Defense of DEI

To the Editor:

It’s interesting to see you tying yourself up like a pretzel over DEI [editorial, 18 Feb.], trying to value diversity, equity, and inclusion, while condemning DEI, a program that attempts to make those values real. Yet you claim that it was perverse to eliminate one small portion of it, a girls-in-engineering event.

Our country has always had a diverse population, which has led to many struggles over our whole history as a nation. After the overtly racist political rhetoric of recent decades, it’s been obvious that we urgently need to have a national conversation about how we treat each other, in a country that started out announcing that all of us are created equal and still claims to stand for “liberty and justice for all.” Instead we’ve had propaganda campaigns trying to deny our history and turn us against groups of people, based on sex and gender, skin color, disabilities, country of origin, and whatever other ways they want to categorize people. One favorite method is to try to convince us that these people are not quite “normal”, automatically lacking the “merit” of us white males.

DEI hiring programs are designed to give members of these “minorities” a fair shake — something I always thought Americans were in favor of. They are based on anti-discrimination laws passed over the last 160 years —laws that have too often been ignored. They recognize that a “meritocracy” that chooses workers from less than half of the population is not only immoral but bound to fail. Fixing that involves changing attitudes on both ends of the process. 

On the hiring end, it means getting those in power to actually “see” the qualifications of all applicants. It does not mean hiring unqualified workers — those selected still have to get thru the standard training and be able to do the job — it means giving them the opportunity to be interviewed and hired. Yet the propagandists want us to think that anyone who doesn’t look like us must be — and remain — unqualified. So, yes, one goal of DEI is to move people away from the kind of thinking expressed so eloquently by the president when commenting on the plane/helicopter crash over the Potomac: If everyone in control of that event is not a white male, then it’s only “common sense” that the crash was caused by “DEI.” It’s so easy to slip into that line of thinking; DEI has been one attempt to help us see thru it. 

But it isn’t enough to expand our view to the whole field of applicants. So the other end of DEI is to encourage “minority” persons to believe that there exist opportunities that make it worth applying or first getting the necessary education. This extends all the way down to engineering-career days for girls or any other group, contrary to your assertions. Such programs are an inherent part of DEI and an effective service in the cause of equity. I agree that the event you cite should not have been canceled — though I don’t know what the presenters would say to the girls under the current regime. It should have been done anyway, as an act of defiance by government workers risking their own jobs to do the right thing for others.

But why should they doubt that cancelling that event is what was expected? Under the Trump/Musk chainsaw approach, their jobs are at risk. Individuals are being fired — regardless of “merit” or how critical their job is — merely because Musk and his crew don’t like DEI — along with so many other important things government does. Some of those affected had no other connection with DEI than taking two days of DEI training required under the first Trump administration. Another worker’s “Be Kind to Everyone” desk-sign was removed as “too woke.” In that chaotic environment, where should anyone have found a clue that one particular part of DEI should be preserved? You can’t really approve of anti-discrimination laws — as you claim in your editorial — if you are opposed to efforts to carry them out.

You and others do our republic no good by casting a vision of “bureaucracy run amok.” And you really go overboard when you escalate to the unfounded assertion that the federal workers who faithfully provide so many of our necessary services, under laws passed by various Congresses, are “liars, frauds, and totalitarians [who] hate America.” It’s puzzling that writing such things didn’t cause you to examine whether those now at the top aren’t the ones who actually exhibit such characteristics. 

Gerald Anderson

Rhinelander