I was on a group call tonight — maybe 20 people — and one of the participants said (quite seriously) that the event she recently sponsored was “very diverse” because all the speakers were women. Most of the attendees obediently nodded their heads as if this was good and profound.
It takes 0.01 seconds for anyone with an operational brain to realize that “diversity” has come to mean something entirely unrelated to the English word diversity.
Real “diversity” would mean that the speakers were different on several levels of analysis. Age, race, sex, national origin, …. It would be easy to come up with 20 categories, and it would not be hard to come up with 100.
But the word has come to mean something entirely different. Now it means something like “anybody but white males.”
If you had all black speakers, that would be “diverse.” If you had all lesbian speakers, that would be “diverse.”
But if you had all white male speakers — who were different in 20 other categories — that would not be “diverse.”
This is the kind of idiotic nonsense you have to believe to join the cult of woke.
Oddly enough I was just thinking about this the other day. The firm I work for has its own “diversity, inclusion, and equity” (DIE) program and we were discussing it at a meeting. A surprising number of us were willing to say we thought we should hire the best candidate, which sounded pretty radical in these strange times.
I think I hear “diversity” used in at least three ways today. (1) In the sense of the opposite of uniformity, i.e. having a sizeable variance; (2) in the sense of being representative of or capturing the variance of a reference group (diversity in the sense of “looks like our country”, i.e. most subcategories are populated); and (3) diverse as an individual property in the sense of character points, like a kind of RPG. You get points based on race (elf, dwarf, dryad) and class (cleric, wizard, rogue, etc.) and the points are generally assigned based on increasing distance from us straight white males, who start at about -50. By looking at the admission score “adjustment” factors at top universities you can get a sense for elite opinion about how many points different groups get, although this can vary depending on context.
(Eventually there aren’t going to be enough of us negative-scoring SWM left to blame for everything, but I think that’ll just increase the estimates of our nefarious powers. After all, who likes to admit the people he burned weren’t actually witches?)
But do you ever hear the word “diversity” used in sense 1 or 2 when paired with “equity and inclusion”?
Sense #1 no, sense #2 yes, especially over the last year.
You don’t get a racial get-of-woke-jail free card just by having all women on your board, for example.