If you’ve visited a college website recently, you’ve most likely seen pictures of students of various races and backgrounds that are meant to speak to the university’s unwavering commitment to diversity. This promise of inclusion suggests these colleges value all sorts of lived experiences, viewpoints, and opinions — but do they?

Their admissions policies would suggest otherwise.

Affirmative action, or the practice of taking into consideration one’s race and status during the application process, is just one example of diversity politics at work. This ideology is a runaway train that has affected everything from political campaign slogans to corporate hiring practices, distorting the true meaning of diversity and turning it into a leftwing dog whistle that groups people together entirely based off skin color or other physical characteristics beyond one’s control.

With April being “Diversity Awareness Month,” our institutions would do well to recall the true meaning of diversity. This value once correctly meant a variety of skillsets, opinions, and experiences based entirely on an individual’s personal choices and background.

A coherent and successful society will both possess and require such diversity. We need people with different lived experiences, talents, and outlooks to power America’s marketplace of ideas and move our nation forward on the path of growth and prosperity.

The Left’s diversity politics, however, wrongly assume that an individual’s choices are predetermined by their environment and skin color. They treat certain ethnicities and physical characteristics as a monolith and conflate race-based presumptions and related hiring or enrollment quotas with truly diverse thoughts and perspectives.

Not only is this understanding of “diversity” morally wrong, but it is also the very antithesis of the principles on which America was founded.

The universal natural rights our founders spoke of affirmed we are all “created equal” and are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The choices we make ought to be based on such individualism and the unique ideas and skills we acquire in this pursuit, not on our skin color or other inherent descriptors. This equality of opportunity is essential for establishing true diversity by giving every individual an equal platform to share their unique perspective.

Diversity politics, on the other hand, is founded on equity — the act of discriminatorily redistributing resources and opportunities to some at the expense of others. Equity argues that, due to America's history, all individuals are, in fact, not equal, and we must level the playing field by way of social justice initiatives. That’s why cities such as San Francisco are considering giving reparations to all black individuals, despite the fact these individuals were never directly impacted by American slavery.

We will never find justice when we discriminatorily uplift and benefit certain voices based solely on immutable traits.

This is not to say our nation’s history is perfect. To deny the existence of past atrocities would be both dishonest and foolish. But reducing the life and perception of every person into a singular lived experience — based on attributes over which we have no control — ignores the richness of the human experience and how significant it is to societal progression.

Economist Friedrich Hayek’s theory on spontaneous order perhaps sums it up best. Hayek believed that our nation’s advancements are ultimately the summation of different people and their unique interactions coming together to create lasting, fundamental change. The Left would have us believe it’s better to pit groups against one another in the name of power and influence. But this ultimately leads to a mindset of segregation, rather than unification.

America, however, was not founded on division, but on universal values guaranteed to all. We believe the virtues of freedom and equality are necessary for society to flourish, regardless of skin color, income, or background. And that’s why the Left’s diversity politics will fail — because it rejects the very essence of what America stands for.

Christian Watson is an outreach fellow for The Fund for American Studies (TFAS) and a host of the podcast Pensive Politics.