Asides: The Unwittingly Self-Undermining Extra Argument

     (Yeah, yeah, I got tired of calling them “quickies.”)

     Via Weird Dave at AosHQ, we have this citation by Bari Weiss:

     Just ask Norman Wang. Last year, the University of Pittsburgh cardiologist was demoted by his department after he published a paper in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) analyzing and criticizing diversity initiatives in cardiology. Looking at 50 years of data, Wang argued that affirmative action and other diversity initiatives have failed to both meaningfully increase the percentage of black and Hispanic clinicians in his field or to improve patient outcomes. Rather than admitting, hiring and promoting clinicians based on their race, he argued for race-neutral policies in medicine.

“Long-term academic solutions and excellence should not be sacrificed for short-term demographic optics,” Wang wrote. “Ultimately, all who aspire to a profession in medicine and cardiology must be assessed as individuals on the basis of their personal merits, not their racial and ethnic identities.”

     [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     The second paragraph above is both sufficient and morally inarguable. The emphasized portion of the first paragraph is the troublemaker. It elicits a nasty response:

“So if diversity initiatives had succeeded in increasing the percentage of black and Hispanic clinicians in cardiology, they would have been acceptable?”

     Watch out for this kind of thing, Gentle Reader.

     If a thing is wrong, it is wrong — and vox populi can’t change it. – Robert A Heinlein

     Neither can “success” at attaining some morally irrelevant “diversity outcome.” Verbum sat sapienti.