DIVERSITY - The Invention of a Concept

In this entertaining book, Peter Wood has undertaken nothing less than the biography of a concept. He traces the birth and evolution of “diversity,” illuminating how it came to sprawl across politics, law, education, business, entertainment, personal aspiration, religion and the arts as an encompassing claim about human identity. It asserts that people are, above all else, members of social groups and products of the historical experiences of those groups. Diversity in this sense, Wood says, is profoundly anti-individualist and at odds with America’s older ideals of liberty and equality. Wood explains how the ideology of diversity has propelled the neoracialists on the political Right as well as those on the multiculturalist Left. And even if it had not exacerbated racial and social divisions, he argues, it would still be a questionable cultural ideal.