The “administration’s” war on “DEI” fills me with such rage.
It’s not just that it is intended to undermine all the civil rights laws that people fought and died for so that the country could, in fact, live up to its principles and give everyone here the rights and opportunities that rich white men (and a few of their select friends) wanted to keep for themselves.
Or that it’s being used to undermine our universities and even medical research. Or to remove highly qualified people from positions of authority so they can be replaced by incompetents who suck up to the grifter in chief.
It’s that so many of the news reports cover it as if it is a policy issue and use “DEI” and “woke” as if they actually mean what the grifter uses them to mean. And they so rarely mention that these policies are a direct violation of many of our laws — which have not been repealed or overturned by the courts — and a good chunk of our Constitution.
I am reminded of someone I knew years ago who ran a small nonprofit working on housing. He hired two women to work for him — one Black woman with substantial experience in housing finance (better, in fact, than his) and the other a white woman with excellent administrative skills, who ran the office.
He micromanaged both of them. It drove them nuts.
He was politically quite liberal, but I always figured that, in his heart, he didn’t think anybody who wasn’t white and male could really do the job — even when they were doing it incredibly well.
I think that’s the crux of the problem: that too many white men don’t think either women or people of color are competent. I don’t mean just white supremacists or blatant misogynists – I mean people like that guy I knew.
So when the incredibly incompetent Secretary of Defense fires generals because they’re women and/or Black, they go tut-tut, but they don’t take it all that seriously. In their hearts, they do question whether anybody but a white man can lead the military.
Here’s the thing that all those people seem to be missing: the purpose of affirmative action, equal opportunity, and DEI is not to put incompetent minorities and women in better jobs. It was – and is – to make sure qualified people aren’t passed over because of discrimination.
It worked, too. Over the past 50 years or so we have ended up with some incredible women and people of color in major positions.
What’s going on now is white guys getting scared that they won’t be in charge anymore (and more than a few white women backing them up).
When I got out of law school back in the day, I got turned down for jobs due to sex discrimination and offered one because of affirmative action. Ironically, I was offered a job running a four-lawyer office instead of one running a two-lawyer office because they’d already hired one woman attorney for the two lawyer office and they didn’t want an office with all women lawyers.
That is, the idea of a law office that was all women just didn’t seem right to them. Of course, back then there weren’t a lot of women lawyers – the town where I ran that office had over a hundred lawyers and eight of them were women. I knew them all – we’d call around and have lunch together and call it the Women’s Bar Association meeting.
That town had two Black lawyers – one in our office and one the first Black woman licensed to practice law in Texas. They pushed doors open. We all pushed doors open.
We cannot let these racists slam those doors closed.
very moving