Victor Davis Hanson
The evil of the diversity/equity/inclusion industry—costing the U.S. more than $1 trillion in its last, most radical four years of implementation—was not its fraud alone. We expected fakers like Ibram X. Kendi—born Ibram Henry Rogers to middle-to-upper-middle-class Jamaican immigrant professionals—to be lavished with millions of leftwing guilt money, spend through it without any tangible result, and finally be relegated to obscurity.
We expected the Marxist women who founded BLM to take the millions of dollars in corporate Danegeld, buy lavish homes, drain the coffers of BLM, and live the good life on their newly purchased estates. In a milder form, we expected the grievance-mongering Obamas to hit the 2024 campaign trail, talk down to minority men considering a Trump vote, do the hopey-change schtick for a few days, and then retreat back on private jets to one of their four estates.
The evil of DEI is not even its blatant racism that claims “anti-racist racism” is OK to combat original racism. Nor is the great fraud of DEI even that it cannot define its own membership, cannot explain the degree to which ancient sins of bias still exist, and cannot demonstrate why the upper-middle-class DEI victim is worse off than the much poorer, lower-class non-DEI victimizer.
No, the problem with DEI is the same that characterizes all totalitarian ideologies. It gives exemption to party members from accountability and frees them to injure without consequences, in the manner of Mao’s cultural revolution or Stalin’s various purges. Once you state you’re morally superior by reason of your equity or egalitarian or socialist or communist ideology and thus exempt from the consequences of your own actions—then the sky becomes the limit of what you will eventually be capable of doing.
Once one claims membership in the DEI/victimized side of the Marxist binary, without showing any proof of past suffering from discrimination, then one feels exempt in all aspects, past, present, and future, of public life.
So now we are witnessing at Columbia and on the streets of New York massive demonstrations, many of them violent. They are aimed at championing foreign nationals put on notice that they will face deportation for knowingly breaking rules and laws in promoting a terrorist-designated organization like Hamas.
The accompanying anti-Semitism is condoned, ignored, or championed, given the DEI victim himself can never cross the binary into victimizer territory, but instead is free to spew hate, call for violence, break laws, and defy campus rules, predicated on the exemption provided by DEI. Once the Left claimed that all Palestinians were non-white victims of white Jewish “settler” victimizers, then the story was over. Anything the latter did was criminal, anything the former did was exempt and protected.
So, DEI sends the message, an attractive one for many, that if you can claim membership on the right side of the binary, then much of the modern world’s pressures and stresses may not apply to you.
Apply to college? Until recently, SAT and ACT scores had been suspended in admissions. Once admitted on DEI grounds, classes accommodated the DEI victim rather than the victim meeting the standards of the classes.
A bad grade? A poor paper? DEI answers “racism.” And the message permeates every facet of wider off-campus life. Was Karen Bass willfully negligent by junketeering to Ghana as her city burned? DEI says, “You’re racist to imply that.” The gay fire chief who was fired? Only possible by a DEI mayor who out-DEI-ed her?
The deputy Los Angeles mayor? Is he still home after allegedly calling in a bomb threat? How dare you suggest he was treated differently due to his DEI status.
When United Airlines announced that it was requiring half its pilot trainees to be DEI applicants, or when the FAA in its hiring of air traffic controllers systematically ignored white males with military experience in favor of DEI applicants, what did the public think would eventually follow? After all, if United or the FAA had once set in place prior standards of quantifiable test achievement, past experience, or educational prerequisites, were they so established for a purpose? Or were they always meaningless?
And if so, did waiving them mean what exactly? Such requirements were never that important? Somewhat important? Superseded by DEI’s superior standards?
Over some 20 years as a California State University professor, I got to know the Orwellian side of pre-DEI affirmative action known as “diversity.” It went something like this. Each year, I would counsel 2-3 senior classics majors about their futures. Usually, they were straight-A students. We urged them to prep hard for the GRE and other graduate school entrance tests of their choice (e.g., LSAT or MCAT). If they wished to go on to law school or PhD programs, we suggested an MA, in which their languages and course work could be honed—on the theory that a CSU Master’s Degree would be considered comparable to a UC BA.
To be continued…
The post <span class="ultra-flag 4"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>The Real Dangers of DEI. Part One appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.