An Upside Down Culture

Living in a society where it is norm for females to take roles to protect men from physical threats would have been unthinkable back in America’s saner days. It would be like imagining that when the Titanic ship famously sunk, instead of men sacrificing their lives for the women and children, women tried to save the men. If this kind of warped thinking had dominated society back then, America’s rise to greatness would have sunk right along with the Titanic. No nation can stand unless the strong protect the weak.

Yet what “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) proposes is that women act like men and become equal protectors in America. DEI is Democrats’ made-up initiative that seeks to implement a radical progressive agenda by erasing men and women’s biological differences (an ideology that mirrors the transgender movement).  

John K. Amanchukwu Sr., DEI Is Emasculating The FDNY Too, Just Like The Secret Service

Acknowledge the Skills Gap and the Behavior Gap

We need to face up to the truth: the reason for racial underrepresentation across a range of meritocratic fields is the academic skills gap. The reason for racial overrepresentation in the criminal justice system is the crime gap.

And let me issue a trigger warning here: I am going to raise uncomfortable facts that many well-intentioned Americans would rather not hear. Keeping such facts off stage may ordinarily be appropriate as a matter of civil etiquette. But it is too late for such forbearance now. If we cannot acknowledge the skills gap and the behavior gap, we are going to continue destroying our civilizational legacy.

Heather Mac Donald, Disparate Impact Thinking Is Destroying Our Civilization. Imprimis, February 2024.

Legal Profession Is Failing

Standards are falling in the legal profession, which came up with the disparate impact concept in the first place. Upon taking office in 2021, President Biden announced that he would no longer submit his judicial nominees to the American Bar Association for a preliminary rating. Why? According to a member of the White House Counsel’s Office, allowing the ABA to vet candidates would be incompatible with the “diversification of the judiciary.” This claim was dubious.

The ABA, after all, cannot open its collective mouth without issuing a bromide about the need to diversify the bar. Its leading members are obsessed with the demographics of corporate law firms and law school faculties. This is the same ABA that gave its highest rating to a Supreme Court nominee who as a justice would make the false claim during a challenge to Covid vaccine mandates that “over 100,000 children are in serious condition [from Covid] and many are on ventilators.”

Heather Mac Donald, Disparate Impact Thinking Is Destroying Our Civilization. Imprimis, February 2024.

"Privilege" vs "Underprivileged"??

Unfairly promoting a less talented person over a more talented person because of his respective skin colors is celebrated as a victory for “diversity” — a reminder that in the twenty-first century, racists are still obsessed with how a person looks at the expense of what thoughts occupy his mind.  Without any public debates or votes, governments have replaced “equal treatment under the law” with “equitable” redistribution — or, in layman’s terms, “special treatment under the law” — so that certain classes of people can benefit at the expense of others.  

In an amazing instance of Orwellian “doublespeak,” the State categorizes those classes that are unfairly rewarded as “underprivileged” and the people against whom it discriminates as “privileged.”  Never in human history have people with “privilege” felt so marginalized.  All this cheating is done for the stated purpose of “including” many different kinds of people, but it depends entirely on “excluding” people to obtain fraudulently manufactured and prejudiced results.  

None of this is fair.  Stealing the earned successes of some, so that others may benefit without sacrifice, has a tendency to permanently scar both the victim of the theft and the supposed beneficiary.  When hard work and dedication are spurned, a seed of dejection is planted that can spoil an otherwise promising life.  When unearned rewards become expected entitlements, the enriching pursuit of human excellence withers and often dies.

J.B. Shurk, The Catastrophic Death of Fairness

Chicago Violence

The Left today has badly misappropriated the word “equity,” using it to mean equality of outcome—something to be achieved through affirmative action and economic redistribution. But real equity, in the old sense, cannot be given. Real equity requires the old fashioned virtues. It is inextricable from full ownership of your own course in life.

Matt Rosenberg, Spiraling Violence in Chicago: Causes and Solutions

Preferential Treatment

Should We Lower Standards to Prevent People From Being “Excluded”?

Performance Standards are often depicted as mere subjective barriers reflecting the biases of those who create them.  Thus Professor Stanley Fish of Duke University charges “insincerity” to opponents of affirmative action who want everyone to compete by the same rules by saying that “the playing field is already tilted” in favor of the majority because “the skills that make for success are nurtured by institutions and cultural practices from which the disadvantaged minority has been systematically excluded.”  With the word “excluded” being used in very elastic senses today, it is hard to know how this statement differs from saying that people from different cultural backgrounds have the prerequisites for various activities to varying extents.  In a similar vein, former Harvard president Derek Bok said that to apply the same admissions standards to minority students as to everyone else would be to “exclude them from the university.”  Among other things, this ignores the fact that blacks were receiving both college and postgraduate degrees from Harvard in the nineteenth century, when it was very unlikely that they were being admitted under lower standards.  The more fundamental fallacy, however, is in using ex ante words like “exclude” to describe ex post results.

Thomas Sowell, "The Vision of the Anointed," pg.199

Equal Opportunity

Equal opportunity means not that everyone must start with the same skills and social contacts, but that no one must be prohibited by law from attempting something morally legitimate in the marketplace.

David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times, pg.702

"Affirmative Action" is Unfair

Sometimes preferential policies are justified as a form of reparations for a past history of discrimination.  That would make sense, however, only if we ignore individuals and think of races as undifferentiated blocs whose members live forever.  The individual beneficiaries and victims of past discrimination are now almost entirely unknowable.  It is hardly sensible to prefer a person who has not suffered discrimination because a member of the same race or sex suffered it thirty years ago.  Whatever happened in the past, in the present the policy does harm to guiltless individuals and benefits those who have suffered no harm.  At some point, history must be accepted for what it is, history.

Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p.238