How Clinton-era ‘diversity’ hobbled black progress in the South

By Bernie Quigley - 05/13/10 11:41 AM ET

Thirty years ago I had an essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer making the point that racial integration in the South had become a project primarily to satisfy the white liberal imagination of Northern people rather than to advance the economic progress of black people in the South. While the South had effectively integrated in the 1960s, the North and Philadelphia, where I lived, had not.

The South, white and black, shared a cultural core in religion, primarily Baptist, of a form that might be considered indigenous to America and to that region, while both religious Southern whites and blacks were inherently alien to the commerce-based materialistic culture of Philadelphia and the North.

Not long after, I worked in a college in the South that made sincere efforts to integrate along the lines of culture, region and religion. It was a great opportunity. The economy was booming. Poor blacks and blacks from the country where heart was trusted over head could find a natural and organic cohesion with whites in the Baptist chapel. But what destroyed those honest attempts can be understood in two words: diversity and globalization.

Diversity became the buzzword in the Clinton era. It took the college administrator, whose job it was to raise funds, off the hook. Problems related to race in the South no longer need be seen as specific economic issues caused by historic conditions, problems fully amenable and with corrections well under way. They became instead aesthetic issues. Race and ethnicity became an abstraction: Prejudice is so ’50s. And not just prejudice against blacks, but against everybody. You could substitute Chinese instead. Rich ones. Or East Indians. Rich ones. Or gay people, or Iranians, or Valley Girls or Zoroastrians. The possibilities were endless.

The few rural and religious blacks brought in after that were like Kafka’s hunger artist: Short-term exotic novelties soon lost and forgotten in the hay when the novelty wore off. Actually heard O.J. Simpson make the point on “Saturday Night Live” back then: Blacks, he said, had become boring to white liberals. They had stopped, then moved on. The poor and working-class Southern blacks huddled by themselves — country bumpkins virtually outcast by well-off blacks as well as whites in the new upscale cultural environment — with the few religious Southern whites in the Pat Robertson corner.

Traveling recently with one of my sons to Southern colleges these past weeks, the morph seemed complete. There were tons of Indians, Chinese and other Asians on campuses, as there are elsewhere. I inquired and was told that rich foreign students pay the way for poor blacks and poor local white kids.

The school tour guide in one school in particular that had a long and laudable Baptist tradition going back to the 1840s was obviously embarrassed by the Southern religious heritage. She was from New Jersey. Yes, there were Baptists here long ago — shudder — but now this is the center of the school, she said, proudly pointing to her sorority house. She guided the tour away from the historic chapel and avoided the topics of race, religion and culture like the plague.

No question, the school was fully globalized. But there seemed to be only enough American black students — great-looking ones, like models for J. Crew or Abercrombie & Fitch — in view to supply the school’s front office in years ahead — or those of political offices or news outlets — and the college brochures and to give a little talk on MLK Day.