Tag Archives: DEI

Racist Leaders Presume You Are, Too

By Rob Meyne

  • Feb. 4, 2024
  • 3-min read

The names of many contemporary movements, organizations, and legislation are focused-grouped tested to ensure they sound as appealing as possible. Nomenclature has a lot to do with the ability to successfully market something.

Terms like Black Lives Matter, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), or the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to generate support for policies that do not reflect what their name suggests.

No reasonable person questions that black lives matter. Nor do they oppose the ideas of inclusion or inflation reduction. Yet frequently a majority of reasonable people oppose the specific actions being taken in pursuit of those objections. The devil is always in the details.

Years ago, you may recall there was opposition to harvesting tuna, because marine mammals were often killed in the process. Accordingly, there was a suggestion that tuna operators should form an alliance and call it “Friends of the Dolphin.” No doubt you could have generated cash contributions to such a group from a lot of people who would have been horrified to find out what it really was.

If you’ve paid attention to the dumpster fire that is also known as the Biden Administration, you will remember they tried to enact components of the “Green New Deal” (AKA, the Green New Steal). These were radical revisions to the way we use and generate energy, manufacture and distribute products, and to whom we give huge taxpayer-funded subsidies. It was politically unpopular and economically devastating. The bill went nowhere. So, they just called it the Inflation Reduction Act. Members of Congress had only a few days to read the thousand page bill, and team Biden just put most of the elements of the Green New Steal into it.

The voters don’t like it? Simple: change its name and pass it anyway.

If you said you were opposed to the Inflation Reduction Act people thought you were in favor of inflation. Sadly, this kind of disingenuousness, and outright lying, drives much of the political process.

Monikers like DEI are crafted to sound like a commitment to a laudable goal but do nothing to tell you the nuts and bolts of the proposals. You can certainly favor the concepts of DEI without favoring the methods leftist elites use to make them happen. The left routinely disguises their true intentions – their actual policies – by labeling them in a misleading way.

It has often been said the left succeeds when the people are not informed but conservatives succeed when they are.

Consider this: any policy that treats people differently based on their skin color or national heritage is racist. That is the definition of racism; treating people differently because of the amount of melanin in their skin. Yet that is exactly what most DEI programs require.

Equity, in fact, is the polar opposite of equal opportunity. Equity requires the allocation of benefits and opportunities based on race. Management by equity requires that merit be a secondary consideration. That is an uncomfortable reality, but until we come to grips with it, we will continue to struggle to find answers to some of our most important problems.

For as long as I can remember, I have been astonished at how people on the left look at everything through the lens of race. Leftist leaders simply don’t believe race isn’t the first thing conservatives think about when they begin their day. Most Democratic leaders assume we are all obsessed with race because they are.

Perhaps more than anything, solutions to problems of race will elude us as long as half the nation assumes the other half shares their obsession with race. Saying that out loud is not likely to make you friends among Democratic leaders.

More to come.

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Equal Opportunity for All Should Be Our Goal

By Rob Meyne

  • Jan. 21, 2024
  • 5-min read

In 2011, Chicago pastor Corey Brooks lived for a while on the roof of an abandoned motel in his South Side neighborhood. He was protesting urban violence and hoping, through contributions, to raise money for a community center.

Brooks is a longtime advocate for people in his neighborhood, a devout Christian, and a respected leader. In the thirteen years since he lived on that roof, Brooks has learned firsthand of the damage being done to young blacks by contemporary Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts and Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Brooks has become a vocal and effective opponent of DEI, CRT, and other schools of thought that teach Americans that you’re either a victim or an oppressor based on your skin color. Brooks writes intelligently and clearly in a piece from Tablet Magazine. It is worth the read.

DEI has evolved into a catch-all phrase that leftists use to refer to everything that is good and worthwhile about fighting racism. If DEI a just referred to good faith efforts to lift up people who might need a helping hand, that would be one thing. No serious and sane person would object to that. That is not what DEI is. As is so often the case with the gospel of the left, the reality of their policies is different from their rhetoric.

It is likely that most people who embrace equity – people who run our schools, have jobs in corporate HR, or maybe work for a non-profit – talk about the concept as if it is a general, all-encompassing effort to pursue a fair and equal world. One doubts that most equity devotees can even define what it means. Most such people no doubt mean well. But the problem is they end up giving energy and momentum to a disastrous concept they don’t actually understand.

The people who implement equity as a policy, however, know that it isn’t the same thing as equality of opportunity. Equity demands equal results based on one’s membership in a group; equal opportunity has a goal of a color-blind society, where effort, talent, and merit matter and skin color cannot hold you back.

In practice, as it is actually implemented by government, DEI tells us that wealth, opportunity, rewards, and benefits should be allocated according to race, sex, and national origin, not by merit. It is all about racial quotas and rejects the role of merit in our society. DEI is perfectly suited for a socialist society but is antithetical to our own.

CRT is an intellectually vacuous set of objectives that have their roots in the Frankfurt School of communism. Yes, no one likes to admit that, and it doesn’t make one sound less conspiratorial to point it out, but it is true. Critical theory in general began with Marx and others who saw all of society as a war between the classes.

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