What’s So Funny About Diversity, Equity & Inclusion?

by admin | February 7, 2025 7:40 am

Many people may rightly say, “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves.”

And, yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.

― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents

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We moved to East Texas in June 1968 against my will since it meant leaving friends I had known since first grade, my introduction to school. My hometown of Allenstown, New Hampshire, didn’t have kindergarten. The school was too small for such, so my parents were responsible for preparing me for school. They did a fine job, both loving books and eager to teach their children well. I was reading regularly by 6, walking to the little library at least weekly. Books and I and haven’t slowed down since.

I was two months shy of turning 13 when we rolled across the Texas border and stopped in Linden, hometown of Don Henley of The Eagles, for lunch. We crossed the Sabine crammed in a 1964 Mercury Comet, sort-of turquoise in color, pulling a U-Haul trailer. My parent both smoked, the car didn’t have air-conditioning (purchased in New Hampshire where it wasn’t an option). They flicked ashes out the open windows, which flew in the back windows and temporarily blinded the 3 boys in back: Gary, Scott, and Gregg.

The movers would come later, the trailer holding the essential: sheets, towels, a few weeks’ worth of clothes, stuff. I had a cheeseburger at a café in downtown Linden. It was my first encounter with sweet tea, along with lettuce and tomato on the burger. Yankees didn’t dress their burgers with veggies. I still prefer mine at least some of the time without those toppings, though eating a burger is a rare treat these days. I am old and cautious about cholesterol, artery blockage, and other elderly ailments. And I only drink unsweet tea, having never acquired that Southern taste. (But I have learned to love grits. It took a while.)

New Hampshire was near-lily white at the time. It hasn’t changed much in the nearly six decades since we moved Behind the Pine Curtain. (I know since my peeps and I return most summers for at least a week to New England to escape the Texas heat.) We spent an idyllic summer living with my paternal grandfather until my dad could find work as a commercial artist (aka sign painter). Once employed, they bought a house on South Twelfth Street in Longview, directly behind what is now LeTourneau University (then college). The fact that I now work there part-time as a reference librarian and archivist feels like coming full circle. I spent hundreds of hours on this campus as a kid, playing flag football with neighborhood buddies near Speer Chapel, exploring the creepy crematorium hidden in the woods – a vestige from when Harmon Hospital occupied this space during World War II – paying a quarter to swim in the outdoor pool, now long gone.

Moving to East Texas was culture shock. Here is a story I have told before that bears repeating: Across Harrison Road from my grandfather’s house in Greggton was a convenience store and washateria. On the latter’s window a painted sign said: Whites only. I found this perplexing. How could a washateria stay in business only allowing white sheets and clothes to be laundered there? I asked my mother, born in Boston and a first-generation citizen whose parents emigrated from Quebec, Canada. She gave me a sad look and explained the sign was not for clothes, but for people. In the summer of 1968, this business did not want Black people to use their washing machines or dryers. Besides being an idiotic business plan, not allowing a goodly portion of the population to spend their quarters with you, it just seemed senseless and cruel.

Vestiges of segregation remained in East Texas for years after schools were integrated. In the 1980s, I came across a doctor’s practice that still had separate waiting rooms for whites and Blacks. I ran a weekly newspaper in San Augustine, Texas, for five years during that decade. The high school each fall elected white and Black homecoming queens, who stood side by side as I took their photo for the newspaper. I once entered a courthouse – not sure where anymore – that still had separate drinking fountains, the signs firmly attached to the tile wall, though nobody enforced the rule or paid much attention.

This is not ancient history, as those now running the show would have you believe. In the long arc of history, apartheid in America occurred practically yesterday.

One conclusion I have drawn in recent years is that race is an artificial construct, a view hardened in recent years after reading Caste, the book from which the quotation at top comes. The prevailing view of evolutionary scientists is that all of mankind rose from Africa. That is all of us, from the blue-eyed Swedes, the Black woman running a university who descended from[1] slaves, the brown-skinned illegal immigrant who works mowing yards on a crew. Ultimately, we are family.

Race is a concept instituted by European colonialism as England, France, Spain, Belgium and others seized countries across the globe. As Wilkerson convincingly writes, at least to me, racial categories were a convenient way to rationalize exploiting, indeed “owning” other humans — the most egregious version of a caste system. Much of this country was built upon  the backs of other humans deeded to be the untouchables of the American caste system.

We still have is a distinct vestige of a caste system, one that those now in power want to perpetuate and expand under the guise of fostering a meritocracy. That is what is spurring the movement to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in schools, workplaces, and government offices. The current occupant of the Oval Office spouts “DEI” as if it were a disease that must be eliminated. So does our governor (a fellow member of Boy Scout Troop 201, which I joined right after moving here in 1968). I am skeptical either one could provide a coherent explanation of what DEI actually means, but it makes for a helluva bogeyman these days.

If anytime a politician wanted to talk about “DEI,” the full phrase was invoked — diversity, equity and inclusion — I don’t believe this would have become an issue. No DEI program is perfect, but the intent is certainly honorable: promoting fair treatment for everyone, especially those from historically marginalized groups. Anyone who thinks the days are long gone of marginalizing people of a certain skin color or ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation has a seriously short memory. It should be noted that the largest beneficiary of affirmative action and DEI efforts are white women, according to a recent McKinsey study reported in Forbes[2] magazine.

The anti-DEI tsunami sweeping this country reeks of hypocrisy. I am deeply concerned about its effect on those groups who it was intended to give a hand-up, particularly when our government is overrun with entitled billionaires, many of whom have taken advantage of governmental programs and contracts to pad their wealth. (I am talking about you, Elon Musk, but not just you.)

I am not sure why, but a line from an Elvis Costello song has become my earworm: What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding? So, what’s so funny about diversity, equity, and inclusion?

To say the least, we live in fraught times, especially for those who belong to those marginalized groups. I am an old guy, privileged by my place in this caste system and largely immune from the ill effects of these misbegotten efforts by our current leaders.

Still, what is happening to this country sickens me.

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