A Ridiculous Need – Defending DEI

When society renders the obvious obtuse.

I wonder if White Americans have any inkling of how frustratingly tiring it is to be Black.

From the moment we landed on these shores in 1619 to this very second, our basic freedoms, our intrinsic dignity and worth have been under constant, injurious assault.

For every agonizingly hard step forward we have made, we have taken three steps backwards.

We are forever having to explain the extent of our mistreatment as if the proofs of it are invisible.

It was less than seventy years ago that our basic civil and voting rights were protected by acts of Congress. Less than seventy years later, every step of that difficult journey seems to have been taken in vain.

The advocacy of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs should be a no-brainer. As one financial services company’s ad campaign says, it should be “the biggest no-brainer in the history of mankind.”

Instead, it is criticized as “racist” and ”unfair.”

It shouldn’t be necessary to explain that the result of hundreds of years of racism and prejudice can’t be overcome in such and short amount of time.

Saying we live in a “post-racial” society doesn’t make it so. In fact, every day of a Black American’s life demonstrates that the concept of a post-racial society is a damnable lie.

There is no such thing as a “post-racial” society, nor do we live in a post-racist society.

In most of the so-called civilized world, slavery was maintained as the result of military conquest or classism.

In America, it was deemed acceptable because Blacks were judged as unequal.

Even a despicable institution as slavery has its levels, and America’s version of slavery lowered the bar, forever staining its history. Staining itself in a way that no amount of literal and figurative whitewashing will mitigate.

Once slavery was officially eradicated by the Civil War, Jim Crow laws were codified to ensure that Blacks would never mistakenly believe that they were free and equal.

The shackles of chattel slavery were replaced with less visible fetters of separate but equal doctrines, voting discrimination by poll taxes and literacy requirements, and anti-miscegenation laws.

When forced busing and affirmative action laws were passed, they were viewed as affronts by the same people who have no qualms benefitting from higher education “legacy” programs and good-old-boy networking.

DEI programs aren’t meant to be the only solution to correcting centuries of systematic, deeply entrenched racism.

But they are a start. A very necessary one.

Most of the medicine that cures us is bitter to the taste and hard to swallow. Reducing ingrained societal prejudice will be neither pleasant nor palatable.

We’re constantly told that the sins of the ancestors are not the sins of their descendants.

It might be said that the current sins are more egregious than the past.

As Maya Angelou famously said,

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

White America should have known better than to enslave other human beings.

They should also know better than to think that problems hundreds of years old can be fixed in less than seventy years.