Peter Wood takes issue with the widespread praise for last week'sUS Supreme Court vindication of racial affirmative action byuniversities.
I'm appalled. This Supreme Court decision may well transform American society - for the worse.
The immediate reaction from most commentators and political leaders has been tepid, as though the court had decided in favour of keeping things the way they are.
Some of the headlines, for example, have declared that the court upheld "affirmative action". No, it didn't. What it did was invent a new constitutional principle, "diversity". In her opinion for the majority in the University of Michigan Law School case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote: "Today, we hold that the law school has a compelling interest in attaining a diverse student body."
This is mild phrasing for a radical change. Diversity has never before been officially recognised as a compelling government interest, and making it into one will make America significantly less true to its deepest principles and stir profound resentment, animosity and conflict for years to come.
The diversity that Justice O'Connor just added to the constitution does not refer to the fact that Americans come from a lot of different places and uphold diverse cultural traditions.
That diversity, plain and simple, has nothing to do with classifying people into groups by supposed degree of historic victimisation and allocating privileges by group size and standing within a victim hierarchy.
Confused? You should be. Diversity as an ideology and legalistic doctrine is a toy for leftist elites, not an enunciation of the rights of ordinary people. The concept does not appear in any of our nation's founding documents. It was set in motion by Justice Lewis Powell's eccentric opinion in the Bakke case 25 years ago, in which he speculated that universities might have a legal way around the constitution if they justified racial preferences as a way of attaining "intellectual diversity".
In all those years - until now - Justice Powell's opinion had never been endorsed by the court. But over the course of 2½decades, the left realised that Powell had inadvertently provided a powerful tool. Divisive ideas that Americans had emphatically rejected could be repackaged as the much nicer sounding "diversity".
Diversity became the American left's greatest marketing triumph: a concept that sounded idealistic and virtuous, and one that even corporate America and the military came to see as just good common sense.
But it is hardly that. Diversity is a recipe for remaking American society in an unending competition of victim groups for ever bigger shares of the spoils. Contrary to Justice O'Connor's view, the policies adopted to promote diversity will not be obsolete 25 years from now. They will instead be deeply embedded in our institutions. The diversity doctrine is about appetite, and bound to grow.
This court has badly misjudged. Though I hope its decision will be overturned quickly, I know that is unlikely. Get ready for a deep- seated transformation of the US into a nation that has subordinated the ideal of equality to the ideology of group rights.
Dr Peter Wood is an associate professor of anthropology at Boston University and the author of "Diversity: The Invention of a Concept" (Encounter Books).