How DEI Hurts America, Part Two

Victor Davis Hanson

4. What were the costs to America of DEI?

Once race, sex, and sexual orientation were pronounced proof of victimization, then preferences and exemptions obviated the very tenets of civilization, law, and culture. Swarm the border, enter unlawfully, reside illegally—and what followed?

De facto amnesty and non-enforcement of laws. Subsidies for housing, food, health care, and education? If 10,000 white South Afrikaners had stormed the southern border each day of the Biden administration, would they have been exempt from immigration laws?

The public soon grew cynical, and odd phenomena followed the woke/DEI farce. When the left-wing, mainstream media reported a crime, usually a description of the perpetrator was omitted if he/she was non-white and especially a non-white male.

So frequent has this habit become that the reader comments that follow such stories become radically cynical and use the omission to play guessing games over whether the perpetrator was brown, black, gay, non-white of some sort, or trans. When a white male was the rapist, murderer, attacker, or thief, his photo blares out from page one. This is all justified by social justice and an evening out of “privilege”—the commissar model of the old Soviet Union that in the early days of the revolution applied customs and laws unevenly on the basis of ideology.

And here too DEI jumped the shark and went beyond parody. When Brian Cole, Jr., the January 6 pipe-bomber was finally apprehended, and was known as a black male, CNN’s Jake Tapper announced the alleged pipe-bomber to be nonetheless a “white male”—in an effort to ensure social justice trumped reality.

And why for four years of the Biden administration was Cole never identified as the pipe-bomber, despite a reported trove of evidence? Had he been known to be a right-wing white male, would he have been indicted under Biden?

Deterrence is lost—when a third of the population felt that their DEI identities provided some or lots of exemptions from legal consequences. Massive COVID-aid fraud in Minnesota took place under the noses of Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and local and state prosecutors—until the federal attorneys under the Trump administration finally stepped in and started indicting dozens of Somali immigrants for over $1 billion in fraudulent schemes to rob the state.

Have we forgotten what racial essentialism does to a society? Why was the Old South considered poorer than the rest of the country? Because the rule of law was negotiated on the basis of race? Because talent in part was adjudicated by race?

How many scientific breakthroughs were lost to Hitler when he insanely began murdering Jews, the intellectual elite of Germany?

Why were 17,000 illegal aliens, most of them from India, allowed to obtain California driver’s licenses, when the majority were in violation of federal immigration law, often could not speak or read English fluently (and thus not understand traffic signs), and were increasingly involved in smash-ups all over the highways of America?

Did their exemptions from the licensing rules encourage them further from then on to ignore the rules of the road? Was their logic that “if they gave us a commercial trucking license we didn’t deserve, surely they won’t enforce traffic laws when we drive?”

Why were Middle Eastern students—some 300,000 strong on American campuses—allowed to violate university rules of protests and free speech, even as they often practiced violent anti-Semitism?

What would have been the reaction of campus officials had 10,000 right-wing Serbians violated their university’s rules and trashed buildings, sprayed graffiti on classroom walls, or chased Muslim students into the library? Instant expulsion? Immediate deportation?

Do cynicism and nihilism then follow in a society that has no consistent rules but ensures they are fluid depending on tribal affiliations?

But what happens when DEI is applied to airline pilots, air-traffic controllers, and power-plant operators?

If post-George Floyd Stanford dropped the SAT and ranked evaluations on the caliber of the applicant’s high school transcript, limited white male admits to 9% of the incoming 1,900 students, then what followed?

That is, if Stanford, and elite campuses like it, believed that they once deserved global esteem on the basis of the academic caliber of their students (top SAT scores, and 4.0s-plus from the best high schools in the nation), the rigor of the courses offered, and the level of expertise necessary to earn a degree, what followed when that was no longer true?

New gut classes? Yes. Seventy to eighty percent of all grades are now A’s? Yes. Course requirements cut in half to accommodate new challenged students? Yes.

If all yeses, why would a Silicon Valley employer hire a Stanford BA graduate, when a student at nearby San Jose State, albeit no anti-DEI paradise—was more likely to be better educated and less likely to feel privileged? And if Stanford no longer abided by its own rules that it claimed ensured them respect and privilege, then why should it receive respect and privilege?