I’d like to share this little vignette from the National Review. It fits in with this month’s theme of multiculturalism (and I promise to find something else to blog about next month…)

(I’m talking about white people, of course — white liberals.)

Do you know this type? They flip through magazines, searching for black models in the ads; if there aren’t enough of them, they complain to the magazine. They judge a neighborhood, an institution, or even a cocktail party by its degree of integration. They can’t look at a crowd without taking a little racial census, mentally.

One of the reasons I affiliate myself with the Republicans is that I abhor this racial-mindedness. I think of what Condoleezza Rice said, when she spoke to the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia. She was explaining why she became a Republican. She began, “I joined the party for different reasons. I found a party that sees me as an individual, not as part of a group…” That was number one, note.

We know the type…

In the course of my work, I often ask people how they came to be conservative (I talk to a lot of conservatives). You may recall the piece I did on Indian Americans in a recent NR. (You are reading the print magazine, aren’t you? Good — I wanted to be assured.) I included in that piece a statement by an Indian American — a Muslim, as it happens — who outlined for me his political history. (Please bear in mind that when I say Indian American, I’m talkin’ Subcontinent, not Navajo.)

He said, “I became a Republican when I was 17, at Berkeley, of all places. This was in the ’80s, and the number-one issue on campus was affirmative action. I had gone to a high school where there were kids of every stripe and color, and race was never an issue. When I got to Berkeley, I thought I was in the Balkans, because everyone hated each other. I couldn’t stand the racial fixations. That’s what drove me to the Republican party.”

And 20 years later, things are as they were.