Race, Gender, And Ethnicity - The Demeaning Bullying Of Diversity And Its Sorry Result

A few years ago when the DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusivity) movement was getting underway, companies organized diversity workshops which were ostensibly intended to make the workplace a more tolerant and accepting place, but which were thinly veiled initiatives to call out white supremacy, privilege, and racism.

The workshops although billed as initiatives to encourage an environment welcoming to brown and black employees, they functioned as an exercise in shaming.  Whites were not to be included as patches in the multicolored quilt, but as the harsh overseers of the slave labor that produced it. 

In one workshop employees were asked to identify themselves by race, gender, and ethnicity, and  to stand in groups.  The identification was left up to the individual - a black Puerto Rican could join either the black or Latino group. A mixed race, white-black worker would be encouraged to decide in which category he felt best.  

Once the division was made, and the various groups were assembled, the facilitator pointed to the white group, not surprisingly the largest in high-powered law, accounting, and economic consulting firms, and began to address the gathering.  LaShonda Evans who was one of Diversity International's most seasoned instructors, began. 

'Here you have America, y'all', she said, pointing to the white group. 'We', she continued indicating the brown and black groups, 'are in the minority.' Broadly smiling, smoothing the folds in her dress, and taking a sip of water, she went on. 

‘But not for long. the demographics show us in the majority in America in a few years, but that numerical majority may still be a minority, treated as inferior, second class, and insignificant unless you' - and here she pointed at the white group - 'assure that it is not. Your days of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and racial bigotry are over, and may they never again return.  Your white supremacy, privilege, and racial elitism, hated but common expressions of the white man, are done for, hallelujah!'

The black folk applauded, the whites did their own shuckin' and jivin', insulted at such outright hysterical cant. LaShonda Evans was no more than a storefront church preacher from the depths of a Washington ghetto, howling for Jesus to come down and save all sinners, full of black spite and vindictive righteousness.  What was she doing here in the first place, an affirmative action momma pulled out of the slums to lecture to us??

 

LaShonda was not expecting anything like this.  Upon hearing her words, white people generally bowed their heads in contrition, regret, and genuine aspiration to mend their ways.  She had not counted on this insurrection, a revolt by these uppity crackers in Armani suits. She would show them. 

'I see that some of us are unhappy with my words...or is it with the message therein? A message of truth, justice, and reform, a message....' 

Here the whites broke ranks, jumped the corral fence and stood in front of Lashonda, arms folded, scowls on their faces, signs she knew were those of dismissiveness, racism, and misogyny.  They never would have treated a man this way. 

The Asians also left their groups and joined the whites circling LaShonda and looking at her with the same attitude, sending their own message to this ugly, fatuous, simple-minded ghetto queen. They had been discriminated against for years by the likes of LaShonda Evans, picked from the ghetto and placed on admission committees bound and determined to open the doors to thousands of black students at any cost.  Bigotry started with black people, not ended with them. 

LaShonda despite all her professional training had not lost her ghetto mojo and stood up to these clowns reverting more and more to the language she knew best  'Shut the fuck up, bitch', she hollered at one white woman who called her out for reverse racism, holier-than-thou penitential nonsense, and empty threats.  'White cunt...buggering honky...the whole fucking lot of you'. 

The Office Manager burst into the room, and with a 'What's going on here?', hurried to LaShonda's side and began to usher her to the wings. It was one thing for his employees to voice their anger in peaceful ways, but the gutter language of the facilitator was unconscionable 

The whole affair broke the emotional dam of LaShonda who, despite her practiced, temperate, and very professional demeanor, had had quite enough from these white, buggering fools, and she could not stop herself.  There was no reining her in.  As she proceeded out of the auditorium, she continued with her vile, rancid, sewer-mouthed rant.  Finally calm enough to walk out of the building on her own, she hailed a taxi and was not heard from again. 

While one might think this a one-off event, it was not.  White people, having been badgered, hectored, and vilified for years at the hands of progressive 'reformers', had finally had quite enough.  The African forest was not the Garden of Eden described by racial advocates, and the black man was not the sentient, environmentally attuned, spiritually evolved being he was purported to be, worthy of placement atop the human pyramid.  On the contrary, he was still living in endemically dysfunctional neighborhoods or in prison in disproportional, record numbers. 

Affirmative action had done nothing except to graduate a whole generation of incompetent lawyers, doctors, and dentists.  Black faces on television sitcoms, on each and every commercial, on high school podiums, everywhere had done nothing to rid cities of the coruscating blight of 'the inner city' - and because these faces were faux, there for engineered diversity which has done or proved nothing, of course there was white resentment.  Hammered and badgered for years, told that their European culture was nothing but rot, a miserable, oppressive, colonialist disgrace, and now forced to put up with face to face attempted intimidation, they were pissed. 

 

The Diversity workshops designed to promote tolerance for gay and lesbian co-workers were no different.  Herded into different stables, asked to bare their sexuality, dunned if it turned out heterosexual, and ridiculed for traditional sexual attitudes, straight workers had become increasingly restive.  Moreover they were increasingly hostile to the suggestion that homosexuality, transgenderism, and the fungibility of the gender spectrum was the reality of the future.

'I am a proud gay man', said Alvin Pinckney, facilitator of another diversity gone wrong workshop, 'and let me tell you my story'.  The heterosexuals, grouped together by self-identification and the largest number, squirmed and fidgeted at what they knew awaited them.  Alvin went on and on, a closeted boy in a West Virginia coalmining family, put out of the house with the pigs and chickens when his father found out he was gay. 

Of course the straight crowd could only imagine the most disgusting scene of buggering in the woodpile, smarmy seconds behind the school boiler.  This was not the romantic love affair in Brokeback Mountain, but an episode of backwoods cornholing. 

It was not going well, Alvin quickly realized and moved on to the meat of his lesson - the existential genius of the gender spectrum, how each and everyone of us has sexual diversity within us, waiting to be explored.  He himself had tried on 'suits of many colors', cut from different cloth and moved in happy elision among the panoply of sexual choices open to him. 

Again, the straight crowd could only think of the old San Francisco Castro where gay men stuck hard-ons through holes in bathhouse walls to be sucked off by strangers.  Now, that was diversity!

Ethnicity, the third leg of the race-gender-ethnicity troika, got short shrift.  Nobody really cared what Mexican lettuce pickers did with their time, or what the life of a Salvadoran leaf-blower was like, so office workers were at least spared that. 

The new conservative administration in Washington has made it clear that DEI nonsense is to stop, programs and offices to promote diversity abandoned, and the ethos of wholistic individualism was to replace the tired, shopworn, discredited, and absurd notions of 'identity'.

It wasn't what you looked like that mattered, but who you were and what you did.  Excellence would be the only measure of performance. Talent, creativity, intelligence, and ambition were to be the hallmarks of the new America.

America gave a big collective sigh of relief.  They would finally be spared the demeaning, bullying, intimidating assumptions of racial diversity.  

The result of decades of DEI? Nothing, a balance sheet with no plusses. 

If this turning tide of excellence continues, then America will see black and brown people among the most affluent and respected - perhaps not in representative numbers, but that's the whole point.  Proportionality is gone, discredited as nothing more than progressive idealism. 

The days of DEI are happily over, although colleges and universities are trying their best to fudge, evade, reconfigures, and rejigger admissions procedures to avoid the law.  It will take another few years of conservative administrations to clear the drains.