Scrolling through my emails I discovered a job posting for a job I would normally decline: DEI Director at American Express. But this time, I decided to apply, and filling out the American Express application was an eye opener.
The base salary for DEI Director "in companies like AMERICAN EXPRESS CO range from $220,153 to $291,813, with the average base salary of $256,703. The total cash compensation, which includes bonuses, and annual incentives, can vary from $243,603 to $359,723, with the average total cash compensation of $292,573," reports a salary research site.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI for short, is everywhere. It has infected both the public and private sector, which are becoming increasingly indistinguishable. From education to culture and entertainment, to law, to retail, to finance, to drugs, to mental health, to businesses big and small, to government, cloying DEI messaging is inescapable. Whether flooding email inboxes, campaigning on public transportation, social media, television, or obligatory seminars and assemblies, it's incessant.
The application contained more of a timid ask rather than a demand for answers, which is apropos for a job based on total fluff. DEI qualifications amount to nothing short of grievances; an internet search yields the following skillset: cultural humility, challenging structural inequalities, and awareness of one's own social identities.
American Express's application asked questions like; do you prefer to work at home, how do you identify, do you wish to submit a resumé (!), and what salary would you like. It sounded like a therapist vetting clients rather than a business looking to stay financially solvent.
"When we announced our $1 billion Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) Action Plan in October of 2020," American Express states on their site, "we sought to build on our foundation of supporting diverse representation and equal opportunities for our colleagues, customers, and communities. As of March 2022, we exceeded $1 billion in spending toward our DE&I Action Plan, ahead of schedule. Building on our progress, we now plan to spend an additional $3 billion toward DE&I initiatives—for an ambition to spend $4 billion in total from late 2020 through the end of 2025. The majority of additional spend will continue to be allocated to underrepresented-owned suppliers."
Based on how things are going for companies married to woke, this doesn't seem like something to brag about.
American Express is just one business committed to DEI. Over two-thirds, 68 percent, of American business owners have a formal diversity, equity and inclusion policy or program. Nearly 60 percent of American businesses provide employee reeducation bootcamps on DEI.
Why?
At a time when the United States is broke and broken, in no small part thanks to DEI initiatives and implementation, American companies spend roughly $8 billion on a paper thin concept showing no empirical proof of making things better. (Perhaps because the qualifications of the job are rooted in misery and limited classical education). Rather, by all metrics, economical, societal, and race relations, things have gotten far worse.
Ohio elementary school children are facing assault charges stemming from a viral video showcasing a group of black students attacking white students and making them say "black lives matter," according to police. Stanford University recently made the news because the Dean of DEI heckled and harassed a conservative judge invited to the law school to speak. CUNY schools have become hostile environments for Jews while hate crimes against Jews in New York City are up 125 percent, and hate crimes against Asians are up 339 percent nationwide. This seems ironic in the wake of all this DEI, but in actuality, it is the only logical outcome.
What the left means by diversity is to shun anyone who isn't white, Asian, Jewish, heterosexual, or conservative. What it means by equity is everyone is entitled to the same outcomes, regardless of effort or work. Merit goes out the window along with standards. Finally, what the left means by inclusion is forcing the majority to accept the minority of fringe identity groups; furries, non binaries, and young love advocates.
Under the Biden administration and Democrat local rule, installing DEI deans, czars, and staff members has become necessary in order to receive funding, awards, and accreditation. In February, 2023 the Biden administration signed an executive order, "mandat[ing] that each government agency create an 'equity team' and also establish a DEI steering committee. The order also established a diversity, equity and inclusion steering committee to hold these teams accountable."
In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams has also rammed through sweeping commitments to DEI. He signed Executive Order 26 and appointed New York City's first Chief Business Diversity Officer, "to make sure that a greater number of city contracts are awarded to minority and women-owned businesses (M/WBE). The mayor also announced that a greater focus will be placed on awarding contracts to certain M/WBE groups, with less of focus placed on allocating M/WBE contracts to businesses owned by white women and Asian men." That definitely sounds equitable, not racist, and diverse, unless, of course, you're a white woman or an Asian man.
Here's the bottom line, because everything comes down to numbers. Biden just proposed a $6.8 trillion dollar "budget" including a 5.2 percent average pay raise for both civilian federal employees and zero cuts to government programs as the country is in economic freefall. The first things that we can and should cut are DEI programs, which have shown time and time again that they only exacerbate the problems they claim to want to solve.
