Mike Wise from the Washington Post:
[I]t came as a surprise to see Gumbel eviscerating the Winter Olympics in the closing monologue of HBO’s “Real Sports” earlier this month. “So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world’s greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention,” Gumbel said, as part of a screed that called figure skaters “pseudo athletes,” the Winter Olympics “a marketing plan” and chastised announcers and writers who try to sound knowledgeable every four years over things they have absolutely no clue about.
Gumbel has a right not to like the Winter Olympics. He can trash curlers, lugers and snowboard-crossers all he wants. But who made him arbiter of all things culturally diverse? Superimposing your own idea of diversity upon athletes from 80 different nations, essentially equating diversity with only race, is just inane.
Holy crap, someone in the media actually caught on. For Bryant Gumble, and other people who actually are black, diversity isn’t about a diversity of races, or a large sampling of cultures. It’s about how many black people are in any given group. Black people, to Gumble and his ilk, mean diversity.
This is the same group of people who love to tell you how minorities are failing in opening their own small businesses and underperforming in schools, while ignoring the minorities from China, Japan, Pakistan, and India who are doing very well in school and in business. Despite the fact that they’re minorities, they’re ignored because they aren’t black.
Go ahead and tell me it isn’t the same thing.
I’m glad someone has finally caught on to the crux of the problem. Diversity, for some, is a simple number and a simple formula for some. Number of people in a given group – everyone but black people = % diversity.
[tags]diversity, gumble, wise, olympics[/tags]