Steven Greenhut of the Orange County Register on Stop the Racial Bean Counting:
Human beings are not inanimate objects. They do not disperse themselves equally across every profession and every part of the globe. For reasons of culture, family, belief systems, happenstance and opportunity, different peoples do different things in different ways. Equality is desirable in law, but an impossibility in other areas of life.
My wife’s relatives were coal miners in Poland, so when the time came to flee that depressed land, they fled to western Pennsylvania, where there were large deposits of coal to be mined – and lots of other Polish relatives and friends waiting to greet them. That’s not odd. Odd would have been them moving to Italian South Philadelphia and opening up a pizzeria or to German Milwaukee to brew beer.
This reality is common sense to an 8 year old, but is impossible to grasp among America’s liberal elites. If the population is not spread out evenly, if everyone is not paid exactly the same amount of money, if all groups of people aren’t perfectly represented in every field or suffer every disease at the same rate, then something is terribly wrong.
They are egalitarians, and like all egalitarians want to use government to change the way we all live.
To these race-mongers, disparities must be the result of discrimination. Government must count the beans and make sure they fall evenly across the floor. Something must be done, lives must be rearranged, tax dollars must be spent. Otherwise, society just doesn’t care.
This kind of thinking is nonsensical, but it also is lucrative. Many organizations get big government grants to analyze disparities based on race, sex, ethnicity, religious background, sexual orientation. They get newspaper headlines screaming about said disparities. Entrepreneurs always look out for new disparities to harumph about.
Longtime readers already know my take on “racial” classifications. I refuse to check the multiple boxes my heritage would allow and I refuse to be forced to do the same for my children. A decade of “interracial” marriage and several years of advocacy on behalf of blended families and I still get clueless “guilty white liberals” (who 99.9% of the time are neither “interracially” married nor “multiracial” themselves) attempting to school me on these hideous, arbitrary and scientifically invalid “racial” classifications. Their condescension and outrage is fairly astounding. For newer readers, check out the archives for more on this subject.