Many organizations that have racial preferences built in to their very functioning are frantic over the possibility that the Supreme Court might rule such preferences in college admissions violate federal law. They’re demanding that preferences must continue and that even more data be collected where race is disaggregated.

Arguing against all of this in today’s Martin Center article is Professor Henry Bauer of Virginia Tech. He writes, “How times have changed! Four decades ago, the dean of our graduate school bragged to me that he had assured against racial discrimination in admissions by removing the requirement that applications include a photograph. Beginning not much more than a decade later, applications for college admission at any level began asking applicants to state their racial category explicitly.”

This reminds me of musical auditions. Blind auditions were instituted so that there would be no discrimination against women or minorities, and it was a great success. But now the “diversity”-obsessed want to end blind auditions because they want race taken into account.

Bauer continues:

“Diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” are concepts that should apply in the first instance to individuals; indeed, the pursuit of individual freedom and happiness, and the safeguarding of individual rights, are explicitly agreed-upon aims of our society. To define those concepts, or the now-common “social equity and justice,” in terms of groups means either that individual experiences are not regarded as the important thing or that all individuals in the chosen group are identical clones in terms of their experience, ability, and preferences — a possibility that is plainly not the case.

Exactly. Every individual is unique and hence “diverse.” Let’s drop the foolish and harmful notion that “race” is the one big thing about people.