What DEI Means to You

To most Americans, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is an abstract, boring idea they don’t have time to worry about. But I’ve written a book on it—“The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey),” and I’m here to tell you why you should be paying attention to DEI.

DEI means that when you apply for a job or promotion, you are not given a fair shake. After decades of indoctrination in college campuses, academia, corporations, and government across the English-speaking world are imbued with DEI.

An old friend once told me that, all things being equal, if a white man and a woman “of color” compete for a job, the latter should be chosen. His reasoning is pure Ibram Kendi: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

Older, white men who believe this are usually at the top of the career ladder: law firm partner, ambassador, CEO, etc. Their sons, meanwhile, would prefer to be judged on their own merits.

Examples of DEI using race are the most contentious, so here’s another.

Say you are hiring a shelf-stocker. You look through all the applications, and the best two in terms of education, experience, and skills are a very tall woman and a man with dwarfism. (Imagine Caitlin Clark and Tyrion Lannister from “Game of Thrones”).

Who do you pick? How do you choose?

If the job involved no shelves above four feet, then you’d have to find another criterion. Perhaps years of experience, character references, or a record of showing up on time might come into play. Height would not be a factor. Neither would race or sex.

But if the job chiefly involved placing and retrieving items on shelves above six feet, height would matter a great deal. Could the problem be mitigated by stepladders or mechanical means without losing speed or productivity? If so, then height would no longer be an issue. If not, then Caitlin is the better pick, all other things being equal.

Note that sex, gender identity, or race are not issues in this selection. And almost never are all other things equal, given so many measurable variables.

President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order required that every federal “contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”

Over time, “affirmative action” came to mean preferential hiring based on race. This is the root of today’s DEI in employment. It means we get jobs over others equally qualified, or we lose out on jobs, based on our race. The principle long since expanded to sex.

Later, the concept of Disparate Impact took root. This idea is that if any occupation, test, or human outcome varies at all from the percentages of the races in the general population, it is due to racism. In Ibram Kendi’s words, “a racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.”

The remedy to racist policies is “antiracist” ones, i.e. discrimination based on race. In the DEI framework, the same policy is applied to sex.

In past practice, this means that if any entity has more men than women, or more whites than other minorities, then the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, could sue and force it to hire women and minorities over equally or better qualified white men.

Comedian Adam Carolla explained how California DEI policies stopped him from becoming a fireman. Decades later, President Joe Biden’s DOJ sued the Durham, North Carolina, Fire Department because their exam had a “disparate impact based on race.” Durham caved and agreed to hire 16 black applicants who failed the test and give almost a million dollars in back pay. Let’s pray they are not plus-sized gals who couldn’t carry someone out of a burning building, like Los Angeles’ deputy fire chief.

If you are a white man applying to be a police officer, you are at a disadvantage in many departments. Biden’s DOJ sued South Bend, Indiana’s police department alleging that it “uses a written examination that discriminates against Black applicants and a physical fitness test that discriminates against female applicants.”

How, exactly, did the DOJ come to such an unequivocal conclusion? Simply based on Disparate Impact. The logic was simple: If fewer blacks passed the test, it must be racist, and if fewer women passed, it must be sexist.

Biden’s DOJ also sued the Maryland Department of State Police. Again, deep-blue Maryland caved and agreed to hire up to 25 applicants who failed the test and pay $2.75 million in back pay.

DEI isn’t some remote, academic mumbo-jumbo that has no impact on you. It affects you, your children, and your neighbors. It affects the safety and prosperity of the entire country.

“Equity” is a mirage—unattainable except by racist and sexist social engineering.

Hiring based on immutable characteristics that have no bearing on a job is both illegal and immoral. America should always strive to make education and opportunity more equal, and to open the ladder to prosperity to all. There’s more to do. But talent is not fairly shared out, and some work harder than others. As Ecclesiastes puts it, “time and chance happeneth to them all.”

We should kill DEI and end all employment discrimination forever. Fortunately, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is now run by the indomitable Harmeet Dhillon, who understands that the Civil Rights Act bars all discrimination based on race, color, national origin, and sex, not just some. She says that “[t]here is no exception that allows discrimination against employees who aren’t considered ‘underrepresented.’”

No more suing fire and police departments for “equity.”

As Mike Gonzalez reminds us, there is work to be done. But if we don’t, our society will crumble from within as the thinning spoils are shared out based on caste, sex, and race rather than talent and hard work.