DEI was never going to survive US Whites approaching majority-minority status
Just too much change in too short of a time for an exceedingly thin-skinned race
An airplane full of civilians crashes into a military helicopter over the Potomac River in DC — a totally believable and thus that much more frightening scenario to this frequent flier who once lived there for a decade and still flies there regularly for work. Everyone (67) on board died.
Tough moment for a new president.
Trump, true to form, handled it by blaming DEI as a root cause: an FAA unjustly accused — in his instinctive attack mode — of being “too White” by his woke predecessors and thus somehow ruined by diversity programs promoted by our one-and-only African-American POTUS and that onetime-Trump-vanquishing Biden.
As always, even when it happens on Trump’s watch, it doesn’t really happen on his watch.
True leadership, right?
So comforting to note our President shall not be blamed. It keeps the national focus where it should be — on his innocence.
From Axios:
"I put safety first. Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first," Trump said during a press conference in which he repeatedly attacked his Democratic predecessors, as well as former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Trump claimed the FAA's diversity policies had included "hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities."
Nothing weird here, folks.
Trump 2.0 is on a roll with its DEI-crushing campaign, having achieved preemptive obedience from all sorts of industries and their leading players. The code-switching here, I guess, is justified on political grounds even as it seems entirely on shaky ground when it comes to defensible values.
I mean, it’s hard to argue the evils of diversity (homogeneity, yay!), equality (inequality, yay!), and inclusion (exclusion, yay!), is it not? Just a lot of ways to say it’s better when “true” talent (read, White) is manning (emphasis on gender) those jobs that demand only the best!
Our president perfectly embodies that arrogance. Thank God he’s bringing back White masculine energy because there’s far too little of that in our world today!
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen …
But there are prices to be paid when social structures (i.e., presumptive privileges) of long standing lose that standing — and steep prices when the timeframe is as short as one century or can be approximated by one human life. I, for one, will die in an America far different in racial makeup and tolerance in general than the one I was born into.
Is this newer version better than the old? In my opinion, it is without a doubt better. I am amazed at how super-empowered I am in this life today compared to the constraints and limits I experienced growing up. My life is infinitely richer and more interesting and challenging in ways I find quite exhilarating compared to my rather homogeneous youth, where the biggest schism seemed to be Methodist versus Lutheran versus Catholic — distinctions I now find tiny and meaningless.
Did I lose privilege in this transformation? Hard to say otherwise. The world I grew up in was built for White males to succeed in every way imaginable. Honestly, one had to work at failure to achieve it.
But will I miss that privilege? Hard to say I will. It was isolating in ways I could not understand until freed of it. I honestly understood so little of the larger world back then that I shudder to think what sort of a grand strategic thinker I’d be today if my immediate world hadn’t changed so much or I hadn’t traveled so much. Back then I had no idea about how much I didn’t know and felt not nearly enough impetus to correct my rather cloistered existence.
I’m not complaining about my childhood, which was wonderful. It’s just that, in truly small town life, once you’re cast as this or that, you’re pretty much stuck with that identity/reputation for life.
I had no idea reinvention was possible until I reached my dorm at UW Madison and then all bets were off. Still, on my co-ed floor, I can’t remember a single non-White among us 50 or so students.
Harvard broadened my perspective some, simply because of the high foreign quotient. Boston was even better, in its racially tense way back in the 1980s.
One of the great things about having traveled to, and worked in, several dozen nations around the world is that you realize just how much of planet’s population is just fine about not being White — not enjoying that “privilege” or even recognizing it. One travels deep into China or Africa, from which three of my six kids hail, and you can go days upon days without seeing a White person and you are the oddity by whom parents want to position their kid for a keepsake photograph (He’s just so curious because he’s never seen one of you in person!).
It is very centering — that experience.
My eldest daughter (White) got it while working as a school teacher in Japan for several years, and my eldest son (also) is getting it right now working as an attorney for the Navajo Nation. It’s that realization that you’re the only White person in the room and that your presence is giving too many of the people there a weird vibe that you just … have to manage.
Of course, that experience is nothing new for minorities in general. Indeed, it’s the norm that produces code-switching, which a lot of people view as a falsehood perpetrated but I view as character acting: I’m still always me, I just present and respond with certain differences depending on the audience.
[Cue Jon Lovitz] Not just ACTING but REACTING!
I do that all the time with public speaking and consider it less a form of shielding than a form of openness — as in, I recognize your presence and your differences and I am open to adjusting to them. The stronger those differences are, to include either a super conservative or super liberal audience, the more I enjoy the challenge and accomplishment. Preaching to the choir is easy; winning over a hostile or skeptical or biased audience is hard but satisfying.
Weird thing is, my mom and dad always taught me that such behavior was only being polite, observant, and respectful. One doesn’t speed talk or mumble before an elder with poor hearing, nor does one casually swear in front of someone clearly uncomfortable with that behavior. That’s all code switching in its most elemental form. Hell, when actors do it, we consider it the height of artistic accomplishment — an amazing performance … transformational!
To me, such adjustments are just good Christianity, in addition to serving as the kernel logic of democracy in that John Stuart Mills sort of way: my freedom to be X, Y, and Z is unlimited … until it bumps up against your freedom to be A, B, and C. Once that happens, we both need to dial it down a bit, adjusting to — and, yes, mimicking — the other in a sort of I’ll-meet-you-halfway-there manner. Per Mills, that’s pragmatic necessity yielding ethics in a very utilitarian manner: I behave like this because it just makes life easier and more efficient.
Plus, not being an asshole really is a virtue!
Conflict and anger and hatred are exhausting; being polite is not. Frankly, it’s the quickest and simplest and least costly way out of, or through, any situation — especially when things suddenly go uptempo.
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you …
Racism and bigotry [and yes, I realize the hard switch from the preceding source] of all sorts are highly inefficient, take a lot of effort, and waste a lot of time and resources.
As the non-biological father of three non-Whites, I can tell you that my status does not guarantee my lack of racism. It’s just makes it such an effort that it strikes me as pointless: How can I justify all that strain on a daily basis — in my own house!
So, I don’t make that effort, and I do code-switch, and I do pretend to be more like others to make them comfortable in my presence and to make me comfortable in theirs … and it works.
But no, DEI was doomed by the growing awareness among American Whites that their central place in our society was diminishing — Obama’s win in 2008 being the cultural trigger to let all that negative emotion out.
Trump’s win in 2016 was monumentally bigger in that regard, and we feel similar shockwaves now with him back in power. All sorts of permissions are now being signaled for behavior and sentiments long deemed unacceptable in polite company, thus yielding a society steeped in anger, shockingly full of hate, and aggressive beyond reason — all of which costs plenty and advances nothing.
I mean, think about it: the NFL feels compelled to generate public-service announcements that basically ask people to be nicer to one another — the NFL!
I gotta say, I already miss political correctness. I like when people try to be careful with their words and actions and are on high alert concerning the feelings of others — seems very Jesus to me. Conversely, the I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-what-anybody-else-thinks-or-feels approach just strikes me as selfishly mindless, sadly uncreative, and entirely unhelpful.
If that’s all you’ve got to add, then please, as my mom used to say, keep your thoughts to yourself (once a virtuous behavior).
Then there’s the larger argument, once the lens is pulled back from America: our tastes no longer define global culture and consumerism as they once did. The future of globalization is overwhelmingly non-American, non-European, non-White, and — for the most part — non-Christian. If you and your firm want to succeed in that world — that present-seguing-into-the-future, then demonizing and renouncing DEI — even just per formatively — is not the way to go; it’s the way to isolate you and yours in an increasingly competitive global landscape.
Remember: come 2050 one out of four people in this world are African and decidedly young. Try selling them the notion that only White people are talented enough to run things.
I guess I miss the America that wanted to be more than just American. I miss that ambition and optimism to take on all comers versus threatening and belittling them.
Just preserving (White Christian) America isn’t enough for me. I want a bigger, forward-looking challenge, and I think we desperately need one for our upcoming generations of leadership to become suitably engaged in those roles.
Excellent analysis. It looks to me like DJT's definition of DEI is morphing. It now seems to bend beyond race and color. His ant-DEI now shuns people with thoughts of democracy and empathy for others as if that is an intellectual handicap. We seem to be resurrecting Fr Coughlin and Sen McCarthy (both Wisconsinites) to my regret.