Sources & Extracts

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Stephen Carter criticizes one version of the diversity argument in his book Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. He makes these comments:

The ideals of affirmative action have become conflated with the proposition that there is a black way to be --and the beneficiaries of affirmative action are nowadays supposed to be people who will be black the right way. . . .

This new conception of affirmative action might be called viewpoint diversity, because its goal is to diversify a professional world that is said to represent mostly the viewpoints of white males. . . .

No one, I assume, would dispute the notion that there are substantial benefits to be gained from association with people unlike oneself. But as much as defenders of this new understanding of affirmative action might protest that it is not intended to suggest that people of color hold a particular set of views, it is difficult to make sense of the arguments any other way: after all, if the views of people who are not white turn out to be just the same as the views of people who are, the case for using race as a proxy for viewpoint diversity collapses.

Reference: From Stephen Carter Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, p. 34-35.