Diversity Idiocy Is Rearing Its Head, Looking for Big Money Following Chauvin Verdict

Vicki McKenna is a heretic and radio
personality in Madison, Wisconsin.

Update: Madison West High School principal apologizes for email scheduling racially segregated meetings

Madison, Wisconsin — Diversity consultants look to ramp up their snake oil sales in the wake of important legal victories against racism, especially George Floyd.

Race consultants are making out like bandits sermonizing their fallacious drivel to corporations, police departments, universities, and all manner of education.

Here in Madison, Wisconsin local radio personality Vicki McKenna has had enough.

Vicki McKenna blew the whistle on the Madison Metropolitan School District's politically correct-identity politics tripe in the wake of the verdict against the killer cop Derek Chauvin.

The School District featured Zoom links for "white parents" and for "parents of color," in strict accordance to the ridiculous way liberal dogma describes race and racism.

This idiocy was too much. Writes McKenna:

Jim Crow 2.0, courtesy of the Madison School District. pic.twitter.com/qMKwHu4mMp

— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) April 23, 2021

McKenna is right. Her tweet was picked up by Glenn Greenwald who added his own experience with the separate-by-color, identity politics practice.

For the last (and actually only) diversity session I attended before leaving The Intercept, the highly-paid outside consultant emailed everyone before saying employees would be divided by race into different rooms (white room & POC room) and it was shocking. Now it's standard: https://t.co/0c6YmFMCX0

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2021

Near the start of the session, before we were segregated by race, one employee of mixed race -- one white parent, the other parent Indian-American -- nervously and earnestly asked which room she should go into. This dividing people up this way is going to have long-term impact.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2021

Most of us have had our own experience with diversity consultants.

At one well-meaning company, (though the diversity consultants were cynical), a week-long diversity training seminar feature consultants explaining that we all have biases, a comment on human nature that we are just empty vessels to be filled somehow with prejudices, with no mention how critical reasoning and independent thinking played into who we are.

On the last day, each of the seminar participants confessed to her bias. Some mentioned Italian people, some mentioned black people, and so on.

When it my turn, I announced I had no biases and I was disappointed that everyone had jettisoned rational thinking to adopt bigotries. It's idiocy.

A friend at the company asked how the seminar went and I told her. She said, her admission of people against whom she had a bias was, 'Germans of a certain age."

Diversity consultants are good for a laugh, but this swindle is taking our country by storm.

Matt Taibbi too had a good laugh, but these corporate-consultant hucksters rake in a lot of money from credulous liberals.

Writes Taibbi in his scathing review of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility last year:

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests. ...

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy ('Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness'), which naturally means 'a positive white identity is an impossible goal.'

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except 'strive to be less white.' To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as 'leaving the stress-inducing situation' – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the 'ordeal by water' (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

Greenwald too has been bashing this hokum for years:

The diversity and inclusion consultancy industry is creepy, authoritarian, cultish and toxic, with a painfully cramped and stilted understanding of how people interact with each other and the rules they must obey. There's a reason - several reasons - the corporate world loves it.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 29, 2020

Radical, independent thinkers lead the most recent movement against American racism. 

Let's foster young intellectuals, and not suppress their minds with dogma.