The \u201cadministration\u2019s\u201d war on \u201cDEI\u201d fills me with such rage.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Or that it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s that so many of the news reports cover it as if it is a policy issue and use \u201cDEI\u201d and \u201cwoke\u201d 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 And they so rarely mention that these policies are a direct violation of many of our laws \u2014 which have not been repealed or overturned by the courts \u2014 and a good chunk of our Constitution.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
He micromanaged both of them. It drove them nuts.<\/p>\n
He was politically quite liberal, but I always figured that, in his heart, he didn\u2019t think anybody who wasn\u2019t white and male could really do the job \u2014 even when they were doing it incredibly well.<\/p>\n
I think that\u2019s the crux of the problem: that too many white men don\u2019t think either women or people of color are competent. I don\u2019t mean just white supremacists or blatant misogynists \u2013 I mean people like that guy I knew. <\/p>\n
So when the incredibly incompetent Secretary of Defense fires generals because they\u2019re women and\/or Black, they go tut-tut, but they don\u2019t take it all that seriously. In their hearts, they do question whether anybody but a white man can lead the military.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s 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 \u2013 and is \u2013 to make sure qualified people aren\u2019t passed over because of discrimination.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s going on now is white guys getting scared that they won\u2019t be in charge anymore (and more than a few white women backing them up).<\/p>\n
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\u2019d already hired one woman attorney for the two lawyer office and they didn\u2019t want an office with all women lawyers.<\/p>\n
That is, the idea of a law office that was all women just didn\u2019t seem right to them. Of course, back then there weren\u2019t a lot of women lawyers \u2013 the town where I ran that office had over a hundred lawyers and eight of them were women. I knew them all \u2013 we\u2019d call around and have lunch together and call it the Women\u2019s Bar Association meeting.<\/p>\n
That town had two Black lawyers \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
We cannot let these racists slam those doors closed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The \u201cadministration\u2019s\u201d war on \u201cDEI\u201d fills me with such rage. It\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1112,611,39],"class_list":["post-4178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-affirmative-action","tag-misogyny","tag-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4179,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4178\/revisions\/4179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}