The “Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion” Pox

     The Fortress “cut the cord” a few years ago. As of today, neither the C.S.O. nor I misses what we forsook. We’ve mostly watched Amazon Prime, Acorn, and BritBox when we’ve wanted visual entertainment. But lately the DEI plague has made inroads there as well.

     Among my disappointments with the fare the above streamers have offered us is their ignorance of fundamental facts of history, the better to serve the DEI evangelists and activists. Consider: medieval-level, low-tech societies, historically have been racially uniform. That’s because concentrations of population in such societies almost always originate from a single tribe. When persons from other tribes first appeared in such places, it was usually as slaves.

     But the gatekeepers at Amazon either didn’t know this or were determined to ignore it for the sake of DEI. If you tried to watch Amazon’s Wheel of Time production, or its Rings of Power pseudo-Tolkien abortions, you’ll know what I mean.

     Tolkien knew better. (So did Peter Jackson.) But the DEI hawks never let the mere ruination of a classic fantasy discourage them from their crusade. In doing so, they rendered those fantasies so discordant as to be unwatchable, for me at least.

     The practice is quite deliberate. I’m not just imagining things and neither are you:

     Last fall, ABC unveiled a set of inclusion standards as a path toward more diverse representation both onscreen and behind the scenes on network shows. For onscreen representation, the guidelines called for 50 percent or more of regular and recurring characters to come from underrepresented groups and the same percentage for the actors who play those parts.
     Walt Disney Television chairman of entertainment Dana Walden referenced the standards April 9 during a panel discussion put on by Chapman University and Glamour, and she revealed that the latest crop of pilots received by the network failed to make the grade. “I will tell you for the first time we received some incredibly well-written scripts that did not satisfy our standards in terms of inclusion, and we passed on them,” Walden explained to moderator Janice Min, now a contributing editor at Time and formerly co-president of The Hollywood Reporter.

     But it’s not just the insistence on “inclusion” that has my fingers crackling.

     Yesterday evening, the C.S.O., a fan of James Patterson’s mysteries, insisted that we try Amazon’s new Cross series. Alex Cross is a Washington D.C. detective. All Patterson’s Alex Cross mysteries are set in D.C. And as we know, D.C. isn’t just majority-black; Negroes are close to 90% of the district’s residents. So it follows that the characters in a Cross investigation will be preponderantly Negroes.

     But what’s this? Here’s another pattern that deserves comment. While there is a sprinkling of Caucasian characters in the pilot episode, damn near all of them are villains, toadies, or maliciously racist. That’s definitely not the case for the black characters. Almost all of them are paragons of wisdom and virtue.

     This pattern has become perceptible, even conspicuous, in video productions of every kind. It falls in line with the “whites are evil” litany the Left has promulgated for more than a decade. It sanctifies racialist grifters such as the “Black Lives Matter’ movement. It also manifests in offhand citations of thoroughly debunked “racial” incidents: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, and the rest.

     I’ve said it before: This is how you manufacture racial hostility on a national scale. Nothing good has come of it nor ever will. And we whites who still enjoy a little video entertainment now and then are getting mighty BLEEP!ing sick of it.