The DEI Ruse Is Imploding. Part Two Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/the-dei-ruse-is-imploding-part-two/
Equity
Equity was rebranded as a word to redefine equality as a mandated equalness of result rather than an equality of opportunity.
This “spread the wealth” ideology is by design contrary to the Constitution’s devotion to liberty and freedom.
DEI’s “equity,” then, is the neo-socialist effort to use government power, reinforced by popular culture, to suppress the perceived wealthy, the more fortunate, and the better off, and then to redistribute their money, influence, and power—summed up as “privilege”—to those arbitrarily labeled less well-off and less fortunate.
And there is always the age-old Marxist qualifier that the revolutionaries who determine who is oppressed and who is oppressive are themselves never subject to the consequences of their own ideology. It is the John Kerry logic that only by flying in a carbon-spewing private jet can he hit all the climate conferences and reduce carbon spewing.
So our cultural Marxists demand teachers’ unions and hate vouchers and charter schools—as their kids go to prep schools. They defund the police—but usually have access to private security. They demand all-electric vehicles—while they fly on Citations and Gulfstreams. They are versions of the old revolutionaries that were all born rich or at least upper-middle-class—our era’s Trotskys, Lenins, Marxes, Ho Chi Minhs, Mao Zedongs, Castros, and Che Guevaras. The most dangerous Marxists always arise from the bored and guilty privileged and well-off.
DEI’s idea of “equity” shares the Marxist boilerplate of just two classes at war with each other. The middle class does not or should not exist as the proletariat of the many battle the few property-holding and despised bourgeoisie. But DEI takes that old, tired binary of oppressed/oppressor and victimized/victimizer and now substitutes race for class.
Why?
Marxist binaries never worked in the United States. America’s dynamic economy and upward mobility and class fluidity ensured too often that yesterday’s supposedly doomed proletarian peasant will be tomorrow’s bourgeois owner of a car wash and landscaping business.
But substitute immutable race as the barometer of oppression and then you have a supposedly permanent victimized class, one freed from the problem of an absence of class oppression.
Presto, suddenly, any non-white, or non-male, or non-heterosexual are by fiat a victim—regardless of running their $40 million “Antiracist” center, or raking in $100 million from capitalist corporations, or holding a Princeton full-professorship, or Harvard presidency.
By virtue of their supposed non-white status, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, LeBron James, and Oprah Winfrey will never have privilege, even though they have more of it—money, comfort, influence, and followings—than almost anyone in America.
So equity was not about class at all—given that even many of the DEI hierarchy from Ibram X. Kendi (father: tax accountant; mother: business analyst) to Ta-Nehisi Coates (father: a publisher; mother: a teacher) to Cornell West (mother: high school principal; father: defense department contractor) were solidly middle-class to upper-middle class.
Michelle Obama recently gave a speech in Berlin to a leftwing group and commanded a $750,000 fee for a one-hour lecture. But note it was on “Diversity” and “Inclusion,” but somehow Michelle omitted “Equity” from the holy woke trinity.
Again, why? Perhaps because there is nothing “equitable” about commandeering $12,500 a minute—a 60-second sum more than most people in the world make in a year.
The Obamas’ worth has grown since 2009 and now has reached perhaps $100-200 million, perhaps not including their new Hawaii estate. They remain big DE[?]I stalwarts, often lecturing the clinging and deplorable American people on their racist shortcomings and biases from one of their four mansions—in Hawaii, Washington, D.C., Martha’s Vineyard, or Chicago.
The idea that millionaire Ta-Nehisi Coates, or the Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle, or billionaire LeBron James are somehow part of a downtrodden group by virtue of their race is absurd. But then again is the entire notion of oppressor/oppressed or victimizer/victimized that omits all context of individual character, history, merit, and class.
So in the twilight of woke, expect to see more “DI” or “Diversity and Inclusion” as “Equity” drops out, given so many of the DEI movement are upwardly mobile careerists.
Comments are closed.
