Of Melanin and Merit
Many years ago, in a hellhole far, far away, I lived the life of a young single man in Southern California. One day, a news story appeared recounting a disagreement between two neighbors. The first man installed solar panels on the roof of his home but, after several years, a tree on his neighbor’s yard had grown to such heights (as per nature’s plan) that it inevitably cast a shadow across the first man’s very expensive solar panels.
Grievance Cage Match
And there we had it, a cage match for the ages in the Californian Utopia of Tree Huggers and Sun Worshippers. Two competing favored groups pitted against each other in the most predictable conflict ever. I think Tina Turner said it best when she said,
“Two self-righteous liberal buffoons enter, one self-righteous liberal buffoon leaves”
And the best part was that it didn’t matter who came out victorious in this rumble in the suburban jungle; the spectacle was enough for me. I was blessed to witness the rare infighting of competing tyrannies (Trees versus Climate) whose motives I both despise. Whose was the greater cause? Let’s watch!
Affirmative Action, Deactivated
Fast forward 25 years and the United States Supreme Court recently ruled that colleges can no longer use race as a metric when determining college admissions. As you might imagine, the Left has gone absolutely apoplectic (do they have any other emotion but outrage?) about this infringement on their ability to create “special rights” and favored demographics.
In fact, Leftists have declared that blacks and other persons of various non-white shades will never be able to compete on a fair playing field, so inferior do these ‘progressives’ believe them to be. Never mind hard work. Never mind sacrifice. Never mind accomplishment. For Liberals, their ‘little brown brothers’ will ALWAYS be ‘lesser than.’ Wow, racist much?
The Left’s solution, as we know, is to always ignore merit and reward melanin. Competence simply does not enter into their calculus for personal advancement and success. And just like the competition between the tree hugger and the sun worshiper that forced a choice between competing tyrannies, the Left decided long ago to also rank races; how positively Hitlerian of them.
But what those on the Left likely don’t realize is that their obsession with the phrenology of race contains within it a hidden logical gotcha: if a special category is the only metric to judge a person (for a job or college acceptance) and that person fails, does this not logically indicate that the special category in fact predicts failure and not success? It used to be that grades were used to rank students for admission into their colleges because past performance predicts future performance and the intent was to foster future success.
A New Premise Established
Case in Point: “President” Joe Biden famously chose Karine Jean-Pierre to be his press secretary specifically because she was a black, gay woman. KJP, hitting the trifecta of grievance categories, by their perverted algorithm, should be the most qualified person on the planet next to Whoopi Goldberg.
In a similar decision, “President” Joe Biden famously limited ‘his’ choices for Vice President to only women of color when he was rumored to be “campaigning” for President in 2020
According to our current “leader,” the fact that these two candidates were non-white, women and gay made them uniquely qualified for their positions. OK. Fine. Let’s run this premise all the way out to the end, shall we?
Question: What happens when people chosen based only by their grievance category utterly FAIL in their job?
Take VPOTUS, for example. Because Harris was chosen specifically for her grievance categories and it turns out that she is an unmitigated disaster, doesn’t Biden’s metric of blackness and woman-ness actually predict failure and not success?
Similarly, because KJP was chosen specifically because she was gay, black and a woman to be President Magoo’s spokesman (a truly impossible job to begin with) and she fails in that position on a daily basis, doesn’t this then logically indicate that we should conclude that black, gay women are inherently unqualified for that position?
If the premise established by our enemies indicate that blackness, gayness, or woman-ness (if only they could define a woman…) is the only metric for qualification, and the person fails utterly, then should we ever choose a person who is gay, black or a woman for anything ever again?
Consider: if we take our ‘dear leader’ at his word and take his premise seriously, then logically we must either:
- Come to grips with the unavoidable evidence that grievance categories are a predictor for failure and we should avoid choosing these categories of people for anything OR
- We come to grips with the idea that color, sex, sexuality and other grievance categories are not a predictor of anything and MUST be thrown out completely.
And this is exactly what the SCOTUS has determined, much to the consternation of groups and organizations who have grifted on this fallacy for decades. Entire sectors of our economy have grown up to service this lie, and we are only now coming out of our dark haze of false qualifications and lowered standards for artificially favored groups.
Now understand, I am not saying that gay people, blacks or women cannot or should not hold these positions. I am merely taking the premise established by the Left seriously and deconstructing it. Remember, Biden’s string-pullers specifically and vocally limited their choices for VPOTUS to women of color and not the most qualified. We now see the results of this choice to all our shared horror.
The Good News
If we realize that these aspects of a person’s artificial grievance categories are absolutely immaterial to any job then we must find our metrics and predictors for success elsewhere. And we already know what those are! Simply stated, the best predictor for success we have is simple competence.
Once we begin to focus on that, we will inexorably create a country that is truly firing on all its cylinders and become, once again, the Engine of the World. We will have a population of people striving to actively improve themselves to make themselves worthy of their aspirations and goals and not merely rely on the lottery the grievance category du jour.
Am I worthy of my goals?
Think of it this way: Considering how utterly helpless we all are when flying in an airliner, think on this: Next time you must travel, do you want the blackest, gayest, woman-est pilot possible? Or do you want simply the most qualified? I’ll leave this to you to ponder.
Personally, I look forward to the far-off day when our children’s children are forced to look up the term ‘diversity hire’ in some future dictionary, so alien a concept it will be to them. I only wish I could be there when they read this term’s definition. I’m sure they will chuckle quietly to themselves and ask, “What? They really DID that?”
Sincerely,
R. Altomare
Founder, BreathEasy
A