Diversity, by its nature, is often found at the center of many hot-button issues. Recent Supreme Court cases, criminal controversies, and political posturing have boldly redrawn racial dividing lines between people, forcing diversity-related issues to the forefront yet again. This is completely bewildering to those of us who happily accept racial differences among people, and simply want to move on to more civilized topics.
We should always fight back against intolerance here at Brandeis, where we are not only tolerant of differences, but also hold diversity itself as a value. It is a worthy pillar of our community and we ought to do it justice. In order to do so properly, however, we must address the meaning of diversity and how to properly achieve it as a value.

There are two commonly accepted approaches to diversity: the race-based approach and the character-based approach. A purely race-based approach strives for a community of people who represent the full spectrum of skin colors, whilst a purely character-based approach would seek out a community of people with the widest possible array of different ideas and outlooks.

Most institutions in the United States, including Brandeis University, favor a hybrid approach, but the dominant aspect of the mixture is undoubtedly the race-based approach. The prevalent concept of a diverse workplace or community is based on race-people tend to envision diversity as a full rainbow of skin tones.

This is a false view that corrupts the true nature of diversity. A diverse community is one with many different kinds of people-but people differ most by their character, not by their race. What makes any given person different from others is the sum of the actions they take and the values they choose, not the pigment in his or her skin. Diversity does not come from a wide variety of appearances, but rather from a multiplicity of ideas and traditions that shape the different ways individuals in a group can approach the world.

Often times, skin pigment becomes a factor for innocent, well-intentioned reasons. Diversity-seekers who intend to create a vibrant community regularly get trapped into pitfalls that result from using skin color as a shortcut to diversity. This is because people from different cultures tend to approach the world differently, and there are many cultures that coincide with racial groups. It is crucial to note when a culture and a race coincide, the color of peoples' skin is not the cause of their unique approach to life, but rather a mere side variable.

In other cases, tactics encouraging racial diversity are adopted in order to combat past or present racial discrimination. While this action is laudably well-intended, it is misguided. Diversity-seekers understand that it is evil to discriminate against a human being's character according to the color of his or her skin. To fight this, they must adopt the inverse of that view, in the hopes of countering it out of existence: they choose to positively evaluate people who have been discriminated against based on skin color.

But, by doing so, they cede the high ground to racists. Both approaches-the discriminatory and the anti-discriminatory-stem from the same corrupt premise: the idea that a human being's character can be evaluated strictly through the color of his or her skin. This contradicts and undercuts the moral base of the diversity-seeker's position.

We can-and must-do better. Here at Brandeis, we share the common goal of being among a student body of diverse thinkers. While we understand this implicitly, we sometimes approach our goal with the wrong means. No reasonable person can consider the notion of skin color as a character attribute to be anything except absurd, if not outright evil. We ought to accept this premise explicitly, and put it into practice.

By having checkboxes on our applications that ask prospective students to indicate the color of their skin, we are fighting against our own mission to achieve a diverse campus. A person's race is not a character consideration, nor is it an academic consideration. This practice must be eliminated.

When our Student Union has a racial minority senator, it implies that none of its other senators are capable of representing racial minorities. This goes against everything that Brandeis University embodies and contradicts the attitude our student body regularly practices toward racial majorities and minorities, which is: "We are all Brandeisians, and differences in skin are only skin-deep." This position is redundant, and its existence is an insult to our already diverse, tolerant and inclusive community.

Our approach to diversity cannot be based on fighting racists. We should counter hatred and division in the same way we countered the Westboro Baptist Church in 2011-by showing that people are united by common values and ideas. This crucial distinction will allow us to push the idea of diversity out of its current trappings, and toward an approach that truly embraces each individual's unique qualities.