The College Fix

OPINION: ‘DEI’ suddenly is a pejorative despite liberals clamoring about its greatness

Now that the 2024 presidential race finally appears set, it’s time for the Left and its lapdog media to go all out for Kamala Harris by virtually any means necessary.

We’ve already seen memory holing of the July 13 attempted assassination of the GOP presidential candidate, not to mention social media’s renewed efforts at censorship. And now that Harris is all but officially the Democratic nominee, the stops are fully unplugged to make her as, er, palatable as possible.

One of the things progressives have to counter is criticism of Harris for being a “DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) pick.” Oddly, the Left lectures us about what a great thing DEI is, yet saying “DEI pick” is suddenly a pejorative.

Murray State Professor Brian Clardy even went so far as to say the GOP was taking off its “hoods and white sheets” by referring to Harris as a “DEI hire.”

In 2020 Joe Biden even noted he would choose a woman as his running mate, and likely a black woman (and was pressured to do just that), so why are conservatives and Republicans getting heat for calling Harris a “DEI pick”? (We know why, of course … anything critical theory-related has no logical consistency, after all.)

Naturally, only someone in the insulated womb of academia could be so myopic as to use her two-decade-long existence in that womb to explain why DEI is not discrimination and really is a terrific thing … and ultimately, somehow, will catapult Harris over the top in November.

So enter San José State University’s Megan Thiele, a sociology professor whose current research includes “ask[ing] about how dialoguing and collective talk can help inform, care for and motivate people to strategize action about climate destabilization, social justice and sustainability.” (She’s also inspired by legislators Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush, and activist Adrienne Maree Brown.)

The very fact that no one wants to be called a DEI hire shows how insidious and foolish DEI is and proves that everyone knows it, even if they pretend otherwise. There are only two real options. Either your race and gender define you and decisions should be made based on those…

— Leonydus Johnson (leave/me/alone) (@LeonydusJohnson) August 1, 2024

In a recent Kansas City Star op-ed, Thiele, who seems unhappy that “white man” JD Vance is against affirmative action, says that as a fledgling college educator she “felt anxiety discussing race.”

Nevetheless, she “tackled” her fear by “gathering information” via organizing reading groups and joining white faculty-only “anti-racist” professional developments.

MORE: Of course Harvard’s president is a diversity hire

Thiele eventually created her own “Anti-Racism and Racial Literacy Dialogue Sessions” so that her fellow Caucasians could “address [their] fragility and lack of racial literacy.”

For her, Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream wasn’t that

[…] white America would rather be anti-woke than wake up to things such as implicit bias and structural and racist violence; that white people would prefer to embrace explicit racist culture and decry anti-whiteness than change their actions to organize around social equity; that white supremacy would appear as aloof colorblindness.

“We either understand that society is systematically racist,” Thiele says, “or we live as though people of color are deserving of ongoing and disproportionate dehumanization.”

Does this sound like Thiele (pictured) is really interested in a discussion and dialogue? And how many alleged “anti-racist” seminars and workshops use terms like “dialogues” and “conversations,” etc, yet include nothing but lectures?

I’m in the know — I experienced this numerous times in my teaching career, and The College Fix archives are full of similar tales.

No wonder Thiele discovered that white guys were most likely to skip her anti-racism sessions. Proclaiming “critical whiteness does not call for people to feel white guilt, nor is it anti-white people” is not going to convince anyone with even the slightest ability to use logic that it’s true.

And it certainly isn’t going to play for VP Harris in blue-collar middle America.

MORE: New U. Arizona DEI course requirement hit with criticism: ‘academically unserious’

IMAGES: Dmitry Demidovich/Shutterstock.com; San José State

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