Some readers don’t like Victor Davis Hanson, but this is an intriguing clip. He compares Affirmative Action and DEI. He says affirmative action was “created during the Civil Rights era 1964 and 65. It was designed to address the historical racism and oppression of black Americans. It was to rectify slavery and Jim Crow in some northern states and de jure segregation in the South.
“And it said that because of that, African Americans had not been given equality of opportunity. And then something happened to this paradigm. When the Obama administration came in, they saw that that constituency was not big enough for the type of woke agenda they envisioned. So they recreated it.”
The Policy of Unfairness
How did a policy meant to address past discrimination turn into a tool for political division? Why are successful immigrants classified as oppressed while struggling Americans are left behind, the logic behind. DEI is unraveling, and more people are waking up to its flaws.
“They used the word diversity, and diversity then would morph during the Obama years to diversity, equity, and inclusion. They added the equity and inclusion so you didn’t obsess on race, which was the obsession. But they didn’t want you to think about that. So then all of a sudden, anybody was diverse on one qualification, they were not white that posed millions of problems, because who is white in a multiracial society, everybody has different heritages.”
“How do we stop fakers like Senator Elizabeth Warren, et cetera? But all that aside, you can see what Obama was trying to do, he was trying to say that the number of people who had been victimized was no longer 12% it was 30% and it was based on the idea of systemic racism. If you could not find overt racism in the 21st century, then you had to put adjectives in it. It was systemic: it was institutional; it was insidious; it was like air. You can’t see air, but you know it’s there.
The DEI Detectors
“So you had to have air detectors, like DEI detectors, and they would tell us there’s you have to have trigger warnings or safe spaces or microaggressions; this was all an effort to build a victimized class. And what happened was, in the old days, there was an economic element to affirmative action. It was clear that African Americans’ income was not comparable to non-African Americans, but under DEI, you could be an immigrant from the Punjab. You could come in from Argentina, you could come in from Taiwan, you could come in from almost any area. And there were actually 16 different ethnic groups with higher incomes than whites. So what happened?
“People began to say two things, this person who we are hiring because we want to be diverse, actually has more money than the people who are being excluded and has more opportunity number one and number two, they have no history of systemic exclusion.
The Inevitable Took Place
“How does somebody who comes across the border from Oaxaca on the first day claim that he’s been a victim of insidious American racism? How does somebody who comes from Taiwan make the argument that he has been a victim of systemic racism in the here and now? So you had all of these immigrants coming in. And remember, DEI was by intent to coincide with a record number of immigrants, 55,000,016% of the population.
“So, what did we do? We created a new group. And the result of it was, for a while, eight years, we got, we got record numbers of Democrat voters among Asians who had been traditionally conservative under Hispanics, blacks, Native Americans, and then it blew up, and Donald Trump blew that up because he exposed the ridiculousness of it.
“These people are trying to divide us into a Marxist binary between victimizers and victims. But the peace people in East Palestine were victims. The people in North Carolina were victims. And there’s some of the victimizers are not white. And so, it’s so convoluted now, and it makes no sense in terms of economic advantage or historic racism or bias or who is what. Let’s just get rid of it and start to treat people as people and make identity politics incidental and not essential to who we are.”
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