entered into the school through this same program. I was not one of them. I am an opponent of Affirmative Action admissions in college. It is nothing more than a COVER FOR THE FAILED PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOLS, of which the people running them are FAVORABLE TO those who call themselves "Affirmative Action Supporters". Clearly the fight is being lost in the ineffective public schools rather than the highly competitive colleges that use Affirmative Action to provide "opportunity".

During the course of this meeting I heard people document Blacks who were employed at the university that could be depended upon. The activist Blacks who were seen fighting for Affirmative Action admissions were said to be "Blacks we can work with". More conservative Blacks who were not in agreement with these polices where said to be "a waste of time".

In listening to BOTH of these tales there is a person who claims that he is a "diversity consultant" for major corporations leading both of these racially tinged incidents that I describe above.

I am not naive. I realize the interplay of race in the politics of much of what we do. I have a problem with people who PURPORT to be for "diversity", selling it on the merits of how it BENEFITS the entity under consideration. All the while this person is as bigoted and deliberate about his agenda as the White folks that he might call RACISTS are.

If THEY are RACISTS......what are YOU?

When you had a chance to show your own valuation of DIVERSITY....you failed the test. My has your adversaries taught you well.