Why DEI Deserves to Die

DEI is all about getting people hired who wouldn’t make the grade under a merit-based system.

Recently, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has gotten a Twitter AKA X debate going about DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). I’m not going to bother going over his arguments because quite frankly, they’re not very good. Pretty much all he’s done is use rhetorical tricks to dodge the issue, so why spend 500 words explaining how he’s sidestepping the problems with DEI rather than just pointing them out?

Still, we need some kind of definition of what often ends up being a deliberately nebulous term. If you ask liberals what DEI is, you get a lot of non-specific mush about “expanding the hiring pool” and related to the supposed importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, none of which tells you anything about how DEI is applied. In the real world, DEI tends to be just left-wing anti-white rhetoric mixed with quotas for the number of non-white males hired, which is, of course, de facto discrimination against white males.

Some people would claim that’s not true, but it obviously is.

If you don’t understand why, since Cuban owns an NBA team, let’s use that as a way to explain things.

First of all, “in 2020, the NBA was 74.2% black and 16.9% white.” Perhaps ironically, the very article those statistics are taken from is questioning why Cuban’s Dallas Mavericks have had so many white players on their roster (either 3 or 4, which would constitute 25% and 33% of the roster respectively).

However, given that 75.5% of the American population is white, white players are dramatically underrepresented in the NBA.

So, what if we applied the sort of DEI rules many companies do to the NBA on behalf of white players? What if teams all started with the premise that they needed at least 9 white players on their roster to match the population levels in the country at large? What would happen in that case?

By default, the number of black players in the league would have to drop significantly if the percentage of white players went from 16.9% to 75%. Furthermore, the quality of play would also undoubtedly deteriorate because lots of white players who currently can’t make a merit-based NBA would have to be hired to meet the quotas. People would also assume that all the black players in the NBA deserved to make it, but many people would also correctly assume that a lot of the low and mid-level white players wouldn’t even be in the NBA if it was merit-based.

In other words, what does DEI produce?

Discrimination. Decreased performance. Less respect for the people the program is ostensibly supposed to help. That last one may seem to be the least important, but if you’re a high-performing, well-qualified woman or black man, DEI is not good for you. For example, in an old interview, Clarence Thomas discussed the negative way Affirmative Action impacted him:

“When I was at Yale, I got along fine. I had friends. The professors were great. I took a lot of very demanding courses — and, again, it was the seminary all over again. Here’s this challenge,” he says. “But (then) all my achievements were collapsed, or actually discounted... “The assumption was that you only have that because you’re black, and it’s not as good as the white kids,” Thomas says. “And that would be, again, one of the things that would happen when I was nominated to the Court — that I couldn’t possibly be as good as the white Yale graduates, because I obviously went to Yale because of the color of my skin. So everything was discounted.

“And I always find it fascinating that people who claim, well, you did this because you went to Yale, all these good things happened because you went to Yale,” Thomas says. “I couldn’t get a job out of Yale Law School.”

Thomas came to believe whites assumed he wasn’t as smart as his white Yale classmates, and when he couldn’t get a job when he was graduating, he saw that as proof: Because he was black, he says, people believed his degree was not as good as a white student’s degree. He saw no “benefit” from affirmative action.

Most people assume that women and minorities hired under DEI are not as talented, qualified, or deserving as white males, and guess what? They’re probably right. If the best people were being hired, it would be a merit-based system and DEI wouldn’t be needed. DEI is all about getting people hired who couldn’t make the grade under a merit-based system. That’s highly unfair if you’re someone like Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, or Thomas Sowell who doesn’t need DEI to make it because it puts a question mark beside your achievements that shouldn’t be there.

Many liberals also simply discount the idea that it’s wrong to discriminate against white males. However, that’s the same kind of thinking the KKK and Nazi Party engages in. The only difference between them on this subject is which groups they want to discriminate against:

At the end of the day, it’s either about merit or it isn’t. It’s exactly as logically and morally permissible to discriminate against people, no matter what their race, religion, or gender happens to be. That’s even enshrined in the 14^th Amendment of the Constitution for government entities, and it has been a foundational principle of how Americans view their society for at least fifty years.

Do liberals want to create a world where everyone feels comfortable discriminating against people based on their race and gender? Because that is the logic of DEI, and you can’t discriminate against white people forever without many of them eventually deciding that they’re being fools if they don’t return the favor. That hasn’t happened yet, but eventually, it will if DEI continues to spread.

Additionally, in some professions or places, the promotion of mediocrity by DEI may not seem like a big deal, but if you’re talking about doctors, surgeons, scientists, and soldiers, do you want the best or do you want diversity hires? No matter what the race or gender of a person may be in a merit-based system, you know they earned a spot.

In a DEI-based system, you should have serious questions about how good the people you’re working with really are if they’re not white males. That’s because in a DEI system, a white male has to be as good as, if not significantly better than the average applicant just to get hired. Personally, I don’t like the idea of having a doctor operating on me or a pilot flying the plane I’m riding in who only got his job because of a quota.

Do you want to load the military up with all the trans weirdos and pronoun people you can find while giving woke lectures on white supremacy? Well, then what happens when the straight white males figure out they’re at a disadvantage in the military because of their skin color? They’re going to stop signing up. We already see it happening:

The US Army has seen a dramatic drop in the number of white recruits, according to a study.

Last year, according to the Military.com website, the army fell 10,000 short of its 65,000-enlistment target.

Underpinning the drop is a dramatic decrease in white recruits from 44,042 in 2018 to 25,070 in 2023, representing a six percent reduction in just one year.

It meant that the proportion of white recruits fell from 56.4 percent in 2018 to 44 percent.

DEI creates a toxic racial environment, promotes mediocrity over merit, and even robs many of the most deserving women and minorities of the respect and acknowledgment they deserve for their accomplishments. That’s why we should focus on merit as a society and let DEI die a well-deserved death.

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