The Problem with DEI

An answer to a letter...

A reader wrote me the following:

The right makes a big stink about policies that support DEI, in their twisted view of it. They tell us that race and gender shouldn't matter; that people should be selected for positions of responsibility based solely on merit, and not demographics. They've gone so far as to attack it with a crude AI sledgehammer written by teenagers that, without the slightest consideration of context, rewrote government documents to ban words like "race" "woman," "Black" (but not "White"), and to deliberately remove awards and acknowledgments to women and people of color for their service from the halls of government. That doesn't improve anyone's life or solve any future problems; it's just a shameless exhibition of bigotry.

So focusing on the gender of the pilots, rather than their experience, or their skills, or their courage in the face of adversity, seems a wee bit hypocritical, does it not? Especially when your words betrayed a thinly veiled assumption that male pilots are naturally more capable than females.

Well, first off, no one capitalizes “White.” That is equity in practice, a way to remind white people that they must always defer. So you are not required to capitalize “white.”

Why do I care? I’ll tell you a story. When I finally graduated from college at 29 and headed to Columbia University Graduate Film Program, I wanted to be a director because I’d won a writing award at UCLA. I chose Columbia because Kathryn Bigelow had gone there. To my mind, she was a great director and a woman, so I thought, if she can do that, so can I.

But Bigelow wasn’t well known because she was a woman. She was well known because she was (and presumably still is) a talented filmmaker.

In subsequent years, after I dropped out and built my website to track Oscar nominees and winners, I noticed that filmmaking, directing especially, was populated by white men—99%, let’s say. No woman had ever won, no Black director had ever won (and still hasn’t, Bigelow won in 2009 and is still the only woman who has won both Picture and Director), and precious few had even been nominated.

So I spent many years on my website advocating for non-white filmmakers and women, hoping to shake the tree. But I never thought Hollywood would change the way it did, nor did I think America would change the way it did after 2020, the “Great Awokening.”

Now, in Hollywood, it doesn’t matter if a person is good or not. All that matters is that they are the right decoration for the people who really run Hollywood and the world (white men, essentially).

If it’s all done to protect those at the top who want to be seen as “good people doing good things,” no real achievement is happening. And worse, it puts pressure on people who didn’t get there from hard work, or talent. Sooner or later, it catches up with those they’ve chosen to use as their protective shields.

A great example of this is Kamala Harris. She was ushered through as the female Barack Obama. She’s good-looking and charismatic, but she was never tested because her story was too good.

She ran on her identity mostly, and this was an era where people were looking for the first female to rise and perhaps one day become president. It all caught up with her when she took the debate stage against Tulsi Gabbard. That was probably the first time anyone had tested Kamala Harris.

Didn’t matter, Biden chose her anyway for exactly the wrong reasons - because he vowed to pick a “Black woman.” She seemed to struggle in the role of Vice President, but that didn’t matter because no one in the mainstream media would ever point out how bad Biden’s choice had been, even though they knew he was old and she was next in line.

You know the rest of the story. DEI is a problem because it rewards minority groups in the short run but cheats them in the long run. An award or a mission handed to you to make white people feel better about themselves is not an achievement.

I never wanted anyone to give me any success I did not earn. For the first five years I ran my website, no one even knew I was a woman. I didn’t want them to know. I’m not naive enough to believe that being a woman doesn’t mean people judge you, and I’m not denying the history of women being shut out of industries or told they can’t do things because they are women.

But that doesn’t mean I want to be lied to or lied about. All of these years later, I will get companies asking me if I have a “climate pledge” on my site, or if I am “minority-owned.” That’s supposed to single me out now, because I am “woman-owned.” All that does is erase my hard work for 25 years to build, quite frankly, the best Oscars site online. That achievement didn’t come because I was a woman. If anything, I had to compete harder because I was a woman.

I’m not bragging — I’m just stating facts. There is no Oscars site online that was or will ever be as good as the one I built. It is a sad and pitiful claim to fame. I’ll grant you that — like, who cares? But still, my gender had nothing to do with it.

All I see in Hollywood now are pats on the head for mediocre movies by women. Scarlet Johansson or Kristen Stewart directs a movie, and everyone says, “Good job!” Greta Gerwig makes a half-way passable film, and everyone praises it to the high heavens. All I can think is that they don’t believe women can make great movies, and this is the best they can do.

A scene in Martin Scorsese’s short film Life Lessons illustrates this. Roseanna Arquette plays the muse to Nick Nolte’s genius painter. She wants to be a great painter, but isn’t anywhere near great. Who will tell her? If he tells her, she will leave him. But she forces it out of him.

Well, he finally does. I always think about this scene when I think about DEI. Lying to people that they are better than they are robs them of their achievement.

One of the reasons Hollywood can’t make movies anymore is that they can’t tell the truth about almost anything anymore. Like the Democrats, they must go along with the lies we tell ourselves that it was only racism and sexism that held minorities back, and if we can dismantle the white male patriarchy, everything will be great.

Not only does that rob the designated minority groups of their achievement, but it also discourages achievement, effort, or hard work from those who are now judged only for being white men. This country was not built that way.

Hope that answers it.