The radical Left has spent years insisting that racial disparity in American life proves the same, evil thing: America is systemically racist, meritocracy is a sham, and the solution is more diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy.
A recent Medium article by leftist activist Edward Richardson that finger-wags at Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action President Kevin Roberts illustrates this perfectly, as the author tries to paint Roberts as out of touch.
Roberts, Richardson claims, is wrong to argue America has progressed beyond the need for DEI because disparities still exist in wealth, homeownership, and education. He labels Roberts’ argument “ideological” while presenting his own as “empirical,” as though scribing prose of over-exposed demagoguery onto a page somehow validates codification of racist policy.
Such arguments have been the Left’s bread and butter for decades as they claimed ideological capture within many of America’s institutions. Find a gap. Declare oppression. Demand radical countermeasures. Casualties be damned.
DEI has been used to explain everything from differences in college-attainment rates to health outcomes. Its apologists use circular rhetoric and claim that the solution to perceived cases of racism is more racism. Their “solution” has always been one in search of a problem. We’ve seen this play out in history time and again as a means to consolidate power.
Statistical differences between racial groups reveal nothing about the root causes of representative gaps. Statistics offer relational data and nothing more — there’s no proof that discrimination exists as a widespread cause. And, so, DEI, race-based hiring targets, and ideologically biased training sessions are offered, at best, to remedy a problem with a false premise. A false premise Richardson feels quite comfortable embracing.
If racial groups do not reach the same outcomes, institutions are told to manipulate hiring, promotion, admissions, contracting, and workplace culture until the numbers look sufficiently “equitable.”
Indeed, after listing racial differences in wealth, education, and homeownership, he declares, “DEI programs are not optional — they are necessary.” Put another way, Richardson’s goal is not true equality but social engineering via bureaucratic blight delivered via DEI.
The evidence offered for DEI’s necessity is simply the continued existence of unequal outcomes. And so the world turns.
The entire DEI project depends on melting Americans into formless racial blobs, then assigning moral meaning to the otherwise explainable outcome. Individual achievements disappear into a morass of group mediocrity. Merit cannot exist in government-controlled systems because differences in tenacity and free will are obstacles to equity.
The Supreme Court directly confronted this logic in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, rejecting race-conscious university admissions and holding that racial classifications must satisfy the Constitution’s equal-protection requirements.
Such principles of equal treatment used to be common knowledge taught even to the youngest of American students. But now, moral decay has reached the point where a screed on Medium is arguing it’s okay to be racist if it’s for a good cause. What have we become?
And before one assumes Richardson is only racist against whites, he portrays Roberts’ opposition to the racial spoils system as a declaration that blacks no longer “need help,” a deeply paternalistic view of minorities that underlies DEI.
The dirty little secret of DEI is that it's no more than a thinly veiled bigoted policy of low expectations. Black Americans have been assuaged by an army of bureaucrats treating them like fools who are incapable of success without the benevolence of a white man’s new-age HR policy. Frankly, it is disgusting.
Every American, irrespective of skin tone, deserves the freedom to lay claim to their own success based on their own achievement. That cannot happen under a system of artificial quotas (DEI) that diminish and demean hard work and skill.