When Did Diversity Go From Being a Widely Shared Goal to Humanity's Greatest Evil?
That can’t be right. Everybody hates diversity!
I’m old enough to remember a halcyon time when diversity was widely, if not universally, seen as positive. The left and the right had different ideas about the best way to achieve diversity, but damn near everyone, Nazis aside, agreed that it was a good thing when an institution or country reflected the great melting pot of American life.
The left embraced Affirmative Action, Black Power, and the study of Black History as ways to fight the damage done by centuries of aggressive anti-black racism in the form of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American Nazi party.
We acknowledged the brutal reality of institutionalized racism and white privilege and took concrete steps to make our country more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.
The right was ostensibly in favor of diversity in theory but saw attempts to fight anti-black racism as condescending, wrong-headed, destructive, and racist.
Conservatives denied that white privilege and institutional racism existed. They portrayed Affirmative Action as the misguided action of fools who thought that black people were too stupid and incompetent to get jobs based on merit and needed assistance from big government.
Donald Trump and his minions are extremely worried about racism. They have consistently depicted it as a terrible social ill. In Trump’s mind anti-black racism doesn’t exist. Institutional racism does not exist. White privilege does not exist.
The racism that Trump is always complaining about is exclusively anti-white racism. For Trump and people like him, acknowledging anti-black racism and taking steps to make up for institutionalized bigotry are inherently racist against white people who might have been slave owners or plantation bosses at one point but now individually and collectively were as innocent and devoid of sin as a newborn baby. A newborn WHITE baby.
For Trump, any black person who advocates for Civil Rights is, by definition, a race hustler out to get rich and make a name for themselves by spreading the poisonous lie that people like himself are racist and that racism continues to exist. In Trump’s mind, only a stupid, low IQ, incompetent moron like Maxine Waters would think of Trump as anything other than principled and colorblind.
Trump finds the very idea that a country that twice elected Mr. “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets”, “Go back to the shithole countries that they come from” and “Prove to me that Obama ISN’T a secret Muslim!” to the highest office in the land, despite an appalling lack of qualifications, might be racist in any way insulting, unfair and obviously untrue.
The pendulum has swung so dramatically that in an executive order that stops just short of proposing the death penalty for DEI proponenets, the practice of trying to make the world a little fairer for women, the disabled, people of color is deemed both “illegal” and “amoral.”
Trump isn’t just firing everyone involved with DEI. He’s having them watched so that if they try to apply for a government job ten years later they’ll be coldly rejected for having once committed the unforgivable crime of trying to make a workplace more diverse.
The Trump administration is worried about evil diversity freaks secretly promoting equality and inclusion so they want the few remaining government employees to find out if “they know of any efforts to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.”
Trump is revoking decades upon decades of executive orders to fight racism, including a program introduced by Lyndon B. Johnson that required government contractors to adopt non-discriminatory practices in hiring and employment.
Thank God that government contractors can now adopt deliberately discriminatory practices in hiring and employment. That can only bode well for society.
The government is officially being controlled by the kind of assholes who spend hours arguing online about how racist and unfair it is that there’s Black History Month but not White History Month and that shouting “Black Power!” makes you hip but “White Power!” makes you a Nazi.
If a minority is in a position of power, then by definition, Trump thinks that they only attained it because the system is unfairly prejudiced against the white people who have always had most of the power in American society, particularly now.
He thinks that Rachel Levine and Kamala Harris only became Assistant Secretary for Health and Vice President, respectively, because life is so damn easy for unattractive Jewish trans women and black/Asian women, respectively.
This is in sharp contrast to Trump and Pete Hegseth, whose power is even more deserved and righteous because they thrived in a system unrelentingly hostile to media-savvy straight white television professionals.
Under Trump, diversity went from being an admirable, widely shared goal to the greatest evil mankind has ever known.
DEI, like Affirmative Action, is a response to the inhuman brutality of a segregated America that was separate but far from equal.
Official segregation ended well over a half-century ago here in the United States.
That is not true of South Africa. The country where my wife was born (which means that my South African-American sons have a doubly fucked up racial heritage) used to be known primarily for its racism, apartheid, and segregation. Now, it’s known for Elon Musk, racism, and Elon Musk’s racism.
For many in Trump’s cabinet, segregation and Jim Crow are things that they read about in history books. It’s something that happened to their grandparents.
For Elon Musk, it was something he grew up with and watched fall in his late teens.
Musk has a closer relationship to segregation than anyone else in Trump’s orbit. He’s very concerned about racism in South Africa, but his sympathies, of course, lie with white South Africans he sees as victims of an evil black power structure. So, while Musk hates the idea of poor brown people crossing the border in an attempt to realize the American dream, he is in favor of more immigration for White South Africans.
Diversity has come to be seen as a society-destroying and corrupting force because we’re way more comfortable being overly, explicitly racist during Trump 2.0. Trump ran on a racism and transphobia-based platform. He may not be able to lower inflation or egg prices, but he has delivered on his promises to fight DEI with the unambiguous enthusiasm of a natural-born racist.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his non-existent dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here.