Christian Conservatives share with Atheist Progressives a totem of moral certainty. This allows both to express their views as backed by a higher power. Dissidents are immediately labeled heretics, degenerates, or evil beings. The Right has their biblical theology; the Left their invented Egalitarian dogma. Churchgoers would no sooner accept a radical in the nave denouncing Jesus than coastal media elites would accept somebody who questioned a trending transsexual rights hash tag movement. Both are faith based, fueled by the human need to feel a purpose greater than yourself, while simultaneously feeling great about yourself for being superior to those who believe otherwise. Two Maslow pyramid birds with one stone.
Religious tenets are not designed to foster debate or intellectual argument. They are intended to be totalitarian, with those who question the faith, ridiculed and punished. Whether this is the Inquisition and the flaying of the skin and forced confessions, or not being able to find a job in the entertainment industry because you question Global Warming theses. The object is to appear as pious as possible, until otherwise defrocked. That would be advancing biblical teachings on the Right, and promoting rather narrow definitions of grandiose tolerance terms on the Left. The latest and greatest being, “diversity”.
Diversity is a remarkable term in its modern day application because of its almost entirely political connotation. The dictionary definition of an array of options, opinions, or items has been replaced with a fuzzy vision of a United Colors of Benetton advertisement filled with multicultural, multiracial, men and women in hip untucked shirts working in a creative office space. As a concept, you can’t be against diversity. What kind of mad man, or mad woman person, would favor homogenous over heterogeneous schools and workplaces and organizations? That’s be downright Hitlerian. Diversity therefore becomes one of those convenient political terms that offers no legitimate dissent or second opinion, allowing it to be used as a cudgel to beat opponents more so than a ideal.
Diversity becomes the goal in applicants for schools and colleges and hiring into workplaces, job promotions, management advancement, political leadership and every other aspect of society currently under the threat of appearing non-diverse. This, regardless of the rationale. The ends justifies the means, regardless of whether justice is being served, or merely the underlying tenet of the religion. They become one in the same. Diversity is the deity.
Because of the massive political and social sway of Diversity, as might be the case of Christianity in other lands of This Land is Your Land, it’s worth examining the impact of the fervor. As a basic for instance, who benefits most from the wave of Diversity politics and programs? If you guessed minorities, you’re wrong. And perhaps maybe is your entire general understanding of the faith.
Affirmative action began in earnest in this nation in the early 60’s as a result of the growing racial tension, at the time between white and black. What most people do not know is that the programs begun in earnest under the Kennedy Administration, never construed women as a gender to be a category to benefit from affirmative action programs. Since minority women were included, this specifically meant that white women were not considered in need of a hand-up to achieve socioeconomic opportunity equality in the nation. A half-dozen years later, white feminists, bolstered by rising women’s magazines and media outlets, forced an addition to the Federal affirmative action policies to include all women in the protected class. A demographic majority of the population was suddenly labeled a minority group. Quite a sleight of hand; zero discussion.
As you might expect, white women rather quickly became the clear winners of affirmative action efforts, what we now more commonly call, diversity. For political purposes, the stats on the rapid rise of women entering four year colleges, professional graduate programs and advancing in the workplace never made mention of the sub-demographic of “women”. What history has now made very clear, is that “women” made huge strides in the wake of affirmative action programs beginning in the 1970’s, but by many multiples, these were white women, not women of color.
In 2006, Ivy League law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote her much talked about essay “Framing Affirmative Action” in which she noted that the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action programs have been white women. Only she said Euro-American women because that’s more politically correct in academia.
As the left-learning Vox media outlet noted in 2016:
In general, women today are more educated and make up more of the workforce than ever before, in part because of affirmative action policies. Indeed, from the tech industry to publishing, diversity has emerged as an overwhelming increase in the presence of white women, not necessarily people of color.
The Vox article noted as many other outlets have also discovered, that statistical study, one after another, shows the great leaps and bounds in socioeconomic advances by white women, with their actual minority gender peers, reaping far fewer of the benefits. In fact, white women have successfully legally challenged many University affirmative action admissions programs that insist on minority race being present for beneficial consideration. And they have won in those cases, providing for their minority status as being on par with black and Latino and Asian-American women.
If you understand the pathology of oppression and unequal application of law and opportunity in this nation, you know the striking difference between European-descended women and their women of color counterparts. On the whole, the backgrounds of the white women are relatively advantaged compared to the minority women. Though under the law, and in the minds of the most vocal, ardent, and public faces of women’s rights movements, the fact that white women are consuming the vast percentage of new opportunity meant for minorities, is never spoken aloud. It is wholly verboten and met with cries of sexism.
A year ago, David Shih, an Asian-American professor of racial studies posed a question to NPR’s audience (not a bastion of Conservative listeners): what if these [campus] diversity policies actually improved the social position of white students and faculty? Perish the thought, as white people, white men in particular, as the innate villains of the diversity movement.
The Ascend Foundation, which tracks the progress of Asian-American and minority hiring in Silicon Valley tech firms has found from data compiled from 2007 to 2015 that white women did very well from the Valley’s new push for increased diversity in management positions, but women (and men) of color, not so much:
Representation of white women in leadership roles improved by 17% between 2007 and 2015. For all other minority groups, including African American, Hispanic and Asian men and women, the percentage declined.
A similar finding came out of a Recode.net article in 2016 which noted that diversity programs meant largely the hiring and promotion of white women.
In my own article on the “The Beta Male Conspiracy” from several weeks ago, I noted the emasculation efforts ongoing against the male gender in the U.S. was an effort spearheaded by college-educated white women who were now competing head to head with men for positions of rank and power. Their mission in their own demographic self-interest, while largely ignoring the economic and social best interest of women of color, whose outcomes have stagnated if not worsened in the same decades that white women have been making enormous advances, in good measure due to corporate and University Diversity programs.
Notice anything about this @HuffingtonPost editors meeting? 💃💃💪🏼💪🏼 pic.twitter.com/7sg4SyraPa
— Liz Heron (@lheron) May 20, 2016
There’s not necessarily a contempt from white women toward women of color, so much as a complete lack of self-awareness between their core, huge differences. In 2016, the infamously progressive Huffington Post sent out a Twitter photo showing off the gender diversity of their editorial staff — a meeting table circled entirely by young women. What nobody at the feminist bastion HuffPo noticed was the almost entirely Caucasian presence at the table, as a humble brag about Diversity became an obvious visual for lack of diversity.
Similar instances of privileged white women taking up the mantle of minority victimhood thrived during the lead up to the 2016 election with professional, white women, especially in the coastal cities, pushing hard for Hillary Clinton, while her enthusiasm waned in the minority female populations. The wildly popular Facebook pro-Hillary group, Pantsuit Nation, started by Libby Chamberlain, a Yale grad and non-profit professional living in Maine, garnered several million followers. The group lasted only several months before women of color began lashing out in the larger group, claiming that actual minority voices were being dismissed and squelched:
Critics of the group have argued that white women are dominating the conversation in the group, as members of racial minorities feel as though their voices are being ignored, belittled, and overshadowed. They believe that white women are using the group as a way to feel “woke” without contributing to tangible, social change.
It was learned during this time that Chamberlain had secured herself a book deal under the Pantsuit Nation brand, and was sharing conversations from her Facebook group within the book. She was also monetizing the Pantsuit Nation name in other media.
Hollywood wealthy white women have furthered the tone deaf divide between the sub-demographics of women when they launched and popularized the #MeToo and #TimesUp hash tag movements for women’s rights and an end to sexual harassment. The wealthy actresses and entertainment industry women, almost entirely white, compared themselves in inauguration to Hispanic female immigrant farm workers toiling in the fields, referring to them as their sisters in suffering. For the Golden Globes #TimesUp protest, numerous elegantly dressed, white actresses including Emma Stone, Meryl Streep, and others brought Women of Color female activists as their plus one for photo ops to the glitzy event. As if not a single soul noticed the clear Plantation visuals of wealthy white women bringing black and brown “new friends” to the gala. And not a single soul within that bubble did.
Susan Sarandon, Michelle Williams and activists Rosa Clemente and Tarana Burke arrive to the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards!#GoldenGlobes #TIMESUP 😍 pic.twitter.com/0kh7UiKhiQ
— Sarange (@SarangeSource) January 7, 2018
Ideally, Diversity in a society, an organization, a company, or an institution would imply a collection of people with broad ranging ideas, experience, points of view, coming together to hash out superior solutions. Diversity has clearly never come close to meeting that ideal, as it’s morphed into a challenge to create a mélange of superficial variety of superficial demographics. Not that race is merely a skin color construct. In many cases it might imply a diversity of background and experience. Though it doesn’t necessarily so.
But even as a purely We Pals rainbow of humans target, Diversity has failed. The socio-economic power that was overly collectivized among the white male demographic, has shifted almost entirely to white females. While the argument may be made that historically white women were denied the same opportunities as white men, that is a clearly antiquated view of the modern landscape. While true minorities, both men and women, who affirmative action programs were originally intended to better, have seen at best a minute fraction of the gains of white women, and at worst, have seen their standing further marginalized.
White women will tell you that their cause is just, but you wonder how much political clout that cause would carry if instead of titles such as Diversity, as in, meet Viacom’s new Chief Diversity Officer tasked with creating a more diverse management and executive staff, the term was Helping White Women Get Further Ahead. As in, meet Viacom’s new Chief of Let’s Help White Women Get Further Ahead. You have to doubt they’d hold a big press conference to meet that new C-level hire.
Anybody who takes some time to objectively study the human condition and the animal nature therein understands that self-interest is the overwhelming motivation for our species. Don’t hate white women, often quite privileged white women, for shamelessly co-opting minority affirmative action and Diversity programs for their own benefit. They largely know not what they do. As men never really considered their long term reign at the top problematic. It’s good to be King. That title now belongs to privileged white women. If you think media, entertainment, and political elites are giving up the term Diversity to largely benefit these ladies any time soon, you don’t understand how “getting some for me” works.
(Cover photo: Talia Goldstein, CEO of Three Day Rule dating app and members of her staff, she highlights 28 of the 30 are women, which is wildly unheard of in the tech world, though few appear to be women of color.)
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