Things must be made unequal to compensate for America’s inherent “racism,” states Critical Race Theory. The organizers of the Cinder Block Comedy Festival (CBCF) in New York City are taking this principle to heart — and are expanding on it. They’re charging an increased submissions fee for only one group: white men. And there’s more.
Until March 15, it’ll be “No white males need apply.”
The festival, taking place September 15-18 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is limiting early-bird-submission opportunities (February 15- March 14) to women, non-whites, and those “identifying” as “LGBT”; in addition, members of these groups can apply at the discounted rate of $19.25. Submissions from what festival organizers call “token bearded white dudes” will only be accepted between March 15 and April 15, and they will have to pay $25.
The organizers claim to be doing this because, as they put it in a website video, “We think comedy shows should be as diverse as f***.” The New American has not been able to ascertain precisely what degree of diversity that descriptive denotes; however, it doesn’t appear the Cinder Block folks (whom we’ll affectionately dub “Blockheads”) believe it should apply to comedy-show organizers. They stated right before making their above pronouncement, “We are a group of women in NYC,” and, sure, enough, all of the 20 organizers are female. Moreover, only three are black — 15 percent — in a borough (Brooklyn) that’s 34 percent black; perhaps none were Hispanic, despite that group’s constituting 19.6 percent of Brooklyn; there were no Asians; and there was not one primordial dwarf among them.
The video goes on to state, “Having a token LGBTQ, person of color, woman, in a sea of white bearded men is not diversity. As an audience you deserve more than one point of view.” Point of view? Isn’t comedy about humor? Of course, it is true that everything people do reflects/projects values of some kind. But, then, is it the case that only a given group can express certain points of view?
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The interesting thing about points of view, though, is that they become especially disparate when people don’t have the facts. For example, the Blockheads arrived at the odd $19.25 non-white-male CBCF submission fee by calculating 77 percent of the regular fee, reflecting the alleged male/female wage gap in the United States. As the Daily Dot reported, citing festival director Coree Spencer, “‘The 77 cents to the dollar is definitely a political statement. Originally that 77-cent discount was supposed to be just for women in the early stages,’ Spencer said. ‘As I was doing a little more research and kind of growing as a human being, I realized that that discount should be extended out to other groups that I want to be part of it [in order] to create the festival that I want.’”
Yet Spencer’s research couldn’t have been very thorough. Had it been, she would have learned that women’s lower wages aren’t due to unfair discrimination but rather the different lifestyle choices the sexes make; for example, on average and relative to men, women choose less lucrative fields (e.g., soft sciences, not hard ones), work fewer hours, are more likely to decline promotions, have less job experience, and are more apt to prioritize job fulfillment over salary when selecting positions. In fact, when these factors are accounted for, women often make more than men do for the same work.
This is why it’s not surprising that while Barack Obama loves to complain about the intersex wage gap, he himself pays male staffers more than female ones. Then there’s the woman who wants his job, Hillary Clinton, who also plays the race and sex card — her six top staffers are white men.
This is par for the liberal course. Members of academia, the media, and Hollywood are notorious for trumpeting “equality,” quotas, diversity, affirmative action, and “white privilege.” Yet whites and males are “overrepresented” — sometimes tremendously so — in those arenas. As for the Blockheads, prejudice clearly would’ve precluded them from including white males among their directors. But what’s their excuse for not finding proportional numbers of minorities? And if “diversity” eludes even those claiming it’s a great virtue, why should it surprise anyone that proportional representation would be absent elsewhere?
It would be easy to play the tit-for-tat game and call the Blockheads and other leftists “racists.” But we should instead accept a simple truth: As Dr. Walter Williams wrote in 2011, there “is absolutely no evidence that statistical proportionality is the norm [in man’s endeavors and experiences] anywhere on Earth.” Williams then provided some examples:
Jewish Americans are less than 3 percent of our population and only two-tenths of 1 percent of the world’s population. Yet between 1901 and 2010, Jews were 35 percent of American Nobel Laureate winners and 22 percent of the world’s.
… Asians routinely get the highest scores on the math portion of the SAT while blacks get the lowest. Men … are struck by lightning six times as often as women.
… During the 1960s, the Chinese minority in Malaysia received more university degrees than the Malay majority — including 400 engineering degrees compared with four for the Malays, even though Malays dominate the country politically. In Brazil’s state of São Paulo, more than two-thirds of the potatoes and 90 percent of the tomatoes produced were produced by people of Japanese ancestry.
Nor should proportionality be the norm. “Our strength lies in our diversity” is mere modernistic mantra, an entirely unproven proposition. The NBA is almost 75-percent black and 100-percent male. Would it be better if it were 62-percent white (congruent with the non-Hispanic white U.S. population) and 50-percent female? Would the world be better if 50 percent of beauty-parlor customers were male? How about daycare workers being 50-percent male and military special forces 50-percent female? What about if women constituted 50 percent of work-related deaths, 93 percent of which currently involve men?
The last example points to how this diversity agenda actually is driven by prejudice — in that only politically incorrect group “imbalances” are noticed. There recently was a controversy over Hollywood actors being paid more than actresses, but hardly a word is said about how top female fashion models can earn 10 times as much as their male counterparts, with women in that field making considerably more overall. The media complain about how most NFL owners, coaches, and managers are white, but why isn’t this proportionality imperative applied to the players, who are more than 70 percent non-white? And Title IX applications dictate that the percentage of female athletes in a college must reflect its student body, which today is on average 57 percent female. Yet given that academics is more important than sports, why are 57 percent of undergraduates female in the first place? Shouldn’t this be equalized in the name of proportionality and diversity?
The reality is that Equality™ has always been a con, used largely as a pretext to undermine tradition. This is why screams of “Equality of opportunity” can so easily give way to drum-beating for diversity and the new Principal of the Day, “Equality through inequality.”
