"Because I have good sense."

     Sorry I didn't have a column in the newspaper Friday. Black people are to blame.
     Oh, did I say that out loud? Whoops. It's supposed to be unvoiced. I should have just pointed out that the newspaper has a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion effort, and let your imagination fill in the rest. 
     I need to work on the above if I hope to mimic the exact note of bone-deep yet tacit racism that President Donald Trump revelled in Thursday when discussing the tragic helicopter/plane collision over the Potomac, veering from his falsely pious evocation of thoughts and prayers for the victims, before he dove into his baseless accusations that the two Ds — Democrats and diversity — are to blame for the crash. Sixty-seven people died, and his minute of silence was followed by half an hour of baseless calumny. It would be shocking if we, you know, hadn't lost our capacity for shock years ago.
     Pressed how he could say that when the investigation of the crash has just begun, the President of the United States replied:
     "Because I have common sense.”
     Good old common sense. No need to spell it out, but let's try. You just know that Black people aren't as skilled as white. You just know that trans soldiers degrade the military. You know that Jews are greedy, Muslims terrorists, and immigrants, criminals and parasites. You know people with disabilities can't do a good job at anything other than bagging groceries. No proof is necessary, and any contrary evidence is merely dismissed. Water off a duck's behind.
     The sad thing — well, one of the many sad things — is there are valid reasons to be critical of DEI. I actually am a member of the DEI council at the paper, When I applied, I did so out of the exquisite sensitivity and devotion to fairness at which I excel.
     "Better to be inside the tent pissing out," I told my wife, "than outside the tent pissing in."
     The language I used applying to the program was more honeyed.
     "While I am not a member of any of the groups that are typically considered under the umbrella of diversity, I've always had a sensitivity to such groups, particularly the LGBTQ community," I wrote. "The paper has always been very supportive — I wrote the first (and to this day, really the only mainstream newspaper look) at the Chicago transgender community in 1992. I'm just now completing a look at how the Sun-Times covered race over the past 75 years, and while it was subject to the limitations and prejudices of its times, all told the paper has always led rather than followed."
     You'll notice I didn't say I'm Jewish. Jews, though certainly a traditionally oppressed group, have somehow lost our minority card. In part, I believe, because we tend to be white, and people buy the slurs against us. Why should the George Soros-funded octopus straddling the world, flailing its grasping tentacles, need a helping hand? DEI is about supporting worthy outcasts, not solidifying Shylock's grasp on his pound of flesh.
     Despite this, my argument worked. Or maybe they just admitted everyone who applied. Either way, I was accepted, and attended the occasional meetings. Which put me in a position to notice Trump tearing out DEI programs root and branch from the federal government with more than the usual perspective of Americans alarmed seeing their institutions re-calibrated to suit the whims of a bigot and would-be demagogue.
     Calling such programs "“radical and wasteful" Trump ordered all DEI-related employees to be put on paid leave by 5 p.m. his first Wednesday in office, in advance of being fired. Concern that any employee address inclusiveness in the workplace was so extreme the order warned against trying to shield such unworthies, demanding that agency heads quiz their underlings whether they “know of any efforts to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.”
     I actually agree with that first assertion. DEI programs are radical in the sense that for the majority of American history, organizations would merely bar employment of disfavored groups. There is no risk of untermenschen proving their worth if you never let them even try. When Chicago hosted the World Columbian Exposition in 1893, Ida B. Wells picketed the fair, where a Black could not be hired a janitor. In the 1920s, colleges struggled to not admit "too many" Jews, so as not to corrupt their student bodies, the way they fret over the proportions of Asian students today.
     The Republican war against DEI is based on the premise that civil rights is over, the minorities won, that white Christians are the besieged community, and the situation must be set right by prying the fingers of these lesser folk from the ledge of acceptability. The thinking is: You can eat at the lunch counter at Woolworth's. So shut up already. The fact that Woolworth's is long gone is not a consideration.
     And true, such efforts create winners and losers. And sometimes it seems that DEI is swapping one unfair system for another. All of that could be discussed, if the current administration were not deploying DEI as a kind of modern shorthand for an old racial slur.

     Any valid complaint regarding DEI melts away when Trump is thundering that all such programs "divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.”
     Actually, it is the president who is dividing Americans by race — or rather, sticking a crowbar into the division and prying back and forth, widening the chasm.
     Everyone harbors prejudice. Everyone exhibits discrimination of one sort or another at certain times and places— I wish we could grind that into people's heads. What I remember most distinctly from the first DEI meeting is this: I had vowed to just listen, to keep my yap closed — shutting up is an art form I struggle to master. But at one point "microaggressions" — small slights too minor to constitute discrimination but yet sting — were brought up.
     "Older employees don't know what a microaggression is," someone said.
     "Which itself is a microaggression!' I blurted out.
     I'd like to say my point was made, my colleagues nodding, wiser thanks to my insight. But it wasn't. Old people, like Jews, are scorned so automatically nobody even considers it prejudice. And so the work continues.

     In closing, I should point out that efforts at racial inclusion really did keep me from writing a column Friday. Because I worked a long day on the Martin Luther King Day holiday, rather than relax and contemplate our nation's progress, I asked to take a day off later on, rather than take extra holiday pay. My boss kindly reminded me I had that day off coming, so I took Friday. An outside observer might be forgiven for believing that this was entirely my doing — the decision to work, and to take time off. But that just means they're blind to the hidden hand of DEI machinations at work in our country today. DEI means nothing is ever your fault.  There will be not a mistake made in the next four years that our monster president cannot lay at its feet.