The world needs more Jerry Seinfelds. A Buzzfeed interviewer recently took the comedic genius to task for having mostly white men as guests on his show “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” Seinfeld didn’t buy it: “People think it’s the Census or something. . . I mean, this has gotta represent the actual pie chart of America? Who cares? Funny is the world that I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested. And I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that.”
If you want to know what a post-racial society would look like, it would be filled with people like Jerry Seinfeld, going about their business, doing what they do best, without the slightest concern for the color of another person’s skin. It would be filled with people who walk into offices, schools and social events without doing a racial headcount to make sure every group was proportionately represented.
Sadly, it seems, we’re moving further and further away from that ideal. Last week, California’s Legislature voted to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November to overturn Proposition 209, which in 1996 banned the use of racial, ethnic and gender preferences in admissions to the state’s public colleges and universities.
Of course, those institutions of higher education have worked to avoid complying ever since Prop 209 passed, using all sorts of shenanigans to make sure that their freshman classes still look like a rainbow coalition. (You know, don’t check off a race box, just hint at your racial background in your admissions essay.)
Like their peers across the country, these college administrators assume that if there is not a perfect representation of all races in all schools (or businesses or comedy shows, for that matter) it must be the result of discrimination. And that must be remedied by whatever means necessary.
It hardly matters to proponents of these policies that they wind up passing over more qualified candidates and discriminating against groups like Asian-Americans, or even that the “beneficiaries” of their policies are often unable to meet the requirements necessary for graduation.
The same motives were behind last week’s rebuke of President Obama by the Congressional Black Caucus for a lack of diversity in his judicial nominees. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton of DC slammed “the appalling lack of African-American representation” . . . in a justice system run by a black attorney general who reports to a black president.
Worse than all of this political bullying and higher-education discrimination is how people wind up internalizing this thinking — everyone scrutinizing his or her life to see if it passes the diversity test.
The perfect embodiment of this absurdity is the much-noted essay last month on the Web site XOJane, by a white woman who notices that there’s only one black woman in her yoga class, feels bad about her privileged life and goes home to cry. Instead of going over to greet a new woman in her class, the author retreats into some kind of existential crisis. This is where the constant drumbeat about diversity and too many college courses on structural racism gets us.
But who can blame this woman? Maybe she was worried that a picture of her family or her friends or her yoga class would end up being mocked on MSNBC. Because, while families across the country (like Mitt Romney’s) are adopting children without regard to their skin color, the cable channel’s host Melissa Harris-Perry is laughing as her guests point out which face “doesn’t belong.”
Parents I know regularly worry about how their kids will handle the real (multiracial) world when they have been raised in a mostly white, “privileged” environment. Could it just be as simple as teaching your children to treat everyone with respect and to make as many good friends as you can regardless of their skin color?
Maybe you think this sounds naïve? On our first date, almost 14 years ago, my now-husband asked me what my family would think of him. I laughed and told him everything would be fine as long as we raised our children Jewish.
He looked at me, puzzled, probably assuming I was kidding. It turned out he really wanted to know how my family would feel about my dating someone black. The question hadn’t occurred to me.
To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, “You’re handsome, kind, smart and funny, I’m interested.”