The Rigid Enforcement Of Stereotypes
Jeff Jacoby has a column in the Boston Globe that reveals the rigid enforcement of "diversity" guidelines in the field of education publication and the toll it takes on the truth.
YOU'RE A publisher of children's textbooks, and you have a problem. Your diversity guidelines — quotas in all but name — require you to include pictures of disabled children in your elementary and high school texts, but it isn't easy to find handicapped children who are willing and able to pose for a photographer. Kids confined to wheelchairs often suffer from afflictions that affect their appearance, such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy. How can you meet your quota of disability images if you don't have disabled models who are suitably photogenic?
Well, you can always do what Houghton Mifflin does. The well-known textbook publisher keeps a wheelchair on hand as a prop and hires able-bodied children from a modeling agency to pose in it. It keeps colorful pairs of crutches on hand, too — in case a child model turns out to be the wrong size for the wheelchair.
This is bad enough, but it actually gets far worse.
Some images are banned from textbooks because they are deemed stereotypical or offensive. For example, McGraw-Hill's guidelines specify that Asians not be portrayed wearing glasses or as intellectuals and that publishers avoid showing Mexican men in ponchos or sombreros. “One major publisher vetoed a photo of a barefoot child in an African village," Golden writes, “on the grounds that the lack of footwear reinforced the stereotype of poverty on that continent." Grinding poverty is in fact a daily reality for hundreds of millions of Africans. But when reality conflicts with political correctness, reality gets the boot.
So, on occasion, does historical perspective, as for example when a McGraw-Hill US history text devoted a profile and photograph to Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman pilot — but neglected even to mention Wilbur and Orville Wright. “A company spokesman," the Journal reports dryly, “said the brothers had been left out inadvertently."
It isn't only when it comes to texts that diversity has led to dishonesty, or even to the manipulation of photos. In 2000, the University of Wisconsin at Madison featured a group of students cheering at a football game on the cover of its admissions brochure. One of those students was Diallo Shabazz, a black senior who hadn't been at the game. University officials, desperately wanting the new publication to reflect a diverse student body, had lifted Diallo's image from somewhere else and digitally inserted it into the football shot. “Our intentions were good," Madison's director of university publications said when the deception was exposed, “but our methods were bad."
You know what they say about good intentions. As Jacoby points out the rigid enforcement of these diversity rules means that the truth comes in in last place. Often it is the lie that gets a prominent role while the reality is swept under the carpet. So it is that "Hispanics" must be of dark complexion with dark hair. African children must be poor, but not barefoot. The mind boggles at the lengths these purveyors of educational materials go to to provide what is, quite frankly, nothing but agenda driven indoctrination.
The diversity movement is actually an insidious idea that reduces groups of people to certain physical characteristics and demands that the text materials conform to those stereotypes. As in too many popular ideas these days, it is actually a form of elitism. You see, the diversity forces imply, we recognize you by the color of your skin or by the wheelchair you are confined to or by the clothing you wear. And we will alter the truth because our intentions are so very pure.
But only if you fit into our preconceived notions of what you must look like.
Civilization, Left Wing, The Ivory Tower | Gaius Thursday, 31 August , 2006
By Roland Hesz, Thursday, 31 August , 2006 @ 9:32 am
Ridiculous.
I guess, the logical next step is that if you don’t have a disabled employee, you volunteer someone and break his spine.
Just to have a “proper representation of the segments of society”.
“Some images are banned from textbooks because they are deemed stereotypical or offensive.”
And thus, introduce different stereotypes.