While it certainly hasn’t been done away with, the anti-quality, anti-fairness, and anti-American “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” hustle is taking some hits. This ugly form of tribalism pits men, whites, and the rich (oppressors) against women, blacks, and the poor (the oppressed.) With a language all their own, the DEI-ists have wormed into just about every facet of American life. The government – notably its schools – the military, and corporations have all embraced the sect.

Of late, Jews have been targeted. After the savage attack on innocent Israelis by Hamas butchers on October 7, Jews have been branded as oppressors, and Israel was deemed a “genocidal, settler, colonialist state” in the minds of the DEI tribe. One former DEI official explained that “criticizing Israel and the Jewish people is not only acceptable but praiseworthy” and “if you defend them, you’re actively abetting racist oppression.”

Bari Weiss sums DEI up perfectly, explaining that it is an “ideological movement bent on recategorizing every American not as an individual, but as an avatar of an identity group, his or her behavior prejudged accordingly, setting all of us up in a kind of zero-sum game.”

Ultimately, standards are lowered, personal responsibility is eliminated, quality suffers, and acrimony toward various ethnic groups is sanctioned.

The country’s students have been heavily indoctrinated in DEI, and are directly acting on their brainwashing. For example, earlier this month, students at the exclusive Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) protested school policies relating to DEI, notably listing specific punishments they wanted to be added for “bias incident reports,” including alerting future colleges.

Parents Defending Education released a video in mid-December, which showed a group of robot-like students at an IMSA protest rally chanting their frustrations. Students complained loudly about their preferred names and their pronouns not being used at school, and that “uneducated people” were allowed to work there. The list of student demands includes a “public outline of the possible consequences for students following a bias incident report” and “those consequences must have concrete impacts for the offender,” which include “detentions, removal from leadership positions, suspensions, expulsions, and notification to parents and potential future colleges.”

“You see our pain. You hear our voices. Then do something,” chanting students can be heard in the video.

Clearly, educational quality has been negatively affected as a result of DEI measures. Many states have abandoned high school exit exams as a graduation requirement for their students as standardized tests are becoming passé.

Sadly, policymakers in New York, New Jersey, and Florida – three of the nine states that still require students to pass certain exams to graduate – have introduced measures to make the tests optional or do away with them completely. And Massachusetts is moving in the same direction.

In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson has decided to eliminate the city’s 11 selective public high schools, which use standardized tests to determine student admissions.

But now, there is pushback starting to kick up over DEI, in part due to a Supreme Court decision in June.

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This article was published by the Heartland Institute and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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