Donald Glover says that when he became a writer for 30 Rock, Tina Fey told him he was a diversity hire.  To this anyone could ask, How does she know he's a diversity hire?  To that question I'd ask, How could anyone be sure he isn't?

This is the great trouble with enforcing diversity.  When the Army, or a university, or the American Medical Association promotes "diversity," the only person you can be sure deserves the promotion is the "least diverse" person in the room.  Everybody else, no matter how skilled, becomes suspect.  And there's no way to clear him from it.  Every time he walks into a room, the degree, instead of making a statement, raises a question.  That's a painful place for the graduate to be in — almost as painful as having cancer and getting a diversity hire for a doctor.

The term diversity hire is an insult.  It means your skill had less value for you than your skin color, your religion, or your sexual orientation.  In other words you were hired for the job based on anything other than your ability to do the job.

It was meant to be charity, but it ended up being robbery.  First robbed are the people who deserved the job and didn't get it.  Second are the people who deserved the job, and everybody thinks they didn't deserve it.  But third — and easily the worst off — are the people who think they're going to get something good and end up getting hurt.  Say, for instance, the mothers who get misdiagnosed and end up dying for no good reason.  Or the teenagers who get a faulty car that stops working right when they're on the freeway.  Or our siblings who trust buildings that collapse on them.  Or the sons who get shot to pieces because their general was incompetent.

Am I being extreme here?  I would argue that this is exactly what's happening, as blue states are ditching grading systems, and lowering standards for bar exams, and barring Whites and Asians from all kinds of advanced schools — as they have to, in order to make "equity" happen.  The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reports,

In 2021, 28 percent of Black test takers were rated ready for college-level courses in English, compared to 67 percent of Whites. In mathematics, only 10 percent of Backs were rated college-ready compared to 44 percent of Whites. In science, ACT data shows 11 percent of Blacks were ready for college-level courses compared to 44 percent of Whites. In reading, 18 percent of Blacks achieved the minimal benchmark for college readiness compared to 53 percent of Whites. All of these scores for college readiness for both Blacks and Whites were down from 2020.

The most striking statistic is that only 6 percent of all Black test takers were rated ready for college-level courses in all four areas of English, mathematics, science, and reading. Whites were more than five times as likely as Blacks to be prepared for college-level work in all four areas.

What will "equal representation" mean in the end?  That America will be cheaper, dumber, and more dangerous — that everyone will have to pay, dearly, to make liberals feel holy and borderline dropouts feel included.  This will all backfire massively.

Will we know about it?  Yes, but mainly in private.  The great advantage of Team Diversity is that we'll never see exactly how much damage they cause.  Every product they mangle, every business and institution they crumble, every life that's lost unnecessarily — every genius we never discovered — is swept under the rug so that the rest of our knockoffs can shine.  And the world we could have had, a world pregnant with actual talents and poetry and beauty, dies stillborn.  Or maybe you could say it was aborted.  And when the mother dies and the son gets mangled, every single instance will be just that — a single instance.  A life flushed down the drain without a news story, or a movie, or a movement.  Not even a statistic, as collecting the numbers for such things is impossible.  We wanted everyone to be represented, and everybody was — except the man who deserved to be, and the ruined consumer he could have saved.

In the end, the greatest argument against White supremacy, if not Nazi Germany, will be our American South.  And greatest argument for it will be the society we engineered to replace it.

Jeremy Egerer is the author of the troublesome essays on Letters to Hannah, and welcomes followers on Substack.  Email him at letterssubscription@gmail.com to get a free copy of his essays, or to see what he says next.

Image: Tom Hilton via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.