BusinessNH magazine recently ran a cover story on the wonders of DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. While the education establishment has been foisting highly-paid DEI coordinators on us for years, businesses are now foisting. Unfortunately.
The BusinessNH cover featured an African-American man and two women. Conspicuously—but typically—absent were the increasingly reviled OWGs (Old White Guys). You know, like our nation’s increasingly reviled founders. OWGs are now targets of a trifecta of prejudice based on age, color, and gender. But that’s seemingly okay with many DEI folks.
The magazine’s puff piece reminded me of a gender diversity panel session I attended at a legislative conference last year. All six panelists were female. OWGs need not participate. Google “DEI and White Males” and you’ll find countless examples of discrimination against OWGs. And YWGs. Lawsuits are coming.
The DEI craze conflicts with Martin Luther King’s dictum about people being judged on inherent merit and character content as opposed to skin color.
Quotas are inevitable. DEI people need stats. If a group is “underrepresented” in an institution’s personnel profile, action is required to address discrepancies. If there are too many OWGs on the payrolls, then good luck to any WG seeking opportunities there, regardless of qualifications. Google “reverse discrimination.”
Diversity staffers don’t market, sell, or build anything. But they do create problems.
It’s one thing to now stack the deck against white guys in academia. Naming a lesser-qualified person as a department head usually won’t kill anyone. But the DEI craze is now putting lives and national security at risk.
In “American Thinker,” Tom Harvey described how our government is plagued by DEI hurdles. Air traffic controller hiring has moved away from merit-based to gender/race-based. Because 86% of Air Force pilots are white men, its recruiting head has identified this as a major crisis. And United Airlines reportedly promised that 50% of their pilots will be women or people of color.
As a nervous frequent flier, I could care less about the gender or race of pilots or air traffic controllers. I just want to put my life in the hands of the most competent people when I’m helplessly aloft in a 737.
Consider how President Biden kneels at the DEI altar. His picks for vice-president, supreme court justice, press secretary, and other positions were driven by identity politics, not competency. So was his choice to replace New Hampshire with South Carolina as the site of the First in the Nation Primary.
The need to promote DEI is an affront to generations of parents, mentors, and teachers who’ve long promoted fairness, diversity, equity, and inclusion without hiring government approved specialists or deploying discredited 1619 Projects or Critical Race Theories.
Orwellian exploitation of the concepts of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” basically reflects “progressive politics.” Can a single conservative DEI coordinator please step forward?
Light needs to be shined on DEI policies and mandates that marginalize OWGs, YWGs, traditionalists, and others. Such policies create backlash and ironically hamper progress towards natural and organic diversity, equity, and inclusion.
I somehow think Martin Luther King might agree.
#####
(State Rep. Mike Moffett of Loudon chairs the House Committee on State-Federal Relations.)
