Fight the Bad Fight

You have to admire someone who takes a moral stand.

We’re talking about people who battle against injustice and refuse to back down. We’re talking about Gandhi, King, and the Dali Lama.

We’re talking about privileged white guys upset about diversity, and…

Hold on. What are talking about again?

Well, it seems that a political group, headed by that slimy xenophobe who slithered around the White House during the Trump years, is trolling corporations in an effort to destroy all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

The group is “morally opposed to diversity” and accuses many firms of “being unlawfully woke.” So they are harassing companies and trying to persuade them to return to the good old days when ethnic minorities wouldn't even get job interviews.

This sounds like a horrible joke, but as conservatives have reminded us time after time, they have no sense of humor and view every evolution in American culture since 1950 as a deathly serious threat to the nation.

So they are out there, protesting any attempt to acknowledge that racism still exists.

And it’s not just this one ineffectual group.

In our favorite state, Florida, the Disney “governing district — whose current board was hand-picked by DeSantis and took control of the district in February — abolished all of its diversity, equity and inclusion programs,” stating that these initiatives “were illegal and simply un-American.”

Yes, these guys are standing up for American values. See what I said about taking a moral stand?

But maybe these principled warriors are unaware of studies that show “if racial economic gaps for Black Americans alone had been closed 20 years ago, gross domestic product (GDP) in the United States would have grown by an estimated $16 trillion.”

Wow—if America weren’t so invested in maintaining the racist status quo, we would all be a lot better off, economically.

These studies also show that if we had more DEI programs, and if they had succeeded in closing the racial gap for Blacks just five years ago, GDP would have grown by $5 trillion, “which includes an additional $13 trillion in business revenue and 6.1 million jobs created per year.”

Again, those studies didn’t even include Latinos, Middle Easterners, and other ethnic minorities, so the total loss to our economy is likely even higher.

Crunching the numbers, DEI actually seems like a good thing for companies to invest in, assuming that they want to make a buck and not flounder just to appease a bunch of belligerent bigots.

In fact, other studies show that “diversity in a workplace plays an important role when it comes to testing an AI product,” which as we all know, is the wave of the future (or a planet killer—opinions vary).

Research implies that current AI models are prone to outputting racist images and text. However, there are many “clear examples of how diversity within the workforce can improve the efficiency of testing to prevent racial bias in AI,” making a better product and improving the efficiency of cutting-edge technology.

But apparently, all of that is immoral.