As the diversity doxology has it, justice will be achieved when racial and ethnic groups are reflected in academia and in the professions in proportion to their presence in the larger population. The absence of such perfect representation is blamed on endemic white racism.
The doctrine is based on one big post hoc fallacy—reasoning backward is a logical error. If B (lack of representation) then A (racism) is an error, as in WRONG! Consider: in professions and academic pursuits where mathematical precocity is a factor, white Americans trail Asian-Americans. And white Gentiles lag behind Ashkenazi Jews. By logical extension, these realities must imply a systemic bias against whites, which is nonsense on stilts. But reason and race baiting are mutually exclusive, so long as those baited are white.
Naturally, no one ever demands that the NBA or the 100-meter dash be made to better reflect the general population.
Rugby is, traditionally, an Afrikaner sport. Afrikaners have always loved and excelled at it. Now TIME magazine is inferring racism from the fact that there are more whites than blacks on the South African national team.
Look at the complexion of, say, the Kaizer Chiefs soccer team. To be fair, in its hissing fit, TIME does qualify its racism taunts with the following information:
“Then again, rugby has never been the first-choice game among the black majority, and in South Africa’s national soccer team, only one or two white players make the cut. ‘You can tell a mostly white high school when you drive by its rugby field,’ Cronjé says. ‘Black schools have soccer fields.’”
The aim, very plainly, is not to leave the Afrikaner anything of his traditions and history. Witness the haste with which the ANC government is expunging South Africa’s past by renaming places across the country. This jocular account of bestowing on old South African boulevards names like Arafat and Che Guevara is courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, a chief cheerleader for the new dispensation in my old homeland.
(More on the New South Africa in our Archive.]
Update: Against the contention made in the Comments Section that “Affirmative Action is an ideology that has been hijacked”: The equal-rights-for-all principles instantiated in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were subverted over the decades by judges and federal administrators, and replaced with “affirmative action in favor of blacks.”
As Harvard scholar Richard Pipes averred, in the book Property and Freedom, the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “gave the government no license to set quotas for hiring personnel by private enterprise or admitting students to institutions of higher learning, yet the federal bureaucracy acts as if it had.”