I’m content with Trump’s federal ban on DEI programs. Hiring and career advancement should be based on one thing only: merit. No one is entitled to anything solely on the basis of their skin color or ethnicity. Where does it say anything about that in the Constitution? There wasn’t a single Founder who ever spoke on these matters. They had more important things to think about: how to create and preserve a nation.
Yet we’ve had several generations of activists who have tried to insinuate an insane theory of race into our governance. To them, if a person of color isn’t succeeding according to the general definition of “success,” it has to be because of discrimination. Well, I agree with JKF who said “Life is unfair.”
This truth is embedded in our notions of common sense. “You can’t always get what you want,” sang the Rolling Stones, voicing a sentiment every child learns (or should) by the age of four. And yet we have these woke politicians who tell our communities of color, “If you don’t have what you want, someone is to blame.” Well, the wokes are getting a shellacking in elections because common sense has been restored.
When I say “common sense” I mean the conclusions of the average person as to what is real and proper. It’s been “restored” in the sense that, while it never went away, it did go underground for a period, drowned out by the baying of the DEI crowd that so skillfully captured the attention of the media, academia, corporations, philanthropies, and government bureaucracies. History will look back to this era as one in which the “social equity” movement tried but failed to launch a permanent revolution. Communism has failed around the world because, despite its lofty idealism, it fails to conform to human nature. In the same way, the social equity movement has had its moment in the sun and been found wanting. You cannot mandate equality of outcome, only equality of opportunity.
And now Oakland seems like it’s about to install Barbara Lee as mayor. There are diehard forces of social equity in our town that will never cease their barren struggle for equality of outcome under the guise of DEI. Lee is one of those revanchist deniers, reminiscent of the Japanese soldiers after WWII who refused to acknowledge that the war was over and they’d lost it. They went slowly mad in their Pacific caves and disappeared into the twilight of history, to be neither missed nor mourned. Someday the Barbara Lee-Pamela Price-Nikki Bas-Carroll Fife anomaly will be expunged, but in the short term we still have our work cut out for us.