A Test of Your DEI Knowledge
Are you qualified to be a DEI administrator in government, media, industry, or a college admissions office? To find out, take the following test of your knowledge of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Test
Five people are described below. Read the descriptions for each and decide which of the five are eligible to be included in DEI programs. The correct answers follow.
Gennadi Gagulia emigrated from Abkhazia to the US five years ago. Thirty-four-years-old, he lives in a three-room tenement in Paterson, New Jersey, with his wife and baby daughter. He works as a fry cook in a diner.
Akifa Abdalla is a 20-year-old daughter of Sudanese parents who emigrated 28 years ago from Sudan to St. Paul, Minnesota. She is in nursing school, and her parents have a house-cleaning business. They are by no means rich by American standards but are uber-wealthy compared to what they would’ve been in Sudan.
Andy Unanue is the third generation of the wealthy family from the Basque area of Spain that founded the food giant, Goya Foods. He is the current managing partner of a private equity firm in New York City and former chief operating officer of Goya Foods.
Jean McBride is a 34-year-old single mother of five children. She lives in poverty in a double-wide in a hollow of West Virginia. Her Scots-Irish ancestors were tenant farmers and coal miners.
Siddhartha Patel is a straight-A high school student in Odessa, Texas, where his parents own three hotels and are part of the Patel clan that owns many of the independent hotels in America. He wants to attend MIT and major in computer engineering.
Definition of DEI
In deciding which of the foregoing individuals are eligible for DEI, it’s important to know the definition of diversity, equity and inclusion. Unfortunately, DEI aficionados are coy about the definition, because that gives them political cover and keeps them from being sued for discrimination. But the definition can be inferred by what they say and do. To wit:
Diversity, equity and inclusion is an effort to get marginalized and disadvantaged minority groups into positions of authority, influence and high pay, so that America’s organizations and institutions are representative of the population at large, and so that past discrimination, injustice, and oppression inflicted on them by the White majority can be redressed.
The key word is “groups,” because DEI is about group identity and not about individual uniqueness, wherewithal, or rights. Specifically, it is about the seven official groups contrived by the government: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, and Middle Eastern. Hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups are split among these seven, often arbitrarily, without a basis in genetics or anthropology.
Test Answers
Two of the five people are excluded from diversity, equity and inclusion. They are: Gennadi Gagulia, the Abkhazian resident of Paterson who works as a fry cook; and Jean McBride, the impoverished Scots-Irish resident of West Virginia who lives in a double-wide. Although they are marginalized and disadvantaged, and although they are minorities, numerically speaking, they are ineligible for DEI because they are in the White group.
The three others are eligible for the following reasons.
Akifa Abdalla is in the Black group, along with African Americans who are descendants of slaves. This automatically typecasts her as marginalized and disadvantaged. DEI makes no distinction between poor Blacks whose ancestors were slaves in America and Blacks whose ancestors immigrated from Sudan or some other country. Under DEI, the latter are identical to the former in values, beliefs, culture, outlook, and experience.
Andy Unanue is classified as Hispanic, because his ancestors were Spaniards. This automatically typecasts the Goya Foods heir as marginalized and disadvantaged, although he is extremely wealthy. According to DEI, he would be an ideal addition to a major corporation’s board of directors, because he would be seen as representative of all Hispanics, even though he has nothing in common with Mexicans, Columbians, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans, Panamanians, Venezuelans, Brazilians, Argentineans, Bolivians, Peruvians, and so on. Nor does he have anything in common with the hundreds of sub-groups that comprise each of these nationalities.
Siddhartha Patel is classified as Asian, although his ancestors are from the subcontinent of India and not from the continent of Asia. This automatically typecasts him as marginalized and disadvantaged, and thus deserving of extra admission points at MIT—in spite of East Indians ranking at the top in income in the US. East Indians have little in common with the many other unique nationalities and ethnic groups classified as Asian, but in the name of diversity, DEI lumps all of them together, as if they are one and the same.
Your Score
How did you do? Were you correct about the five scenarios and are thus qualified to be a DEI administrator?
I promise not to tell anyone if you are qualified, for it would be insulting and slanderous to be seen as so illogical, contradictory, fallacious, unthinking, and divisive.
