DEI Dementia

Is Bratgirl Kamala the personification of diversity, equity and inclusion, or isn’t she?

I come not to praise diversity, but to bury it

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Donald Trump just got in trouble with black female journalists over the race profile and DEI status of Kamala Harris. His claim that she’s pulling a fast one, presenting as African-American now after touting her Indian bloodline for years, has to be rated as mostly false. It’s true that Harris is biracial, but she never really played one side against the other. Barack Obama was biracial also, but except for a handful of loons on the Right, everybody accepted that he was black.

It’s worthy of note, however, that the first two black Americans to make serious runs for the presidency have backgrounds atypical of the African American mainstream. Obama’s family history is well known: Kenyan father, white American mother, raised by his white maternal grandparents. Harris’ mother, now deceased, was an Indian immigrant and her father is a Jamaican immigrant. Both earned Ph.D.’s, she in endocrinology, he in economics. I feel these to be facts of some significance, though I’m not sure what to make of of them.

Then came what I suppose was meant to be the killer question: Did Trump believe that Kamala Harris is a diversity hire? He dodged that bullet by asking the reporter for a definition of DEI ( Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), adding that he doesn’t know Harris well enough to hazard an opinion. The correct answer, of course, was yes—if you believe Joe Biden. But Trump didn’t go there.

Anyhow, the original question interested me more than the subsequent back-and-forth, because it so well illustrated the ideological dementia of the Left. Apparently, DEI is a very good thing in principle, but a very bad thing in any specific case. One may praise the concept, but not by pointing to some individual—say, the Vice President of the United States—who’s benefitted from it. That is held to be a heinous offense, a cruel insult. How dare anyone claim or imply that a person of color or gender got where she is, not on the basis of merit, but because someone put a thumb on the scale?

Some on the Left have tried to reconcile this contradiction by denouncing the whole idea of merit—which, they assert, is nothing more than white male privilege, rebranded. Admittedly there’s some truth to this, though not so much today as in the Mad Men era. But even within the reviled Patriarchy, merit was recognized and rewarded. Humanity does not live by mediocrity alone.

A variant of the critique of merit is particularly injurious to minorities: the claim that traditional virtues of hard work and study, honesty, punctuality, and so forth are “white values,” alien to people of color. This has put Asian Americans in an awkward position, since they hold those supposedly white values in high esteem. Therefore it was necessary to eject them from the BIPOC Alliance and lump them in with evil white people. American Jews have suffered a similar fate. As for the rest of the gang, well, the implication that people of color are lazy, dishonest and chronically tardy is not too flattering, is it?

All of this nonsense derives from the guilty knowledge that in one way and another, DEI marginalizes the people it purports to benefit. Kamala Harris is at best a mediocre politician with an embarrassingly sparse record of achievement. Joe Biden selected her as his running mate on the basis of ethnicity and gender—and he got what he paid for. As vice president, Harris failed at every task she was given, and came to be regarded as a dud. But now, thanks to the implosion of the Biden Administration, she’s the Democratic Party’s 2024 standard bearer. And suddenly, she’s a political superstar. But not really.

Whatever one might say about Barack Obama—and I am no fan—he was not a fool. Our first black president was perfectly well aware of the condescension embodied in the praise, often embarrassingly fulsome, that came his way. White progressives, he knew, saw him as The Acceptable Black Candidate—someone just like them but African American! But though he was vain enough to resent this, Obama was cold-blooded enough to use it to his advantage.

I doubt whether Kamala Harris catches the similar false note in the praise now being heaped on her. Not so long ago, the people shoveling it were shaking their heads over her word salads and Venn diagrams, and muttering what a disappointment she was. Now she’s their political savior. No wonder Democrats and progressives are working overtime to make us all forget how Harris made it so far up the greasy pole.

Their indignation over the truthful observation that Bratgirl Kamala‘s a diversity hire proves that the comrades have no faith in the justice or morality of DEI. Deep in their gnarled little hearts, they know that they’re running an ugly and divisive BIPOC spoils system. And they know also that DEI will never be worn as a badge of honor by anyone, anywhere. Honestly, who would to want be known as a diversity hire? No one, not even Kamala Harris.