When Inclusivity Integrates - One Big Happy Side Show Of Diversity, Better Than The Circus Any Day

Harper Fielding was happy that finally his dream had come true.  The Cooperative for Diversity had organized a jamboree to which all minority groups were invited.  Blacks, gays, lesbians, transgenders, Hispanics, and people of all colors would for once join together for a common experience of solidarity, communality, and good will.  The jamboree would kick off a movement for minority integration, the necessary joining of forces against the misanthropic, hateful policies of the Trump administration. 

This event had long been in the offing, but had been hard to visualize let alone organize.  The progressive canon of inclusiveness had focused on individual group identity.  While black people and gay people both were oppressed groups, they each needed distinction, space, and recognition. How would a ghetto pimp possibly understand water sports, dirt-tracking, and flower arrangement? Or vice-versa how could a gay man even begin to understand the strutting, ho's-and-bro's black thing?  No, it was important first to consolidate, unify, and share; and then perhaps to join others in a universal hatred of white, straight America. 

'I ain't fuckin' with no queers', said Pharoah Jones, one of Anacostia's big men, pasha of the ghetto's biggest harem, drug potentate, and the black Bernie Madoff, when he heard the idea of the Joint Conference On Minority Solidarity organized by Washington progressive Harper Fielding, social justice champion, veteran of the civil rights wars, and President Emeritus of Alternate Love, Inc., the leading lobby group for integrated minority rights. 

Finisterre Langley, cross-dressing queen from Dupont Circle, considered the most beautiful and desirable transgender woman in Washington, leader of Cunts For Civil Action, another of the Florida Avenue corridor non-profit agencies, and woman of notice, felt the same way.  Although she commiserated with the plight of the black man, she wanted nothing to do with his nasty machismo, pimp-walking, cock strutting arrogance. 

 

Latinos were too busy with three jobs fixing up white people's property to be interested in any such event or movement; plus the fact they wanted nothing to do with either black man or queers, were happy to stay within the friendly confines of Adams Morgan, and stick to rice and beans. 

'This is not what we intended', Harper confided to a colleague about the DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) identity movement. 'It was to be a big tent affair'; but the seeds of division and separateness had been sown long ago.  Black people were the anointed race to be raised from slavery and the African forest to the top of the human pyramid, and they could do this only if they were unencumbered, free to move, develop, mature, and profit.  

Gay men, for so long in the closet, and so anxious to get out of the smarmy bathhouses of San Francisco into the mainstream, be married, and happy with children had to find their own way to negotiate their future in a straight world. And lesbians, from girly-girls to truck-driving dykes, needed their own pathways forward. 

Latinos it seemed needed nothing.  They were happy enough on white roofs, white gardens, and white lawns, ready to pile the muchachos in a pick-up and start Rodriguez & Associates, landscape advisors; and didn't need any outside interference.  Besides which, they were being elbowed aside by a swarm of illegal Mexicans and Hondurans pushing their way into a business where they didn't belong. 

This of course was the fundamental fallacy of the DEI movement.  It was created to form one, big, non-white, alternative America, and it ended up with nothing but a freak show of bearded ladies, two headed babies, dwarves, and oversized women.  No solidarity there in a me-too environment fostered and promoted by the movement's regents in Washington. 

Harper should have known better, since he had been given a sinecure in the Biden White House, a diversity advisor charged with furthering the administration's agenda of inclusivity.  The former President had done his level best to include every permutation of human beings possible on his staff.  

Led by LaShonda Williams, a high-shelved, no-nonsense ghetto queen who had caught the eye of Biden's Chief of Staff, the recruitment process was a side show.  But when all was said and done, the staff did not look anything like America but some very perverted vision of it, exactly what the President wanted. 

 

Human nature being what it is - aggressive, territorial, self-interested, and amoral - the different identity groups (each appointee brought his/her own staff) quickly began to fight for traction, influence, and funding. Staff meetings were raucous, untamed, wild affairs with never any agreement or consensus.  Diversity meant each to his own, each for his own; and the result was a clawing, nails out brutal affair. 

Yet, Harper's natural idealism prevailed, he dismissed the White House food fight as growing pains, and soldiered on towards the utopian future promised by his progressive colleagues. This journey had to be done cooperatively, with all minorities pulling their oars in rhythm and unison otherwise the ship would drift off course.  The jamboree and the Movement For Minority Integration would be instrumental in a successful voyage. 

Now Harper, not unlike Finisterre Langley, hated to visit the ghetto; but like it or not, Anacostia was the motherlode - the urban street culture which defined the black experience, and Pharoah Jones was its best expression.  If he could encourage his folk to participate in the movement, the battle was half-won. 

Harper insisted in travelling to the inner city in a caravan.  The crime rates in Anacostia were sky high and even the Metropolitan police stayed away; but that was not black people's fault but the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and insidious, perpetual white racism. 

'Whatchoo doin' up in here, white boy?', said Pharoah when Harper stepped out of the lead vehicle and approached him on the stoop. Harper extended his hand which was refused.  Pharoah spat into the street, took another pull of his Colt-45, and went inside.  'Go back uptown, you ofay cunt', he said as he opened the door. 

 

If this was the black experience, Harper thought; but then, catching himself in apostasy, stopped short, nipped it in the bud, and explained away Pharoah's 'diffidence' because of a natural suspicion of 'the other'.  He would come back another time. 

Harper was just as tentative about going into the gay dens of Dupont Circle as he had been about going to Anacostia, but he steeled his resolve and looked up Finisterre Langley in her club.  Different venue, same greeting.  'Hi, honey, want a blow job?', Finisterre said when she saw him part the beads and come into her dressing room. 

From there it was misery for Harper, although he was now getting the picture.  He and his progressive colleagues had done their job and done it well, giving a sense of identity, entitlement, pride, and defiance to the many identity groups out there, and the idea of some measure of conformity, unity, or solidarity was just a pipedream, an idiot's imagining, a non-starter. 

Simply to square the circle, Harper made a perfunctory stop in Adams Morgan, Latino Central, and was warmly received.  Most of the Salvadorans there were unemployed but unconcerned, and happy-go-luck. Que sera, sera; la cultura de la hamaca; and manana were still operative in the barrio. Of course they will come, but would there be free food? and how many black people will be there?

Harper hung 'em up after than desultory meeting in Bar San Miguel.  Enough is enough, let them be, he said referring to the whole lot of protected minorities.  If that indifference weren't bad enough, he began to wonder when these people would shape up? 

'A conservative in the making', said a friend to which Harper had no response.