The Perceived Values of Diversity, then and Now

This essay, given as the Uri and Caroline Bauer Memorial Lecture at Cardozo Law School, is also a chapter in a forthcoming book, Schuck, Diversity in America: Law's Uneasy Roles. I trace the intellectual history of what I call diversity-as-ideal (as distinct from what I call diversity-as-fact) from Biblical texts to the present. I find that except for a few precursors like Mill, Whitman, and the cultural pluralists Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne, diversity was until the late 1960s viewed as a condition to be managed and perhaps admired, but certainly not a social ideal to be promoted and celebrated, much less a public policy goal to be pursued through law. Even these relatively few diversity visionaries, moreover, did not celebrate it as a universal ideal that included blacks and other racial minorities. Here, as in many other areas, the 1960s marked a fundamental change in the American view of diversity-as-ideal, one whose normative foundations and policy implications remain contested.