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What?s The ?Difference??

Sometimes liberals like ?difference,? and sometimes they don?t.

Insofar as ?diversity? provides a coherent justification for treating people differently based on their race or ethnicity, it is that we benefit from being exposed to people different from us. In practice, as I?ve pointed out many times (see here and here for examples), this means that blacks and Hispanics have to be imported to selective schools so that Asians and whites can reap the benefits of being exposed to them.

But I digress. The point I want to emphasize here is not the exploitation at the core of ?diversity?-justified preferences. It is the simple fact that if the preferentially admitted were not regarded as ?different,? they would provide no ?diversity.?

Thus ?difference,? in the cult of multiculturalism, is good.

Except when it?s bad. It?s bad when it makes students feel, well, different. A case in point is the raging debate over reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in tiny (pop. 810) Woodbury, Vermont (hat tip to Drudge) that, according to the mother of a first-grader, ?is tearing our community apart.?

The brouhaha in the Vermont school began in September, when parent Ted Tedesco began circulating petitions calling for its return as a daily practice in the 19th-century schoolhouse, which has 55 children in grades kindergarten through six.

School officials agreed to resume the pledge as a daily exercise, but not in the classroom.

?We don?t want to isolate children every day in their own classroom, or make them feel they?re different,? said Principal Michaela Martin.

Instead, starting last week, a sixth grade student was assigned to go around to the four classrooms before classes started, gathering up anyone who wanted to say it and then walking them up creaky wooden steps to a second-floor gymnasium, where he led them in the pledge.

H.L. Mencken once famously defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. Similarly, liberal (which is to say, orthodox) school policy often seems to be based on the haunting fear that somewhere, some student may be forced to feel different.

But, we may well ask, how different does ?different? have to be to be bad? In Woodbury, for example, ?about half the students? chose to give up pre-school play time and walk up the creaky wooden steps to recite the Pledge. What if 75% or 85% or 95% of the students had not wanted to recite the Pledge (this is Vermont, after all, home of our only declared socialist Senator)? Wouldn?t it make the tiny minority of Pledgers feel ?different? to force them to leave their classroom and troop to a distant, isolated location to practice their patriotism?

Would Principal Michaela Martin care about their feelings? In fact, maybe even the actual 50% are made to feel ?different? by being segregated and sent upstairs to practice a strange ritual that other students don?t want to be exposed to.

In the Clintonian world in which we still live (indeed, Obama seems to be picking more Clinton retreads for his transition than Hillary would have), I suppose there are simply different definitions of ?difference? for different occasions.

Full post as published by Discriminations on November 16, 2008 (boomark / email).