Opinion | We were never serious about racial equality

In hindsight, maybe all of us should have known that the brief period of racial justice that America experienced in the months after George Floyd’s murder was all crap. 

Maybe we should have seen it for what it was – a bunch of white people jumping on a trend because it momentarily made them feel good and a bunch of wealthy corporations using the momentary national guilt to perform peak capitalism. 

Because that’s all it was. 

Less than five years after the breathless selfie videos of A-list actors and the slow-music, heart-string TV ads produced for every company from Target to Netflix told us all about the racial problems in the U.S. – and about how we all had a responsibility to do our part to end them – those same companies a step away from producing “All Lives Matter” ads and those celebs aren’t uttering a peep. 

Which, honestly, is about right for America. Four hundred-plus years of racial oppression. Four years of kinda, sorta feeling bad about it. And then right back to pretending that white people are somehow the victims for even acknowledging that we did some bad stuff. 

And all it took was one really, really racist white dude with no shame, and an administration that’s hell bent on eradicating anything resembling racial equality, to end it all. 

The most recent organization to suddenly find itself not so sure about this whole diversity, inclusion and equity thing is the White House Correspondents Association, which announced last week that it was backing out of its contract with comedian Amber Ruffin – a known Trump critic and a Black woman (double whammy) – and is instead “going a different direction.” 

That’s right, even the damn media is bailing. 

For racists, this is a glorious time. What could be better for them than watching a white supremacist administration systematically eliminate civil rights divisions of government agencies, tear apart diversity programs, forbid agencies from implementing equity programs and strip away any mention of Black accomplishments in the military, government and American history. Trump most recently went after the Smithsonian for daring to still feature exhibits honoring Black history that noted the very real racism that has dominated American culture over the years. 

And no one – not a solitary soul, outside of maybe Apple and Costco – is pushing back. 

Walmart ended its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and also eliminated a program in which it ensured minority vendors were properly represented. Target did something similar. So did Boeing. And Chipotle. And Ford. And John Deere. And Tractor Supply. And Harley Davidson. 

All of those companies are suddenly supportive of uniformity, inequality and exclusion. I mean, that has to be the case if you’re ending your company’s “DEI” programs, right? If you don’t want diversity, equity and inclusion in your company, I’m going to assume that you want the opposite. 

The shift in attitudes nationally has, of course, emboldened states like Alabama, which has a long history of requiring forced decency from the federal government to honor that whole “all men are equal” thing. We’ve got an AG threatening to sue Costco for refusing to be racist and a state legislature that’s proposed so many anti-Hispanic bills that they accidentally copied the Fugitive Slave Act.

I truly hope that most Black people in the country didn’t fall for this ruse, and I suspect that several generations of watching us white folks work led to a healthy distrust. I hope they knew that most white people meant they were for equality only insofar as it meant they weren’t inconvenienced and would still never lose a job to an equally qualified Black person. 

Because, you know, that’s all that those DEI programs actually did – ensure that equally qualified minorities were offered opportunities. Pretty much every DEI program, including almost all of the ones eliminated by major retailers, contained exceptions to hiring quotas for unqualified candidates. Those programs only required store managers to make more efforts to hire minority candidates and maintain a diverse workforce – which, of course, best serves America’s diverse customer base. 

It’s pretty easy to see the result of failing to do that. You need only to look at the Trump administration, which is stacked floor to ceiling with unqualified white goobers who are only in their positions because they had the right friends and lacked a moral compass. So, you end up with war plans texted out to a journalist, the accidental firing of all the nuclear weapons workers, the accidental firing of the scientists trying to stop the spread of bird flu, a whole bunch of planes crashing and disease outbreaks because your HHS head couldn’t pass a middle school biology class. 

It must be endlessly infuriating to watch less qualified people continually slide by you, and then have the nerve to preach to you about boot-strap work ethic. And it must be twice as painful to see the entire country acknowledge those generational injustices and promise to fix them, only to completely and utterly abandon such notions four years later, while simultaneously whining that they were somehow wronged by the miniscule corrective actions. 

My only hope is that by now you’ve learned not to trust most of us white people and you never got your hopes up to begin with.