Decades ago, two high-achieving daughters of our friends got turned down for admission to medical school in Washington, D.C. because two minority applicants with far lower test scores were admitted to the school in their place.  The girls were sad, angry, and disillusioned and without recourse.  They had worked hard their entire young lives, being second-generation "white" Iranians with a superb work ethic passed on to them by their parents.  The girls rose to the top of every challenge they encountered and were assured of entry into medical school by any decent standard of judgment.  But they came up against an indecent standard of judgment; racism.  The idea that hard work and achievement will get them there was shattered because less deserving applicants were given black privilege.

This story is replicated thousands of times around the country every day.  Activists deliberately behave as though white people have all the advantages when it is really they who now have the advantage.  And just so there is no misunderstanding, I do not for a moment believe that black Americans are intellectually inferior.  You cannot listen to Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Candace Owens, or Chloe Valdary (to name only a few) without knowing that.  It is folly to elevate the less competent over the more competent.  It is human nature for people to set hierarchies of preference because that is how we advance, by choosing the better. No serious person chooses the less qualified person over the best qualified person.  That is a recipe for decline and mediocrity.

Blacks constitute 14% of the U.S. population but are overrepresented in TV and radio commercials.  Black privilege can be seen on every TV drama series, such as Netflix's series Bridgerton, where there is Black royalty rising to the upper echelons of society of the times, which never happened.  Again, this is revisionist history in service to the systemic wokeness of our era.

White filmmakers and employers are bending over backwards to hire a more diverse staff.  Pressure on employers to adopt unfair DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) practices is extremely high.  The people doing the hiring are often making a conscious choice to choose black over white for reparations' sake, out of fear of retaliation.  It is often not voluntary.  In too many cases, the sole criterion for hiring is skin color, not competence.

Black "anti-racism" (a deliberate Orwellization of the language) has created a culture where white people are malevolently passed over for jobs and enrollment, including in medical schools and hospitals.  But we need standards, not slogans.

If applicants being hired are not the most competent, the entire culture gets downgraded to mediocrity, which is one reason you have the new anti-Semitic White House press secretary at a total loss for cogent thought, a new female SCOTUS judge who doesn't know what a woman is, people who believe that whiteness is a malignant disease and should be eradicated, and TV personalities who fervently insist that the Holocaust was not about race.  These people are failing up, and that is fair to no one, not even them.  The age of accomplishment has given way to retaliatory hiring and magical thinking.

If people "of color" want redress, I suggest that it has already been done: statues were toppled, the language is now closely monitored for offensive words, books have been removed from schools and libraries, math books have been racialized, and white employees have been "retrained" and told to apologize for their unconscious bias or lose their jobs.  White people were called "demons" and "not human" by one black reparationist.  What do they want — the extermination of white people?  Yes, some do.

When are reparations enough?  By all means, hire black people who are competent, but don't degrade the entire cultural and economic infrastructure by hiring the less competent — of any color.  The eye for an eye retribution makes everyone blind.  Everyone suffers from that kind of malignant largesse because it is systemic racism.  Any way you try to deodorize that warthog, it still stinks.

Image via Pixabay.