Another week, another case of a woke figure imposing PC lunacy, another rage storm.
Another fizzle, another memory-holing of the story — and another absence of consequences.
And the woke monster lives to fight another day.
This time the issue is a DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) “hit list” circulated at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (JHM) in Baltimore. As GB News wrote on the story late last week:
John Hopkins Hospital’s chief diversity officer Sherita Hill Golden uploaded an update which described “diversity” as the word of the month.
It said: “Privilege is a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group.
“Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels, and it provides advantages and favours to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of other groups.”
The Maryland-based hospital identified white people, able-bodied people, heterosexuals, cisgender people, males, Christians, middle or owning-class people, middle-aged people and English-speaking people as being privileged.
It added: “Privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it.
“People in dominant groups often believe they have earned the privileges they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them.
“In fact, privileges are unearned and are granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent” [relevant tweet below].
The irony of this coming from Golden, a black woman in a high position, did not escape man-on-the-street observers. “What is sad is that this woman is utterly blind to the fact of how much MORE privilege she has than almost everyone else,” wrote MSN commenter “Sam son.”
Striking a passionate note, respondent Leo B didn’t mince words. “Privilege is [h]aving a society so stupid,” he stated, “that they ‘invent’ executive positions for people who don’t have to actually account for anything beyond using their minimal useless talents to make up ‘words of the month’ and tell people that they should feel guilty and repent for the poor behavior and culture of others.”
(By the way, “Some universities pay their DEI executives as much as $430,000 per year,” a source recently pointed out.)
Actually, put simply and succinctly, privilege is this: Distributing a thoroughly divisive, bigoted message, essentially saying “Oops!” and then being able to stay in your ivory tower position of power.
Yes, that’s precisely what has happened with Golden.
Unlike disgraced ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay (who also still enjoys a cushy job), Golden issued an apology without taking on a victim role. It still, however, was contrition boilerplate, with Golden calling the original message “overly simplistic and poorly worded.”
Actually, the wording was spot-on accurate DEI theology through and through.
JHM leadership also issued an “Oops!” saying that the message “included a definition of privilege that runs counter to the values of our institution.” Really? Were this true, would they have a “Chief Diversity Officer” and an “Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Health Equity” in the first place? The apologies are below.
One man who might agree with eliminating such positions and offices is billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Exasperated with the with DEIty worship, he said of the JHM bigotry, “This must end!”
But it won’t — anytime soon — and part of the reason why was expressed by an X user responding to the apologies.
“It’s not enough to retract the privilege list,” remarked commenter Carl Gottlieb. “You must part ways with the racist who created it.”
Harsh? Well, why do we so often hear that people fear expressing politically incorrect sentiments — even politically incorrect truths? This list of figures canceled for transgressing against wokeness (apologies didn’t save them, either) reflects why.
The Left plays to win.
“But we’re not like the Left,” some “nice guy” conservatives will say. No, we’re not.
They’re effective.
No bad behavior is eliminated absent consequences for it (ergo, our shoplifting phenomenon), and, as someone once put it, “Stigmas are the corollaries of values.” Insofar as you value something — honesty, industriousness, perversion, decadence, virtue or vice, etc. — you’ll unavoidably devalue its opposite. All civilizations have their values, too, and hence their stigmas; it’s just a question of what they’ll be.
And when a society stigmatizes opposition to wokeness (evil) far more than imposition of it, it means that “good” people haven’t done their job.
It’s true, of course, that assuring proper consequences is difficult when the culture shapers — media, academia, entertainment, and Big Tech — are against you. But a good start is understanding how culture wars are won (and lost).
Reviewing socialist Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is instructive here, and especially apropos is his Rule 13. To wit:
“Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.”
When people fear being woke for the same reason they now fear being un-woke — because they know it can mean scorn, ostracism, and career and reputational destruction — the insanity will end. Not a moment sooner.
You don’t win wars, cold or hot or cultural, by allowing an adversary to fire a salvo, apologize, and then collect his shrapnel and return to the lines. You win wars by taking the enemy off the field and out of the action.
