The Route to 9066; W. Moore

In spite of the dubious rationality of attempting to duplicate a city's racial per centages in the classroom, there are proba bly a number of good reasons that "ethnic diversity" could be considered a reasonable goal. One might be that a knowledge and understanding of cultures created by people of different races and different geographic locations is part of the definition of a liberal education. Another might be the wish to right past wrongs against many racial groups whose children were denied the advantages of a private education for no other reason than that they were born to non-Anglo Saxon Protestant parents. A third reason might be to contribute to the elimination of racial prejudice and thus to the enhance ment of world peace. There may even be Mrs. Moore is a freelance writer from Santa Rosa, California. other noble objectives that at the moment do not occur to me. It would seem that, if one wished to offset a predominantly WASP student body, en sure cultural enrichment, and create an environment where racial tolerance could flower, one would actively seek those fam ilies in the community who had just immi grated to this country and who carried with them the language and customs of a different culture. One mightalso expect these schools to try to enroll children from households in which the members spoke a foreign lan guage or in which the members still adhered to foreign religious or social customs though they had been in this country for some time.

However, it seems that satisfying their pos itive goals does not require "progressive" schools to follow either of these positive criteria. Instead it means satisfying a nega tive one, Le., that a prospective student not have an English-speaking white Anglo Saxon Protestant lineage. If their family names are Stroganov, Pa tel, or Yamamoto the children must have an enriching cultural heritage to bring to the school to balance the culture shared by the Smiths, Browns, and Joneses who are al ready on the student roster. Never mind that the Stroganovs have never spoken a word of Russian and never eat borscht, that the Patel child's mother is a corporate lawyer who wouldn't be caught dead in a sari and that no one in the family likes curry, and ~hat the parents and children in the Yamamoto clan have never been to Japan, attend a Meth320 odist church every Sunday, listen mostly to rock and roll music, and number hamburg ers and French fries among their favorite foods. Never mind these or any of the other features that characterize their lives as American and not as some other culture.

They fulfill the criterion as representatives of Eastern European, Indian, and Japanese culture, so they'll balance the student pop ulation nicely. The disturbing premise that underlies this policy is that ethnic origin carries with it certain irrevocable cultural characteristics. If one is born of Russian parents one must somehow· carry with him the genes of a Russian persona which inevitably produces Russian "culture." Because a child has Indian parents or an Indian ancestor, he or she will therefore be the carrier of a distinc tive Indian essence. If one has an Oriental name and facial features, then this person also has an "Oriental perspective" on life. When I hear arguments in favor of an admissions policy like that of the school my grandson might attend, I hear the voices of reasonable people in a different historical context whose noble objectives justified something that turned out to be just the opposite. As uncomfortable as it may be for the morally righteous of today to contem plate, an admissions policy that uses race or ethnic origin as a criterion has as its foun dation the premise that justified Executive Order 9066, which set in motion the reloca tion of anyone of Japanese descent from the West Coast in 1942.

In California just after Pearl Harbor, one argument repeated ad nauseam by radio commentators, in letters to the editor, in newspaper editorials, and in magazine arti cles was that blood ties were stronger than political or social ones, and that no matter how long people of Japanese descent had lived in this country, no matter how many generations their families might count on this soil, they were still Japanese, and a part of them would forever owe allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. Since they were not" one of us," their loyalty was to be questioned, their civil liberties revoked, their property confiscated, their movements restricted, 321 and ultimately their lives uprooted and their persons segregated-all because, by an ac cident of fate, they had the racial lineage of a political enemy. The premise that children born of a cer tain racial caste are destined to share exclu sive cultural preferences, personality char acteristics, or a certain perspective on life is patently false. Yet thoughtful people every where seem unwittingly to be advocating an academic admissions criterion based squarely on that premise. The heterogeneity which characterized the life of persons of Japanese descent in the United States at the beginning of 1942 was ignored, submerged beneath a mountain of misconceptions re garding some ineluctable relationship be tween race and culture, between ethnic origin and values, between family origin and behavior.

Ethnic diversity on this level is a super ficial goal resting on a fallacious premise which is ominous in its implications. Today the premise of inborn cultural characteris tics may net a relatively benign result. Tomorrow it may reap a harvest of misery and shame. Today it may produce an eth nically balanced and peacefully interacting student body. Tomorrow it may erupt in a movement toward racial exclusion. Today this policy intends to educate children in the ways of enlightened civilization which lib erates the individual from any stigma at tached to a racial or cultural stereotype. Tomorrow, this same policy might educate children in the ways of collectivist tribal barbarity by identifying each other by that very stereotype. The advocates of Executive Order 9066 justified their actions just as the advocates of "ethnic and cultural diversity" do today. In the process they became blind to their own racism and hardened to the results of the despotism generated by their erroneous as sumptions. Let's hope modern school ad ministrators and parents willrecognize their own faulty logic in time before the color blind society they so fervently hope to engineer becomes one that makes the blood lines of one's ancestors more important than the working of one's mind. D THEFREEMAN IDEASON UBERTY FROM MARX TO MISES: A REVIEW ESSAY by Peter J. Boettke I n 1989we collectively sat and watched the defining ideology of the twentieth century die an inglorious death. Our newspapers and magazines were full of stories. The nightly network news reported almost daily on some radical change or another.