Victor Davis Hanson
America has reverted to a pre-civilizational fixation on tribe and superficial appearance over character and expertise—and the result has been a disaster. But how do we even calibrate “diversity” or “people of color”? Why is a poorer Sicilian-American not diverse, but a richer Hispanic of lighter hue with a “Latino” last name is “diverse”?
So, what makes one a member of the DEI club? Is it a threshold percentage of non-white DNA, as the Left resurrects the racist “one-drop” rule of the Old Confederacy? Is it hairstyle? Does dyed blond Joy Reid no longer qualify but the once young Bo Derek with cornrows did? If we can construct our sex/gender and “transition,” why not with race?
Do income and wealth and privilege matter? Rich Harvard ex-president Claudine Gay, from one of Haiti’s prominent business families, was not part of the African American historical experience. She certainly grew up in privilege, with all the elite educational checkoffs. So why was she considered in need of fast-track DEI consideration?
So, what is this racist idea of DEI?
Apparently, affirmative action devolved into “diversity,” to then being described not as victim status from historical American oppression, but simply as mostly not being white (regardless of the undefined percentage threshold of qualifying as not being white)—regardless of class, privilege, riches, or familial history?
Do we see where we are going on this racist trajectory?
Any society that categorizes individuals by their supposed racial status—whether the yellow-star Third Reich, or the Indian caste system, or the Jim Crow one-drop rule—eventually becomes consumed by their absurd fixations.
And we will be no exception, as we see Kamala Harris, the child of two PhDs, one an Indian American of Brahmin family status, the other a well-off Jamaican family with a long ancestry of land-holding that included an Irish-Jamaican slave-holding estate owner.
The point?
Again, once you go down the road of racial essentialism and privilege (in the past accorded whites, in the present accorded non-whites), you have two choices in such a racist commissariat: one, you can have no rules to adjudicate racial categorization and you end up with the faker Elizabeth Warren, Harvard’s “first” Native-American law professor, or a Ward Churchill in beads and buckskin, or a Rachel Dolezal, or the thousands of unnamed who game the system—or you can have rules of racialization and end up on the long road to a sick caste system.
The post <span class="ultra-flag"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>The DEI Drag: Part One appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.