What I see is that nothing was learned from previous debates, DEI (as an example) was not about what you claim here, what you describe is the caricature that the right wing came up with.
What DEI Actually Is
This isn’t the first time this country has manufactured outrage to avoid accountability. The issue’s a recurring theme that I’ve written about for a separate thesis recently:
In this country, anytime there’s a push in the direction of equity, there’s an immediate countercultural backlash led by people terrified of losing their unearned advantages.
Contrary to what many DEI opponents claim, diversity programs aren’t fringe efforts dreamed up by liberal U.S.-hating academics. They’re the result of legislation meant to bring the country closer to its stated ideals.
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, requiring federal contractors to adopt affirmative action. That order formalized the country’s first large-scale DEI effort and — with its 1967 expansion to also prohibit sex discrimination — worked to “increase the participation of minorities and women in the workplace” which was (and still is) an issue that needed addressing.
DEI programs later expanded, specifically for groups who’d been historically marginalized and cut out of mainstream education and career opportunities. According to a University of Michigan Leadership Institute article on the history of diversity in higher education, “At the height of student activism in the 1960s, one in five student protests demanded an end to racial discrimination on campus.”
These were foundational efforts in addressing centuries of exclusion.
This wasn’t just a social shift though. It was also a legally binding one.
Queer activism in general puts a high premium on the concept of visibility. You can’t generally tell someone’s sexuality by looking at them, which makes us an invisible minority unless we make an effort to be seen as queer. The closet makes it a lot easier to other us, and a big part of the success of the gay rights movement was people realizing that they had friends, neighbors, and family that were queer all along, which is why “visibility” has always been the center tentpole of the queer rights movement. So a portion of it is likely just reflex: when you do social activism as a queer, you make it clear that you’re doing it As A Queer.
But there are also more practical reasons. As DrStrangelove was so keen to point out, Palestinian culture is pretty conservative, and not very big on gay rights. This is likely reflected in at least some of the orgs that work on Palestinian rights. If a queer person wants to volunteer their time helping the Palestinian cause, signing up for “Queers for Palestine” makes it a fairly safe bet that they don’t have to worry about conflicts with homophobes working for the same org. Similarly, if someone is looking to donate, “Queers for Palestine” at least implies that there will be an effort to make sure the money doesn’t end up in the pocket of some cleric who wants to stone gay people to death, and maybe even put some of that money to supporting queer Palestinians specifically.
Relatedly, it’s good PR. A visibly queer charitable org working for the Palestinian cause would, hopefully, inspire some of those Palestinians who hold homophobic opinions to soften their opposition.
It’s also a good source of free advertising. The juxtaposition gets people’s attention, which gives QfP the opportunity to push their message. And, somewhat cynically, a lot of charitable giving is performative, especially corporate charity. If a company is looking to virtue signal to a liberal customer base, donating to Queers for Palestine checks the boxes for both “Free Palestine” and “Queer Rights” for the cost of a single donation.
That wouldn’t be my read of the progressive position at all.
But really what I thought about when I read this is, I’m not sure it’s entirely rational to expect anyone to treat anyone the same regardless of whatever immutable characteristic. People are entirely too prone to their own biases, even with the best of intentions. For decisions like who to hire, so many factors go into that beyond some kind of objective assessment of qualifications. It really comes down to a gut decision about who’s going to be the best fit, and that often includes cultural fit, and culture is so often a stand-in for race.
I don’t have a solution or even a policy position to offer, it just struck me as absurd on its face that anyone anywhere could ever be viewed in purely objective terms. It is human nature to discriminate.
I’m of the opinion that when certain folks see this picture,
they cannot not think that it’s just a false representation of what progressives really want to do which is to remove the guy in the blue shirt’s legs with a chainsaw and Crazy glue them to the kid in purple. Because any change to the status quo by definition does harm to the folks with actual privilege and in the end fails to actually address the pathology that the kid in purple is naturally doomed to have because of his culture and genetics.
No, what they are questioning is whether these dark skinned people need to be watching a game at all. They’d prefer them out in the field doing manual labor.
I really don’t think many people realize, or are willing to accept, how freaking racist this country is. I grew up in various places in rural Michigan. My grandfather on my adopted father’s side, a local Sheriff, was in the KKK. My step-father on my adopted father’s side was also in the KKK and I’ve heard he killed people. There are many people in my family who are also racist as shit (my mother thankfully was not.)
The first day I met my grandmother’s new husband, I was all of ten, and the first words out of his mouth were “You ain’t dating no
niggers
are you?”
What do you say to that, at ten?
My best friend in junior high was half-black (and quite racist against black men at that time.) Someone stole her agenda, and returned it to her with a date circled and a noose and a message she would be lynched on that date. This was 1998. She did not tell me about this until decades later.
Or listen to my other grandmother, sweetheart that she is, try to explain why everyone was so much happier before segregation ended.
I think as a result of this I grew up with more than a little white guilt. It influenced what I studied in school and how my politics developed, for sure.
But like, you think some kind of corrective action is not necessary for a social context that is so absurdly over-the-top racist? When you live in a society in which the open expression of racism is a form of social capital, something’s gotta give.
But what about Oprah and Bill Cosby and Barack Obama???
And then we need to have the history lesson on the difference racists find between the field nigger vs house nigger and their love of the zip coon (something that lasted into the TV age with Amos and Andy).
It only truly happens when you stop caring about that characteristic. Eg, 100 years ago in America, various immigrant groups saw themselves as Irish-American, Italian-American, Polish-American, and so on. And it probably seemed absurd that they could ignore this ethnic identity when hiring. And today there are still Americans with ancestors from those countries, but they just see themselves as Americans, and it would seem absurd to care about it when hiring.
That would be the real goal. That when you’re interviewing candidates, it no longer matters whether someone is black or white, straight or gay, cis or trans. You just pick the best person.
I think it’s a real representation of what progressives want to do: they want to create equal outcomes, and because everyone is different, they do this by treating people unequally. However, in the picture, the tall guy is getting no benefit from his box, whereas in most real life situations, this is not the case: you are taking away the money someone earned, or limiting their opportunities, in order to help someone else.
They didn’t just see themselves as suspect Americans they were told in no uncertain terms that they were not and never would be accepted as real Americans.
No, they do not just see themselves as Americans as can be evidenced by the numerous ways we celebrate their nationality of origin; multiple parades, every large city having ‘ethnicity towns’, and if you want to see fifth generation folks that think their more ethnic than the people that still live in ‘the old country’ try going to the Jersey shore or Brooklyn.
This is a currently popular shibboleth but AFAICT it doesn’t have much basis in reality. IME, queer people in general, including supporters of “Queers for Palestine”, are quite well aware of homophobic prejudice and oppression in various parts of the world, and they’re not at all “confused” about anti-LGBTQ repression in Palestine and particularly within Hamas.
They’re also aware (as most of the people who jeer at “Queers for Palestine” are not) of Palestinian civil society gay-rights organizations like Al-Qaws, and specific issues regarding the struggle for gay rights in Palestine. (They’re also aware that Israeli society, despite establishing legal equality for gays and using targeted pinkwashing as a PR strategy, also fosters a lot of homophobia in its leadership and in many Israeli subcultures.)
Moreover, there is nothing “confused” about opposition to ethnic cleansing, mass slaughter, and denial of rights and sovereignty in general, even when inflicted on a people whose cultural practices you consider unethical in some ways. For example, as a woman and a feminist, I’m not supportive of the traditional patriarchal domination of women by men in Uyghur Muslim society. But that doesn’t mean that I think that advocating for the rights of Uyghurs against the oppressive and genocidal treatment of them by the (in some respects) more gender-egalitarian Chinese government is “supporting the wrong crowd”.
That sort of attitude represents a disgusting callousness towards fundamental human rights. Oppression and genocide do not become okay as long as they’re targeting cultures that are more sexist or homophobic than our own.
How does it work, then? What I’m always hearing is that these groups think of themselves as white, even if they still keep some traditions and favourite recipes from their original homelands. Would an Irish American discriminate against an Italian American today?
Sure, potentially. But I think the key point is that many (not all, by any means) Americans still think of themselves as ‘Irish-American’ or ‘Italian-American’ contrary to your assertion. It has declined a bit since the whole somewhat manufactured foofaraw around ‘African-American’ a couple of decades back, which itself originated as an attempt to blend in with the common American culture in the rust belt where many American Blacks settled near tight-knit urban white immigrant ethnic communities because that was where the jobs were. It also was always less prevalent in areas like the interior West than it was in the Eastern and Midwestern rust belts. Nonetheless it certainly hasn’t disappeared.
Locally for example it is not hard for me to find various social organizations directly labelled or referencing Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Portuguese-Americans, Polish-Americans, etc.. White America still has a lot of residual old country ethnic pride.
They’re assimilated now, but the hostility their ancestors had to deal with lead to their ancestors and their decedents maintaining their original nationality as a thing of pride.
I posted this a long time time ago, but nothing was learned, I see. You can only say that when you wrongly assume that there was no inequality before that.
“This looks a lot like how the right turned Critical Race Theory into a caricature, the important thing there was to realize that the right willfully ignored how CRT was a frame work and how minority researchers also did and do use it to investigate their own issues of bigotry among their ancestral locales. There was also some definitions that were made to mislead what they were all about.
In this case one should not ignore how the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion teachers explain the definitions they use, it follows that you then go for secondary sources that misinterpret what they do, or go for past meanings in the attempt to make them sound silly. Like with the CRT proponents, I did bother to check what the proponents of DEI are talking about, and well, it is not really helpful to ignore what they do talk about.
From the DEI training I got:
It’s important to understand the distinction between equality and equity. Equality would mean giving each and every person the same thing as a show of fairness, but when it comes to best practices and inclusion, this is not a sufficiently informed solution. Equity is about giving people whatever they need to be on equal footing. For instance, a person with a disability may need specific accommodations that other employees don’t. Dedicating resources for things like noise canceling headphones for folks who are neurodivergent, signals that equity is not just a value, it’s a priority. Any social identity group that has historically had their opportunities and access limited may need extra support to advance in a culture where other groups have had decades of education and work opportunities to build their access to professional networks.
– Dereca Blackmon
Stanford University
BA, History. Inclusion Innovator.”
I married into a family that is aggressively ethnic American. My husband’s grandparents were immigrants who faced discrimination trying to break into the business world, enough that his grandfather had real pain and anger about it. His family was able to be successful in spite of the discrimination they faced, and they are pointedly proud of their heritage and have kept many of the traditions that would set them apart from traditionally white America. His grandmother was recently knighted by the country of her birth. I don’t think they ever had any expectation of blending because everyone they know is of their own ethnicity and also a member of their family. It’s rare for anyone in the family to marry someone who’s not of that ethnicity - my husband was the first person when he married me. Now we have a little blond-haired brown-eyed ethnic-American boy with an Anglo name. I thought for sure that kid was going to look like him.
Has his family assimilated? It’s hard for me to judge because I honestly don’t know what part of their culture is being rich and which part is being ethnic, in many cases. They do speak English and very rarely speak their native language, but my understanding is that they were both from a rural area, and their dialect is considered lower-class so they try not to draw attention to it. But that’s something you would only know/care about with respect to other people of that same ethnicity.
Rather than generalizing about all ethnic-Americans I think it really just depends on a) the literal color of your skin and b) whether you live in an area with a lot of people who share your ethnicity. In areas that are predominantly white you will see more assimilation of these cultures. In cases like my husband’s family, where they associate mainly with the 500 or so people in their own family, they don’t have to assimilate much. The darker your skin or the more you deviate from the generic white norm, the harder the time you’re going to have.
Of course, being Italian or Irish was no walk in the park but it can’t really compare to being Black in the US. The Irish look down on Black people, the Italians look down on Black people, their function is essentially to keep everyone else from complaining too loudly. There are certainly plenty of ethnic Americans with a long and storied history of discrimination who are more or less considered white in the US, assuming they left a sufficient amount of their culture behind. This is not the case with Black people. Black people have been so consistently discriminated against at every level, often explicitly, throughout history, so much so that large swaths of the US population - white, Italian, Jewish, Asian, you name it – consider them culturally separate and inferior. You would think that experiencing discrimination yourself would make you less likely to discriminate against others, but this has not been the case.
Is it better? I don’t know. I used to think things had gotten better but look where we are now. Racists are having a field day. They’ve been with us all along. The Supreme Court has already gutted major elements of the Civil Rights Act and I can see them kicking things like interracial marriage and school segregation back to the states. We stand to lose decades of racial progress.
Also, it’s not just Black people who aren’t allowed to assimilate - Latinos, Asians of various ethnicities, Indians, Arabs, etc. are certainly not considered white. But they are considered, by many, to be preferable to Black.
*I’m only saying “ethnic-American” as a fig leaf for my husband’s own cultural heritage because I don’t want that level of specificity on these boards. But you can probably guess.
When there was a big cyclone in Indonesia i gave money through a Jewish organization instead of some generic disaster relief organization (which is what i usually do) for similar reasons. And partly, i wanted to “virtue signal” to the Indonesian Muslims that Jews can be good people, too.
