Bruce Bawer Quote

He talks about the way in which the American academy assigns an official group identity to students, eliminating the distinction between voluntary association and imposed group identity. For example, a Jewish student who is totally assimilated—whose Jewish identity is totally unimportant to him—goes to college and is assigned a special Jewish advisor. The academy also distinguishes between people who own their sexual, racial, or gender identity and those who, in its view, have internalized their oppression.' For example, Kors says, Walter Olson, a tort reform expert at the Cato Institute who happens to be gay, is not really gay because he doesn't understand the sources of his oppression. Thomas Sowell, an African American author based at the Hoover Institution, isn't really black. And Daphne Patai, a founder of Women's Studies at Amherst, isn't really a woman because she identifies with the oppressive culture around her. So in the humanities, when they speak of diversity, the one kind of diversity they don't mean is individuated intellectual diversity. On the contrary, there's a process of vetting against individuation. The people who are most discriminated against, then, are not straight white males who just roll over and play along, but rather libertarian and conservative blacks, women who are critics of feminism, and gays and lesbians who are critics of the 'official' gay and lesbian positions on every issue in the world.