What Should America Look Like?

The Supreme Court is taking another look at the question of race-based affirmative action. Central to the question of selecting who gets into colleges that employ a diversity test should be the reasoning behind the requirement to consider it at all. There has not been a national debate on the central importance of diversity; it is taken on faith with the Left daring anyone to say otherwise or risk being immediately outed as a racist.

This is a good time to question the orthodoxy of the Left on this issue. Nowhere do you hear logical arguments on why diversity is more important than say, competence, and, it’s a virtual secret on how the Left ranks its priorities to achieve diversity. The Left has bet the farm on the notion that diversity and its other stablemate, equity, should rightfully replace millions of years of natural human development; overnight, on faith alone. Let’s start with the arguments presented by the Left and then debunk them:

  1. According to a report by McKinsey, the top 25% of companies based on financial performance have 33% greater ethnic diversity compared to the bottom 25%,
  2. Nondiverse workplaces lack cognitive diversity
  3. With strong team diversity, customers are better represented
  4. The company attracts more talent
  5. Diversity improves the company's reputation
  6. The cost of not embracing diversity, equity and inclusion is high
  7. Companies must have zero-tolerance policies against discrimination
  8. Companies must invest in DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) training

I found many supportive arguments favoring strict allegiance to policies of diversity and inclusion. They all speak to an overriding passion for enforced niceness, i.e., little to no emphasis on actual measurable performance. The basic premise behind such arguments is that individual strengths are somehow not quantifiable and therefore must be fluid. It is assumed that anyone on a team can and will contribute something important to the group’s work regardless of competence. Sounds a lot like the present crazy logic backing gender fluidity. It’s the same thinking, built on one false premise after another. And no one may question the emperor's lack of clothing either.

Examine the above eight statements and see what they have in common. Many if not most are either nonprovable or biased as a consequence of groupthink. Let’s take the statement “It attracts more talent” as an example. I could assert that DEI excludes certain talent who would find the requirements for diversity training outrageous and unacceptable. “Companies must invest in DEI training” seems to be the opposite of individual thought and true diversity, meaning “do I have the right to disagree with you?” DEI seems to say “no” you don’t have that right. It’s exclusionary, not inclusive.

Do you believe companies are more responsive to their customers today than they used to be? I don’t. As far as I am concerned, DEI may do the opposite of “improving company reputation.” Over and over, one is faced with the discrimination of individual thought and action for people who can’t or won’t conform to what amounts to organizational fascism. Are we better off today with all the facets of DEI ever present in today’s large companies and the government?  I suspect you know the answer.

The lunatics who seem to have control of our narratives today have now achieved undeserved legitimacy in their thinking. Here’s an example of what we’ve lost in terms of productivity and speed of execution since the workplace has been so “transformed.” The fastest jet-powered airplane ever built was the SR-71.  It was designed and built between 1958 and 1962 by Kelly Johnson of Lockheed together with a small bunch of slide rule-toting engineers who designed, tested, and built 12 airplanes in less than three years.  We can’t do that anymore.

Yes, there is more complexity in many of the things we design and build today. But largely, social manipulation and corporate policies, along with the relative coddling of today’s demanding employees have resulted in a typical 25-year design, development, testing, and production cycle for similar leading-edge aircraft. We’ve become risk-averse and pay a very high price for our society's “advancements.”

And, this extends to every other modern technology, except perhaps consumer goods, which somehow seem exempt from some of their dogma. Apple USA is about 70% white and mostly male. Not exactly reflective of the world they sell to, is it?  What does Apple CEO Tim Cook say about this?  He's "not satisfied" with employment diversity at the company.  Then why doesn’t he fix it? Because he can’t make wonderful innovations at speed without smart people, who too often are white and Asian stereotypes. DEI is taking a back seat at Apple -- just ignore what their lips say!

Did you ever hear the meme that if you put an infinite number of monkeys together with an infinite number of typewriters and give them an infinite amount of time that they would type out the works of Shakespeare? Even if true, what’s the point? Resources are finite, not infinite. This requires that we do things as efficiently as possible, without waste and fluff. That’s where we stand today. And, now it is time we circle back to the Supreme Court and affirmative action.

In that 2003 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to uphold affirmative action but said it expected that in 25 years, "the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary." Left-leaning justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that. When you seek artificial outcomes that cannot be had naturally due to a plethora of reasons that surround individual ability, your horizons will radically shrink. The Left secretly knows this and as a result, uses many tricks to try and fool all of us.  They move goalposts, seek less objectivity in decision-making, and settle for reduced outcomes and lifespans. That should confirm to anyone that DEI ideas are not only wrong-minded; their desire to grind everyone down to the lowest common denominator is flat-out evil.

Race Neutral. Isn’t that what Martin Luther King wanted to achieve? Remember this famous quote:

“Judge a man not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.”

What to make of progressives, Democrats, or the Left, whatever you call them, throwing MLK under the bus. It is obvious; they have moved away from King’s aspirational statement. Why? Almost 60 years have gone by and the majority of blacks and some other minorities do not hold a proportional share of our wealth. And, that’s despite massive social spending, preferences, set-asides, grants, endless laws, educational mainstreaming, and a thousand other experiments and trials that have been implemented.  After all that, disparities largely remain. Yet, the government says “it’s only getting started” in their goal to level us all out.

Back to our title question: “What Should America Look Like?”  The answer should be obvious. We are a nation of individuals. We have our shining stars and our dullards. We have those who break free of their upbringing and those that fail despite their advantages. America is a melting pot. It just can’t and shouldn't offer guarantees beyond an equal start. Asking for more than that is Marxism, which just might be what the Left really does want America to look like.

Author, Businessman, and Thinker. Read more about Allan, his background and his ideas to create a better tomorrow at www.1plus1equals2.com

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