By Simon Hankinson, former career foreign service officer
Senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation
Organizations get the behavior they reward. The military and federal government are increasingly rewarding adherence, and requiring declarations of fealty, to the divisive, discriminatory ideology of DEI.
With each generation of self-replicating leadership, it will get worse. Congress needs to root out and defund DEI bureaucracies, before it’s too late.
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If you’re like most Americans, you’ve heard the acronym “DEI.” You may also know that it stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
What you may not know is that those words are as accurate as the word “Democratic” in the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (today’s North Korea) or the “German Democratic Republic” (the former East Germany).
DEI is, in fact, a reductionist ideology that sees all disparities of performance as evidence of racism.
It promotes discrimination based on immutable characteristics like skin color, and prizes equal outcomes over equal opportunity.
The efficiency and credibility of the U.S. State Department, military, and federal bureaucracy are being undermined by the Biden administration’s relentless insertion of DEI into every facet of operations, not least personnel.
As the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley writes, “the progressive left’s response” to gaps between racial groups in performance outcomes “has been to wage war on meritocracy rather than focus on improving instruction” in K-12 schools, where lie the roots of group disparities that show up years later.
DEI as practiced in most American organizations is antithetical to America’s fundamental values and often illegal.
And yet, DEI bureaucracies are now well entrenched across academia and government.
Most American universities are dominated by Leftist ideology. Viewpoint diversity is vanishing, to the detriment of both faculty research and student learning.
This would be bad enough if it were a phase or fashion, but the increasing use of biased hiring processes to weed out non-believers is creating a permanent, self-replicating staff.
To take one example, to recruit an “African American Studies professor versed in ‘feminist and queer studies,’ Yale asked applicants to “share ‘some way(s) in which they have championed diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.” The requirement for evidence of “championing” DEI would screen out anyone who dares question its premise.
Similar DEI litmus tests have now infected promotions in the public sector.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has drawn attention to the military’s promotion into senior grades of officers who spout the required dogma about DEI, fealty to which is becoming a necessary tick-box for advancement.
This is despite the fact that it does nothing to promote military readiness.
One aspiring general officer on the pending promotion list is Air Force Colonel Benjamin Jonsson, who wrote an article excoriating his fellow (white) colonels, recommending that they read “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo. DiAngelo’s depressing thesis is that all white people are inherently racists, especially the ones who don’t think they are.
“Replacing the officer class of police and military ranks with politicized ideologues who will bend to a transformative dogma is a strategy that has worked in places like the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Venezuela,” according to the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez.
Over at the State Department, joining the ranks of the senior civil or foreign service is the civilian equivalent of becoming a general or admiral.
Skill and experience are important, but reciting the right catechism plays an increasing role. The easiest path is to tell the boss what he/she/ze wants to hear, and under Joe Biden, that’s DEI.
Anyone questioning the existence of “systemic racism” at the State, or challenging assumptions about racial outcomes in hiring, promotion, crime, incarceration, or education, would be sidelined at some stage, no matter how solid their data or convincing their argument.
By sharing the same ideology, or at least pretending to, the elite ranks thus replicate themselves over time. . . . (read more on 1945)
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