Hire Fire Fighters Who Can Do the JOB! PERIOD. NO MORE DEI

LETS REVISIT THIS TOPIC This is still happening around the country.

The fact of this occurrence motivated me to try my hand at writing a critique of the concept of diversity, which is a very slippery term. What it truly means is “let’s aim for fewer white men in positions of authority,” which would be a fine idea if race and sex were reasonable criteria by which to judge applicants, and if it wasn’t motivated by a broad set of “progressive” beliefs, which include the idea that we live in an oppressive patriarchy and that men who work now should be required to step back so that a litany of hypothetical, indefinable and prejudicial historical wrongs might be righted (this even though those who do the righting weren’t those who committed the prejudicial crimes, so to speak, and those who benefit not those who were the victims). There was even a recent article in Nature, a magazine that was once, with Science, one of the two unquestionably most influential scientific journals, suggesting that male scientist should voluntarily delay their career advancement so that their underprivileged colleagues (underprivileged despite their status as university professors) could catch up and justice properly served.

“Diversity” is a word that, on the face of it, masquerades as something positive—because it is positive, in some of its manifestations. It’s obviously not helpful to set up an organization where everyone thinks alike, or solely in the approved manner. It is necessary, for example, for healthy organizations to ally the conservative tendency to preserve with the more liberal tendency to transform. But that begs the question: where is diversity to be found? Among the ideologues who were pushing the “progressive” doctrine that it’s part of, most frequently including “inclusivity, equity and intersectionality,” it is to be found in a set of immutable characteristics that typify different groups, including race, sex, gender (because that is distinguished by those same ideologues from sex) and sexual proclivity, above all.

There are real problems with this agenda, however. The first is that it’s dangerous, in exactly the manner it is hypothetically designed to fight. The argument made by those who are truly prejudiced has always been that the differences between groups are so large that discrimination, isolation, segregation and even open conflict–including war and genocide–are necessary, for the safety of whatever group they are part of and are hypothetically protecting. Why is it any less risky for the argument to be made in the reverse manner? The claim that group-based differences are so important that they must take substantive priority during hiring and promotion merely risks validating the opposite claim.

There’s a second problem, too—and it’s particularly interesting, because it has been made by the same ideologically-oriented groups on the left that are pushing the diversity agenda: considering race, say and gender when making diversity decisions is not sufficient. Diversity that focuses on females is insufficient, because black, Asian or Hispanic women, for example, face more egregious prejudice than white women. This brings us to the last word of the progressive set—“intersectionality.” For the ideologues of intersectionality, true diversity cannot be limited to the features we have already considered—race and the like—because many people are alienated or, in the jargon, “marginalized,” from the broader culture by more than one oppressed minority feature. In consequence, the “intersection” between the groups must be considered for any real justice to make its appearance as a consequence of policy.

This is an extremely problematic theory, practically speaking (and this is the second problem, in addition to the danger just outlined), in that there appear to be no limits, practically or philosophically, to the number of group memberships that have to be taken into account for true diversity to establish itself (and I mean this non-ironically). It doesn’t take much thought—just a little arithmetic—to determine the nature of the problem: There are just too many potential intersectional categories. Let’s break it down.

There’s race and sex, for starters—and plenty of attention is paid to both—and, following that, gender, which seems to come in something approximating second place in terms of import. But how many races, sexes and genders is it required to consider? Assume, for the sake of argument (and this is what the modern science suggests) that there are five major human subpopulations: African, European/Middle Eastern, East Asian, inhabitants of Oceania, and denizens of the New World. Let’s assume two sexes and three genders—although many of those concerned with diversity, etc., would insist that there are a much larger number of the latter. So that’s 5X2X3 =30.