The Dei Ruse is Imploding- Part One Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/the-dei-ruse-is-imploding-part-one/
Diversity
Has there ever been a sane nation in the world that preferred “diversity” to “unity”?
The former Yugoslavia was certainly “diverse,” and it finally stressed its diversity to the point of unending death and destruction. Ditto Rwanda and Iraq.
So what exactly was the advantage of ditching the melting pot for the tribalist salad bowl? What was the historical argument for making race essential rather than incidental to who we are—other than institutionalizing racial bias and prejudice to further the careers of mostly middle-class and upper-middle-class “marginalized people”?
And what sort of diversity did DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) promote?
Religious?
Not at all, at least in the case of Christianity. Declaring oneself overtly Catholic or Protestant would certainly be unorthodox and “diverse” on campus, but not encouraged and more likely a cause for social or career ostracism.
Ideology? Was diversity designed to ensure a matter of all sorts of political views?
Again, no.
Most polls of faculty, especially on the supposed “elite” campuses—whether calibrated by party identification, donations to political causes and candidates, or by ideology—consistently show somewhere between 90–95 percent of academics identify as Democrats or parties to their left, or as “progressive,” or even further still to the left.
Did diversity imply or include class in its definition? Not at all.
Most academics are from the upper-middle or professional or aristocratic classes. Claudine Gay, for example, is from a rich Haitian immigrant family (family cement magnates)—a world away from East Palestine, Ohio.
She went to one of the nation’s top boarding schools (Phillips Exeter Academy), then Princeton for a year, then Stanford, then Harvard.
Ditto all sorts of “diversity” professionals.
Remember when Joe Biden announced in advance that he would pick only a “diverse” Vice President, as in a black woman—apparently on the post-George-Floyd rationale that we needed a diverse voice close to the president?
Yet both of Kamala Harris’s parents were immigrant PhDs. Her father was a Stanford economics professor, her mother, also an immigrant, was from a well-off Brahmin Hindu caste, a Berkeley PhD, and a cancer researcher. What exactly “diverse” did this upper-middle class elite bring to the White House, other than an anemic résumé jumpstarted through a long liaison with California’s politico Willie Brown?
The list of hoi aristoi whom we feel to be oppressed by deplorables of America could go on. But there is a reason DEI has nothing to do with class since those who benefit most from it so often are not in need and are among our upper classes.
Diversity then is mostly about being non-white, and to a lesser extent non-male or non-heterosexual—and sometimes making a lot of money off ghost racism. It is mostly a careerist enterprise, a sort of indemnity insurance that protects the holder from criticism, reprimand, or dismissal on grounds of “racism,” “sexism,” or “homophobia.”
In the case of Ibram X. Kendi, he siphoned $40 million in corporate cash infusions for his now imploding, “Center for Antiracist Research” at Boston University. That “institute” published almost nothing, conducted little if any research, and had no real existence other than serving as a receptacle for profiteering and grifting in the post-George Floyd and How to be An Antiracist cult era.
Still, Kendi’s haul was a distant second to the $90–100 million that BLM founders bragged was “white guilt money”—and which is still mostly unaccounted for.
DEI elites made the argument to rich liberal bicoastal elites that institutionalizing bias and prejudice would somehow help the underclasses of the inner cities, whose plight was usually off-limits to constructive solutions that circumvented the professional racial grievances industry. And part of the implicit bargain was that using race to promote upper-middle-class professionals along their career paths would alleviate white liberal guilt and ensure indemnity as well.
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