Recent actions by Stanford University's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee, and those of their ilk reinforce the widespread and growing perception that DEI is no better than phrenology; the quack pseudoscience that, among other things, used head shapes to "prove" Black people to be inferior to Caucasians. The issue involves not just a handful of DEI practitioners, "a few," or even "some." The behavior is characteristic of "many" if perhaps not "most" which leads to my conclusion that many people in DEI positions deserve no more respect than phrenologists and snake oil salesmen.

The instant you cross the line by promoting racist assumptions about people, including "white privilege," and "people of color cannot be racist," you have made yourself part of the very problem you claim you want to solve. Ben Shapiro reports, for example, how one program segregated students by race; an insult to the countless civil rights activists who were sprayed with fire hoses and attacked by police dogs when they protested peacefully against segregation decades ago.

If, by the way, you say that people of color cannot be racist then you are stating the racist belief that people of color cannot be held to the same standards of behavior as Caucasians. When Al Sharpton calls white people crackers and Black people he does not like the N-word, he is just as racist as any white supremacist and far more influential because Democratic Presidential candidates including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are eager to appear with him in public. Republicans, on the other hand, shun David Duke like the plague.

When DEI Creates a Hostile Work Environment

Stanford's DEI Committee is the subject of a complaint filed by two Jewish employees for violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act. The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law is representing the employees. It is therefore alleged that the very people whose job is to enforce equal opportunity laws, including Title VII, are allegedly themselves creating a hostile work environment. This makes as much sense as putting Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein in charge of a summer camp for teenage girls, or the Westboro Baptist Church in charge of a multifaith religious activity.

The Forward's "Our research shows many DEI staff have a blind spot when it comes to Jews" says of the DEI "profession" in general, "We found that DEI staff are obsessed with Israel, communicating about the Jewish homeland almost three times as often as about the country [Communist China] that is actively interning their Muslim citizens" and quoted a DEI professional's anti-Semitic and frequent Hamas talking point, "Israel has a particular loathing for children. They target them with violence specifically and intentionally every single day.” Why doesn't this DEI person just come out with the details about how those nasty Jews make the blood of the children in question into matzos?

Stanford's DEI Committee stated, "Jews, unlike other minority groups, possess privilege and power, Jews and victims of Jew-hatred do not merit or necessitate the attention of the DEI committee.” Jewish privilege, power, and control were the central theme of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Josh Blackman's article adds that Stanford's institutional bigotry does not stop with "the Juden." "Jewish staff have been pressured to attend the DEI program's racially segregated 'whiteness accountability' affinity group, which was created for 'staff who hold privilege via white identity' and 'who are white identified, may be newly grappling with or realizing their white identity, or identify as or are perceived as white presenting or passing (aka seen as white by others even though you hold other identities).'" This meets the very definition of racism; assumptions about people based on their skin color or ethnicity. Joe Biden's "the poor kids are just as bright as white kids" makes similarly the racist assumption that all nonwhite children are poor and all Caucasian ones are at least middle-class.

If we return to "Jews and victims of Jew-hatred do not merit or necessitate the attention of the DEI committee," it is also reasonable to form the perception, whether right or wrong, that Stanford University might even be physically unsafe for Jewish students. A similar directive was issued in 1938 during Kristallnacht to the effect that, "Jews and victims of Jew-hatred do not merit or necessitate the attention of the German police." The complaint against Stanford adds that the DEI program, "knowingly failed to respond to [two] anti-Semitic incidents that occurred on the Stanford campus." These included the "Zoombombing" of a virtual town hall with Nazi swastikas along with the N-word. The DEI program allegedly condemned the latter but not the former, even though the Nazis had no more use for Black people than they had for Jews. Maybe the swastika gets a pass at Stanford even though it is also a slap in the face to the families, including Gold Star families, of American soldiers and sailors who fought against that evil from 1941 through 1945.

Here is yet another specimen, Yasmeen Mashayekh, of a “diversity, equity and inclusion senator” for the Viterbi Graduate Student Association at the University of Southern California. The terrorists she supports openly with tweets such as “If you are not for the complete destruction of Israel and the occupation forces then you’re anti-Palestinian” and “I f***ing love [H]amas” destroy and ruin every single thing they touch. While Israelis turn deserts into gardens, Hamas turns Arab as well as Israeli gardens into deserts. Palestinian Arabs live in squalor because their terrorist leaders teach hatred starting in grade school and pocket misguided foreign aid from the United States and European Union.

Mashayekh's Twitter account also contains the anti-police hate slogan "F***12." USC's reaction to all of this is here. It is vital to remember that organizations like Hamas and individuals like Yasmeen Mashayekh, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez staffer Hussain Altamimi are no more representative of Arabs and/or Muslims than the Westboro Baptist Church is of Christians. Hamas is why many Muslims in the region, and especially Muslim women and LGBT people, live in fear for their physical safety, so the best way to free Palestine is to destroy Hamas.

The bottom line is that, if the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion profession wants respect rather than the widespread pushback it is getting from Americans of all races, it needs to align its agenda to that expressed by Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago. If you immigrate, assimilate, and adopt our national values, you are one of us regardless of what you look like, where you or your ancestors came from, or how long your family has been here. It is absolutely un-American to discriminate against anybody who meets these criteria, and that is about everything we need to know about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Civis Americanus is the pen name of a contributor who remembers the lessons of history, and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way. He or she is remaining anonymous due to the likely prospect of being subjected to "cancel culture" for exposing the Big Lie behind Black Lives Matter.