Diversity survives only as a bureaucratic initiative. It has no more revolutionary thrust; the thrill is gone. It resides in the mouth of the VP of Communications, not in the heart of the disenfranchised. It suits corporate America better than the barrio and the ghetto. When you hear it, a dulling effect sets in.

Diversity has no plot. Or rather, it has half a plot, or one-fourth or one-fifth. I mean this in a literary sense. The elements of a diversity drama are bare and simple. In the beginning was the man, the white man, the straight white man, the Christian straight white man. And then there were many—women, blacks, browns, Hindus, Haitians, gays . . . it’s a storyline that is applied to our country, colleges, movies, and corporations, whether they fail or succeed in diversity.

That’s it, the story is set. Once we go from mono- to multi-, vanilla to thirty-nine flavors, nothing else follows or needs to follow. Diversity is an end in itself. Old plays had their opening, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement, but the diversity plot is a one-two, before and after. Our progressive leaders in business, media, education, and politics envision it in precisely this way.

But of course, this is too abstract and unimaginative to serve as a satisfying plot. A novel needs more than that, and so does a national story, personal biography, social mores. Plot is the abstract arrangement of incidents, Aristotle said, but we need a little more individual flesh and blood than this demographic change admits. The struggle to get home, to pass through treacherous lands and return to family and possessions, as Odysseus does—that’s a plot. The discovery of a dead body and the steady detection of the killer, the escape from bondage in Exodus and Huckleberry Finn, the course of the Confederacy from the seizure of Fort Sumter to the surrender at Appomattox, boy-gets-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-girl-back . . . those are plots.

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