A recent post at another blog prompts me — once again — to speak directly to those who figure I must be a conservative bigot, given what I’ve written about the diversity efforts of law firms (and law schools).

I see it like this — if it’s wrong to favor a prospective employee (or college student) because he’s a white male, then it’s wrong to favor another because she’s a black female. I see no essential difference: they’re both instances of the sort of discrimination that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was meant to end.

Of course I know the real world isn’t fair, that some are favored just because of their last name, or who their daddy is, or where he went to school, or where he works, or who he knows, etc. But if it’s not right when a white man is the beneficiary of some favoritism, then I don’t see how it’s right when the beneficiary is a black woman.

Yes indeed — the best paid and most powerful lawyers in the U.S. are white men, with few exceptions. And the reason for this is not that white men make better lawyers than black women, or that there’s a greater demand for white, male lawyers than black, female lawyers. It’s because of a longstanding and widespread bias against black women in the legal profession (a bias long exercised by some of the very same firms that now call their commitment to diversity one of their core values).

I know full well that you can’t favor white men for so long and then ban all forms of favoritism and expect that everything will then be fair. As Lyndon Johnson said so well, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

I understand that. I also understand this: a gigantic company wants to sell sugar water to everyone, everywhere in the world. To help it achieve that goal, it tells its law firms that they’d better start hiring people who are as varied as everyone everywhere. What can the firms do? With a very limited supply of the most highly valued minority attorneys to choose from, they start competing with one another.

What results is a function of supply and demand. A black, female attorney just minted by Harvard Law School is offered a greater hiring bonus than a white, male attorney just minted from the same school because she’s more valuable than he.

That’s not equal opportunity. It’s just more of the same sort of nonsense the Civil Rights Act was meant to end.

That’s how I see it.

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I began this blog by posing this question — where is the evidence that a heterogeneous group of people is smarter and more creative than a homogeneous group of people? I’ve asked (literally) scores of CDOs at the firms that make this claim for the evidence: they offer none.

I wonder why.