Newsletter

January 2007

Sacrificing Truth On The Altar Of Diversity

Jeff Jacoby

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.

Houghton Mifflin’s ploy was recently described by reporter Daniel Golden in a
Wall Street Journal story on the lengths to which publishers go to get images of
minorities and the disabled into grade-school textbooks. A Houghton Mifflin
spokesman claimed that able-bodied models are presented as handicapped only as
a last resort. But according to one of the company’s regular photographers, the
deception is the norm. At least three-fourths of the children portrayed as
disabled in Houghton Mifflin textbooks actually aren’t, she told Golden. In
fact, publishers have to keep
track of all the models they use for such pictures, so that a child posing
as disabled in one chapter isn’t shown running or climbing a tree in another.

Faked photos of handicapped kids are just one of the ways in which truth is
sacrificed on the altar of diversity. The cofounder of PhotoEdit Inc., a
commercial archive that specializes in pictures of what it calls “ethnic and
minority people in all walks of life," advises publishers that images of
Chicanos can be passed off as American Indians from the Southwest, because they
“look very similar." Similarly, Golden notes, a textbook photographer tells
clients that since the “facial features" of some Asians resemble Indians from
Mexico, “there are some times where you can flip-flop."

Yet
pictures of authentic Hispanics who happen to have blond hair or blue eyes don’t
count toward the Hispanic quota “because their background would not be apparent
to readers." In other words, rather than expose schoolchildren to the fact that
“Hispanic" is an artificial classification that encompasses people of every
color, publishers promote the fiction that all Hispanics look the same — and
that looks, not language or lineage, are the essence of Hispanic identity.

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."

But
the ”good" intentions of the diversity crusaders cannot be separated from bad
methods they resort to, whether those methods involve racial quotas in
admissions and hiring, the assignment of schoolchildren on the basis of color,
or photographic fakery that puts healthy kids in wheelchairs. By reducing
“diversity" to something as shallow and meaningless as appearance, they
reinforce the most dehumanizing stereotypes of all — those that treat people
first and foremost as members of racial, ethnic, or social groups. Far from
acknowledging the genuine complexity and variety of human life, the diversity
dogmatists deny it. Is it any wonder that their methods so often lead to unhappy
and unhealthy results?

Jeff Jacoby’s e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

Boston Globe, August 30, 2006.