I'm sitting here looking at an NBC news poll asking about whether people support or reject the idea of DEI programs and hiring practices in the USA. I am shocked to find that 49 percent of the public think that DEI initiatives in the workplace should be eliminated and are unfair.
"We should eliminate DEI programs because they create divisions and inefficiencies in the workplace by putting too much emphasis on race and other social factors over merit, skills and experience..."
I wouldn't refuse the right for someone to have an opinion, but I feel like this particular opinion is wrong. Yes, we should all work hard to try to get ahead at our jobs. Merit, skill, experience are all valuable traits and are treated as such. I would feel good about deleting these programs if I thought that the white folks in our country had truly integrated to the best of their abilities. Unfortunately with their blind following and devotion to Donald Trump, I have to think that this is not the case. White people still fear the other races...especially white men. I wish I had reasons for why they are still dealing with this fear, but I don't. It's been 160 years since the Civil War, and just under 65 years since the Civil Rights Act was signed. There has been ample time to throw old,
I look back at my upbringing and clearly remember the racist nature of my grandmother. It was nothing for her to use the "N" word to describe someone. Heck, she still had Confederate cash laying around the house, hidden in stacks, even though SHE wasn't old enough to have used the stuff. She raised my step-father, who really seemed to try to get over the prejudiced nature of his mother. While I was growing up, I remember that he had quite a few black men that were good friends of his. His being in the military had given him a very diverse group of people to work with and he was embracing it. It wasn't until he retired that I saw that vicious streak of hatred toward black people (and more virulently with Hispanic people and southern immigrants). He had NEVER dealt with with LGBTQIA+ people...ever, even though he'd been involved in a homosexual situation for a good chunk of his life, along with his marriage to my mother, of course.
One thing truly troubling me is that I see this happening now in Gen-X individuals. We are the result of the first wave of DEI programs. Our schools were required to have a diverse black population, and since I grew up in Las Vegas, we had a sizeable Mexican population as well. We were fine with it! When we were kids, we mixed and formed cliques and included multi-cultural fabric to our lives through our friendships. There were problems sometimes, but overall, we were a fairly tightknit group that were RAISED to get along with each other, and it seemed to be working. Heck...it should have worked.
Now, I see that my generation is reverting to the same things that father and grandmother were doing. You can see it in these polls for one thing. The prejudices are back. My generation are the ones coming into their own right now, and this is the way that people are feeling. My question is why? How did they unlearn all the things that we learned while we were growing up? Why weren't we able to defeat the prejudices of our parents and grandparents?
Maybe it's because I have an Archaeologist/Anthropologists brain, but for the life of me I don't get it. There is nothing to gain from eliminating these programs and everything to lose from pushing the populations of different races further apart from each other. Let's find a way to all get back on the same page again. If you ask your Millennial children, you'll see that they really don't care about race, color, or sexual identity. In many ways they have become more developed than we are. I sure hope that means that a united world is just around the corner, right after this bout of Authoritarianism.
