Diversity Mongers Target the Web

Imagine someone coping with real discrimination — a black tanner, say, in 1897 Alabama. To expand his business, he needs capital and access to markets beyond the black business corridors in the south. Every white lender has turned him down, however, and no white merchant will carry his leather goods, even though they are superior to what is currently on the market. Tell that leather maker that an alternative universe exists, where he can obtain credit based solely on his financial history and sell his product based solely on its quality — a universe where race is so irrelevant that no one will even know his own — and he would think he had died and gone to heaven.

For allegedly discriminated-against minority and female writers, the web is just that heaven. —Heather Mac Donald —Diversity Mongers Target the Web (National Review)

Well, that assumes that the minority and female writers have equal access to the technology and skills that would prepare them for success on the internet. It also presumes they have equal access to the time it takes to build up a reputation that leads to paid work.

Mac Donald notes that women don’t tend to write about politics as often as men, and that some minorities might not have the verbal skills that would enable them to make excellent writers; she also raises the spectre of quotas, which was probably unnecessary.