The University of Arkansas issued a press release on November 16, 2022, “Ad/PR Student Attends National PR Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Summit in Chicago.” The story said, “Breana Hicks, a senior in the School of Journalism and Strategic Media, attended The Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations 2022 Summit on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Milestones in Mentoring gala in Chicago. Hicks was one of 18 diverse public relations students to receive the 2022 Plank Center DEI Student Travel Scholarship chosen from universities across the country.”
I hear you, Don. I won't say much because I have to write and edit DEI copy where I work. What I would say is that if a company doesn't perform, as in sell things, employees are let go. Non-essential employees go first. Every company has goals for its employees. One of my goals is to increase website traffic this year is by 8 % with content. So far, traffic this year is up over 10% and climbing, but I have to sustain that until Dec. 31 when a new target will be assigned. No target, no bonus. ( I comment here as often as I can while working.) DEI where I work also has targets and one of them "engaging with content" which means reading it. That is usually low. Where DEI succeeds is internally with all of its "positive" messaging and its employee groups. In my case, I do what is asked of me to the best of my ability because I am a professional. Other than that, I stay in the background because I am fearful of saying the wrong thing. I am even worried about commenting here. There is diversity but not diversity of thought. This will be the last time I say anything about the topic.
Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor would reportedly write in his diary, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
my employer has been suffused with much of this nonsense. i work as an accountant for an academic medical center. the first word there is the source of the problem. the med school proselytizes critical race theory and the infinitely worse queer theory. a ridiculously large percentage of hospital employees are listing preferred pronouns in their email signatures. glad that i'm old and sickly enough that for the rest of my days there will still be a few physicians around who won't prescribe euthanasia simply because i'm not a pervert.
DEI is the current liberal/progressive parasite sucking the lifeblood out of "the host" - usually formerly healthy companies.
I'm (now) a 65 y/o white male pastor in the mainline (sideline/old line) United Methodist Church, and I've experienced this anti-male, anti-white (and anti-conservative) bias for my whole career. I've watched women and minorities (and esp. minority women) rise to the top on a greased track, irregardless of job performance.
That nonsense can defeat you if you let it. Instead, I just kept my head down and grew every church I served (in both membership and financial giving), which included a couple building programs (and the capital campaigns to pay for them).
Now, close to retirement, I'm finally leaving the woke (and soon to be broke) UMC with my current church to join the new, more traditional/orthodox Global Methodist Church. It can't happen soon enough (June 1st)!
This is a very sad situation. First of all to implement such a program one must identify the people or characteristics that must be selected for 'special protection or treatment' under DEI (definitely excludes intelligence). One issue you may or may not be aware of is that college enrollment of males is down. There has been such a focus on race and women that the plain vanilla male is being excluded. What good can come of that? We know (all diversity considerations aside, and speaking here of just the raw facts) men are stronger than women. So what good will come of taking the 'alpha' of the species and condemning him to a second tier life ( although maybe he will be better off without all that 'useless' college debt??). The most pernicious thing is the tendency to wipe out advanced or accelerated courses because of racial imbalances., related to this is a movement in California (where else??) to declare MATH itself as racist and teach it differently in away that calculus will not be able to be taught in high school... FLASH!! colleges WANT calculus taught in high school...I gradate high school in sububran Detoit in 1968 had calc and placed out of my college 'requirement.' My wife (not as old as i am...) who went to school in Olympia Washington had a similar experience. How come we could do this in 1968 but can't do it in 2023? How is this progress in education? How will this make America more competitive? it surely will not. So... my father was a school principal in an all-black inner city school in the Detroit Area. His school was always one of the successful ones. why? He knew his neighborhood and compensated for what his K-4th grade students needed. He gave them a safe environment, good teachers, and brought in the federal breakfast and lunch programs. Kids can't lean if they are hungry... I spent time with him getting his school ready each new year and working with some local kids the school system let him hire ( he would not pay me out of school system funds...he paid me $20 a day from money out of his own pocket). Why this digression on me my dad and black schools? because THEY - not race - are the problem. I am an economist (PhD). there is an automatic stabilizer in our educational system like those we talk about in our economy- except it is not working...Why? The 'stabilizer' is that when you have a racial pocket it gets racial representation. So there should be an ability to fix issues of racial disparity when they arise. But this does not happen. 'Race' representatives to the state legislature or Washington or wherever and get sucked up in the power game and do not use their power and influence to fix what's broken back home. Would it help black children more to have a Juneteenth holiday, to take a birthday holiday from a US president and give it to Martin Luther King OR..TO FIX THE SCHOOLS?? Well guess that they have chosen to do? Look at Chicago, Detroit, NYC, all the Eastern cities dominated by Democrats for years. All with concentrations of black population, and high crime and CRAPPY SCHOOLS. If there is systemic racism in America it's because of CRAPPY SCHOOLS. and schools are local and political representation is local. so connect the dots... It's not hard. Why is there an Asian-Black Schism? Asians are NOT part of the 'rainbow coalition...why? Blacks reject education Asian embrace it (and embrace 'white values'). They embrace these things to such an extreme that they 'out-white the whites' to put it in racial terms. actually what the BLM folk call 'white values are simply the values people hold world wide who are successful. Dumbing down our schools, their course work, and offerings will only make things worse. We compete with China Russia, India, Europe and all other global areas, and these people are not doing these STUPID things called DEI. There is nothing useful or productive about DEI. It's an impediment. People of 'race' need to focus on issues instead of their race. Once they fix the right issues they will find differences of 'race' melt away. The very notion that math is racist is, well, racist!
Apr 26, 2023·edited Apr 26, 2023Liked by Don Surber
I don't know what a phrenologist is - or what one does - and I don't care enough to find out.
I'm pretty sure that by now, those of us who are not only capable of, but actually actively practice critical thinking know that, 'diversity' means non-white, and non-male except for token representation purposes, but always non-white male.
"...the School of Journalism and Strategic Media,..."
What the hell is, Strategic Media? It sounds like a euphemism for propaganda - probably because that's exactly what it is.
"The women and the man in that photo need to develop marketable skills."
Huh? Are you telling me that a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in Victim & Oppression of Left-handed Mulatto Lesbian Single Mothers in the Inner City of Helena, Montana, Studies, is not the credential needed to gain the experience to develop such skills? Surely, you jest!
"On January 24, Kelsey Butler of Bloomberg reported, 'Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard'"
"On February 6, an alarmed Marguerite Ward of Insider reported, 'Layoffs sweeping Big Tech are putting corporate diversity efforts at risk.'"
Thank God for market forces!
"'Well-funded and well-connected GOP power players masquerading as aggrieved parents have been "harassing educators for policies they deem unfair to white students and antithetical to their values," per a Boston Globe columnist. It's "white backlash politics" that's "clearly coordinated, with right-wing money" and engaged in a campaign of "whipping suburban parents into a frenzy" to win elections for the Republicans.'"
Assuming that the above is true. How is it any different from this?
"'Well-funded and well-connected Democrat power players masquerading as aggrieved parents have been "harassing educators for policies they deem unfair to black students and antithetical to their values," per a Boston Globe columnist. It's "black racial politics" that's "clearly coordinated, with left-wing money" and engaged in a campaign of "whipping urban parents into a frenzy" to win elections for the Democrats."
I agree... mostly. I just called my gay brother in law and thanked him for being in my life. Like most evangelicals, I have a tendency to approach lifestyles I don't agree with a guilt stick and beat them. But my attitude completely changed when my brother in-law helped me when I was desperately sick. He became the Good Samaritan Christ talked about. It appears that Jesus was a healer as well as a disruptor.
As I remember it during the 90's one of the corporate trends was to identify the company's "core competency", strengthen that and outsource everything else. There are very few companies where DEI is the core competency; other companies are wasting money investing in it.
1. People don't know how hard it is to speak the truth, to a world full of people who do not know they are living a lie. Edward Snowden
2. Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity, where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they are doing today? Thomas Sowell.
3. Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as to not offend imbeciles. Dostoyevsky
4. Yes. Don. DEI is DIE. Divide and Conquer. An old idea but a certainty. "Death by a thousand Cuts." Brought to you by the Fifth Column in America, funded by the source of that last truism. Old Joe is the American Quisling, supported by Foreign Dirty Money. And there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of fingers pushing buttons, pulling levers, in Government and both Political Parties.
DEI, the cult of antiracism, Black Lives Matter, and the 1619 Project are a scourge. They attempt to replace all the gains of the Civil Rights Movement with a new form of racism, this time against white people and white males. Racism is not the solution to anything it is the problem.
But these combined movements which are about bigotry against white people, harm people of color and Black people most of all.
First of all these movements are against the police. A majority of inner city Black people want more police not less.
Secondly, these movements imply that people of color are defined by their victimhood. This has the effect of denying Black people any sense of agency, instead they offer Black people a way to avoid taking any responsibility for the quality of their lives. This is damaging to Black people.
Before Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty the majority of Black families had fathers. After the War on Poverty and as a result of this and similar programs, the minority of Black families have fathers. This is proof that reparations and making Black people into victims is destructive of Black families.
Robert Woodson, the head of the 1776 Project, describes this aptly in this video.
Those on the Left, and the Marxists have no solutions for the problem of racism. Their policies have led to the destruction of Black families and impoverishment of Black lives.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are weasel words for c-o-m-m-u-n-i-s-m. When those Frankfurt School muttonhead communists came to the USA they knew the philosophy and ideology of outright Marxist-Leninist communism was a non-starter. So they decided to employ the vainglorious intellectual class to deceive the masses with divisive junk-talk. The Frankfurt School target-statement is always worth repeating: “We must organize the intellectuals and use them to make western civilization stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.” DEI is a big step in promoting that dictatorship.
In the internet early years for me, I read daily many conservative pundits like Neal Boortz (white man) Ann Coulter (WW) Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams (BM) and today Don Surber. If Don hadn't posted his pic I wouldn't know his race nor would I care! Nor did I care of the race or sex of the others listed above. The way it should be!
Around that same time period, Ward Connelly (BM) tried to get passed in CA a ballot measure removing from ALL government criteria the listing of race! All applications to schools grants etc. Would remove race. Liberals killed it. I wonder why?
We keep pushing policies that seek to lower the river rather than raising the bridge; that reduce (rather than increase) skills rather than produce real wealth and upward living standard for ALL. Economic problems are not solved by slicing "the pie" into more equal slices - that will shrink the total pie over time - economic problems are solved by making "the pie" bigger over time. Diversity - a point in every direction - is no point at all.
I hear you, Don. I won't say much because I have to write and edit DEI copy where I work. What I would say is that if a company doesn't perform, as in sell things, employees are let go. Non-essential employees go first. Every company has goals for its employees. One of my goals is to increase website traffic this year is by 8 % with content. So far, traffic this year is up over 10% and climbing, but I have to sustain that until Dec. 31 when a new target will be assigned. No target, no bonus. ( I comment here as often as I can while working.) DEI where I work also has targets and one of them "engaging with content" which means reading it. That is usually low. Where DEI succeeds is internally with all of its "positive" messaging and its employee groups. In my case, I do what is asked of me to the best of my ability because I am a professional. Other than that, I stay in the background because I am fearful of saying the wrong thing. I am even worried about commenting here. There is diversity but not diversity of thought. This will be the last time I say anything about the topic.
Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor would reportedly write in his diary, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
We can hope this is so in this case as well.
my employer has been suffused with much of this nonsense. i work as an accountant for an academic medical center. the first word there is the source of the problem. the med school proselytizes critical race theory and the infinitely worse queer theory. a ridiculously large percentage of hospital employees are listing preferred pronouns in their email signatures. glad that i'm old and sickly enough that for the rest of my days there will still be a few physicians around who won't prescribe euthanasia simply because i'm not a pervert.
DEI is the current liberal/progressive parasite sucking the lifeblood out of "the host" - usually formerly healthy companies.
I'm (now) a 65 y/o white male pastor in the mainline (sideline/old line) United Methodist Church, and I've experienced this anti-male, anti-white (and anti-conservative) bias for my whole career. I've watched women and minorities (and esp. minority women) rise to the top on a greased track, irregardless of job performance.
That nonsense can defeat you if you let it. Instead, I just kept my head down and grew every church I served (in both membership and financial giving), which included a couple building programs (and the capital campaigns to pay for them).
Now, close to retirement, I'm finally leaving the woke (and soon to be broke) UMC with my current church to join the new, more traditional/orthodox Global Methodist Church. It can't happen soon enough (June 1st)!
Another superb column, Don. Am going to circulate this.
Not too surprising that the event was held in Chicago-- hotbed of the Chicago Communist Cartel, Bill Ayers, Obama, Valerie Jarrett, etc.
D E I = Division, Enmity, and Intolerance.
This is a very sad situation. First of all to implement such a program one must identify the people or characteristics that must be selected for 'special protection or treatment' under DEI (definitely excludes intelligence). One issue you may or may not be aware of is that college enrollment of males is down. There has been such a focus on race and women that the plain vanilla male is being excluded. What good can come of that? We know (all diversity considerations aside, and speaking here of just the raw facts) men are stronger than women. So what good will come of taking the 'alpha' of the species and condemning him to a second tier life ( although maybe he will be better off without all that 'useless' college debt??). The most pernicious thing is the tendency to wipe out advanced or accelerated courses because of racial imbalances., related to this is a movement in California (where else??) to declare MATH itself as racist and teach it differently in away that calculus will not be able to be taught in high school... FLASH!! colleges WANT calculus taught in high school...I gradate high school in sububran Detoit in 1968 had calc and placed out of my college 'requirement.' My wife (not as old as i am...) who went to school in Olympia Washington had a similar experience. How come we could do this in 1968 but can't do it in 2023? How is this progress in education? How will this make America more competitive? it surely will not. So... my father was a school principal in an all-black inner city school in the Detroit Area. His school was always one of the successful ones. why? He knew his neighborhood and compensated for what his K-4th grade students needed. He gave them a safe environment, good teachers, and brought in the federal breakfast and lunch programs. Kids can't lean if they are hungry... I spent time with him getting his school ready each new year and working with some local kids the school system let him hire ( he would not pay me out of school system funds...he paid me $20 a day from money out of his own pocket). Why this digression on me my dad and black schools? because THEY - not race - are the problem. I am an economist (PhD). there is an automatic stabilizer in our educational system like those we talk about in our economy- except it is not working...Why? The 'stabilizer' is that when you have a racial pocket it gets racial representation. So there should be an ability to fix issues of racial disparity when they arise. But this does not happen. 'Race' representatives to the state legislature or Washington or wherever and get sucked up in the power game and do not use their power and influence to fix what's broken back home. Would it help black children more to have a Juneteenth holiday, to take a birthday holiday from a US president and give it to Martin Luther King OR..TO FIX THE SCHOOLS?? Well guess that they have chosen to do? Look at Chicago, Detroit, NYC, all the Eastern cities dominated by Democrats for years. All with concentrations of black population, and high crime and CRAPPY SCHOOLS. If there is systemic racism in America it's because of CRAPPY SCHOOLS. and schools are local and political representation is local. so connect the dots... It's not hard. Why is there an Asian-Black Schism? Asians are NOT part of the 'rainbow coalition...why? Blacks reject education Asian embrace it (and embrace 'white values'). They embrace these things to such an extreme that they 'out-white the whites' to put it in racial terms. actually what the BLM folk call 'white values are simply the values people hold world wide who are successful. Dumbing down our schools, their course work, and offerings will only make things worse. We compete with China Russia, India, Europe and all other global areas, and these people are not doing these STUPID things called DEI. There is nothing useful or productive about DEI. It's an impediment. People of 'race' need to focus on issues instead of their race. Once they fix the right issues they will find differences of 'race' melt away. The very notion that math is racist is, well, racist!
WORD!- RAB
I don't know what a phrenologist is - or what one does - and I don't care enough to find out.
I'm pretty sure that by now, those of us who are not only capable of, but actually actively practice critical thinking know that, 'diversity' means non-white, and non-male except for token representation purposes, but always non-white male.
"...the School of Journalism and Strategic Media,..."
What the hell is, Strategic Media? It sounds like a euphemism for propaganda - probably because that's exactly what it is.
"The women and the man in that photo need to develop marketable skills."
Huh? Are you telling me that a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in Victim & Oppression of Left-handed Mulatto Lesbian Single Mothers in the Inner City of Helena, Montana, Studies, is not the credential needed to gain the experience to develop such skills? Surely, you jest!
"On January 24, Kelsey Butler of Bloomberg reported, 'Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard'"
"On February 6, an alarmed Marguerite Ward of Insider reported, 'Layoffs sweeping Big Tech are putting corporate diversity efforts at risk.'"
Thank God for market forces!
"'Well-funded and well-connected GOP power players masquerading as aggrieved parents have been "harassing educators for policies they deem unfair to white students and antithetical to their values," per a Boston Globe columnist. It's "white backlash politics" that's "clearly coordinated, with right-wing money" and engaged in a campaign of "whipping suburban parents into a frenzy" to win elections for the Republicans.'"
Assuming that the above is true. How is it any different from this?
"'Well-funded and well-connected Democrat power players masquerading as aggrieved parents have been "harassing educators for policies they deem unfair to black students and antithetical to their values," per a Boston Globe columnist. It's "black racial politics" that's "clearly coordinated, with left-wing money" and engaged in a campaign of "whipping urban parents into a frenzy" to win elections for the Democrats."
In war, healthcare or aviation you don’t want DIE because you don’t want to Die.
I agree... mostly. I just called my gay brother in law and thanked him for being in my life. Like most evangelicals, I have a tendency to approach lifestyles I don't agree with a guilt stick and beat them. But my attitude completely changed when my brother in-law helped me when I was desperately sick. He became the Good Samaritan Christ talked about. It appears that Jesus was a healer as well as a disruptor.
"“Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard."
Dead wood always gets trimmed first.
As I remember it during the 90's one of the corporate trends was to identify the company's "core competency", strengthen that and outsource everything else. There are very few companies where DEI is the core competency; other companies are wasting money investing in it.
1. People don't know how hard it is to speak the truth, to a world full of people who do not know they are living a lie. Edward Snowden
2. Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity, where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they are doing today? Thomas Sowell.
3. Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as to not offend imbeciles. Dostoyevsky
4. Yes. Don. DEI is DIE. Divide and Conquer. An old idea but a certainty. "Death by a thousand Cuts." Brought to you by the Fifth Column in America, funded by the source of that last truism. Old Joe is the American Quisling, supported by Foreign Dirty Money. And there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of fingers pushing buttons, pulling levers, in Government and both Political Parties.
I very much agree with the author.
DEI, the cult of antiracism, Black Lives Matter, and the 1619 Project are a scourge. They attempt to replace all the gains of the Civil Rights Movement with a new form of racism, this time against white people and white males. Racism is not the solution to anything it is the problem.
But these combined movements which are about bigotry against white people, harm people of color and Black people most of all.
First of all these movements are against the police. A majority of inner city Black people want more police not less.
Secondly, these movements imply that people of color are defined by their victimhood. This has the effect of denying Black people any sense of agency, instead they offer Black people a way to avoid taking any responsibility for the quality of their lives. This is damaging to Black people.
Before Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty the majority of Black families had fathers. After the War on Poverty and as a result of this and similar programs, the minority of Black families have fathers. This is proof that reparations and making Black people into victims is destructive of Black families.
Robert Woodson, the head of the 1776 Project, describes this aptly in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gtaTgxshkY
Those on the Left, and the Marxists have no solutions for the problem of racism. Their policies have led to the destruction of Black families and impoverishment of Black lives.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are weasel words for c-o-m-m-u-n-i-s-m. When those Frankfurt School muttonhead communists came to the USA they knew the philosophy and ideology of outright Marxist-Leninist communism was a non-starter. So they decided to employ the vainglorious intellectual class to deceive the masses with divisive junk-talk. The Frankfurt School target-statement is always worth repeating: “We must organize the intellectuals and use them to make western civilization stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.” DEI is a big step in promoting that dictatorship.
In the internet early years for me, I read daily many conservative pundits like Neal Boortz (white man) Ann Coulter (WW) Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams (BM) and today Don Surber. If Don hadn't posted his pic I wouldn't know his race nor would I care! Nor did I care of the race or sex of the others listed above. The way it should be!
Around that same time period, Ward Connelly (BM) tried to get passed in CA a ballot measure removing from ALL government criteria the listing of race! All applications to schools grants etc. Would remove race. Liberals killed it. I wonder why?
We keep pushing policies that seek to lower the river rather than raising the bridge; that reduce (rather than increase) skills rather than produce real wealth and upward living standard for ALL. Economic problems are not solved by slicing "the pie" into more equal slices - that will shrink the total pie over time - economic problems are solved by making "the pie" bigger over time. Diversity - a point in every direction - is no point at all.