This in recently from the always-worth-reading Dr. Thomas Sowell:  The Demand for Villains.  Excerpt:

The latest tempest in a teapot controversy is over a lack of black nominees for this year’s Academy Awards in Hollywood.

The assumption seems to be that different groups would be proportionally represented if somebody were not doing somebody else wrong. That assumption carries great weight in far more important things than Academy Awards and in places more important than Hollywood, including the Supreme Court of the United States.

Having spent decades researching racial and ethnic groups around the world, I have never yet found a country in which all groups — or even most groups — are even roughly equally represented in most endeavors.

Nor have I been the only one with that experience. The great French historian Fernand Braudel said, “In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally.” A study of military forces around the world failed to find a single one in which in which the ethnic makeup of the military was the same as that of the society.

Let’s focus for just a moment on the recent Academy Awards.

There has been a significant amount of whining over the whiteness of nominees.  For two entire years, the nominees for the self-congratulatory Academy awards have been people of pallor.  Is the Academy – all denizens of the notoriously liberal Hollywood – racist?

Probably not.

In fact, the protesters are turning Dr. King’s dream on its head, as are the rest of the professional racial grievance industry.  They want to be judged, not by the content of their character – or by the quality of their performance – but by the color of their skin.

So why not just start their own Academy Awards?  There’s plenty of precedent.  There’s a Black Entertainment Television.  Why not a Black Academy Awards?

You know, because, diversity, and stuff.