The Real Problem With DEI Programs

The Wall Street Journal can be incredibly dense at times and borders on adoption of aspects of the woke ideology ruining our society.  While the editorial pages are generally solid and sensible, the op-eds, which are approved by the editors, occasionally veer off into the hinterlands of rationality.  I am a day ahead in Australia so I don’t know when this op-ed was published, but recently.  It deals with DEI programs and why they don’t seem to have made a dent in “equity”, meaning every group on every bizarre characteristic has to have exactly the same percent of people in a position as the group’s proportion of the population; unless the group is one favored by the whacked ideologues, currently African-Americans and any gender other than the two that actually exist.

To get to the meat of the stupidity inherent in this op-ed; it completely ignores the very high probability that the reason some groups aren’t represented in management, for example, according to their proportion of the population is because they don’t take the responsibility to get the education and the experience that would qualify them for such positions.  In particular, large segments of the African-American community deride getting an education as “white”, and many families in that community do little to encourage their children to attend school, much less learn something there.

The other blatant flaw in the editorial’s reasoning is that somehow only white people would have implicit or explicit bias.  In fact some research has shown that some minorities are far more racist.  Do you think it is an accident that almost every one of the recent attacks on Asians in this country is done by African-Americans, usually with no provocation.  Seen the video of the recent intentional murder of a bicycling white person by African-American teens?   There is a long line of research on racist views of various groups and minorities are just as prone to stereotyping and bias as whites, perhaps more.  Take a look at Twitter if you don’t think that is the case.

The authors seem to think that if we just stop making people feel guilty, DEI programs will work better.  What a load of bullshit.  They will never work because of the E–equity, whose premise is that people should be given jobs or whatever based on irrelevant characteristics like skin color, ethnic background, sex, etc.  A far better approach would be to push every group to value education and to obtain the knowledge, experience and skills to hold the jobs they want, and then ensure that hiring decisions are made in a neutral fashion ignoring those irrelevant characteristics.  But don’t hold your breath waiting for that, its too important to the wokesters and the real racists to keep pimping DEI, no matter how much damage it does to the country.   (WSJ Op-Ed)