Diversity Thursday

One of the things we like to do on DivThu is to give those who believe that people should be seen as individuals who deserve to be judged by the content of their character, not by immutable characteristics people are born with and can do nothing about some facts to push back against the emotion laden DEI commissariat diktat thrown at them on a regular basis.

One of the auto-generated comments we hear so often extruding from the diversity nomenklatura is that something – especially our officer corps – must “look like America” and that exceptional efforts must be made to force-mode such results.

Is this even possible without actions no one would be proud of? Probably not.

The big-lie here is in 2022 that somehow the US military in general, and the US Navy in particular, is racist at both an institutional level and at an individual level. This accusation is not shocking, really, as this is the exact world view of the public intellectual that CNO Gilday expended so much personal and institutional capital promoting and defending, Ibram X. Kendi.

The commissariat don’t like to acknowledge the fact that the US military’s intake is society’s outflow valve when it produces an ~18-year old young adult for enlistment or, after college, an officer program.

The various segments of our society do not have the same results in various objective criteria for success. Any brief review of the data shows this, but the commissariat insists on only looking at their specific claims and freeze them in aspic without any vulnerability to examination or question. 

Another supporting lie to the main effort is, naturally, a word game. When it comes to the word “diversity” they will throw up a smoke screen embedded with clouds of chaff that they value “diversity of viewpoints” and “diversity of perspectives” etc when we all fully know that those metrics are not tracked, are not measured, and unquestionably are not briefed. 

As we’ve discussed on previous Thursdays, that means one of two things: 1) They are gaslighting you; 2) They believe in racial determinism with regards to how the human brain works. One should insult you, the other should be recognized for what it is – a racist view of humans that belongs in an early 20th Century eugenics book. Neither is acceptable, and I’ll let you decide which sounds right to you.

Thanks to our friends in the FAO community we have an opportunity to show how simple it is to destroy the gaslighting and lies of the diversity industry.

Let’s dive in to see what spot of bother they are picking at today.

The emphasis there is theirs, not mine – but that fits the pattern.

The entering problem is that they assume on Day-1 of the military’s opportunity to intake new people, that objective criteria are all the same for each self-described sectarian groups. The reality is they are not, and I’m going to give you a brief example. The reasons are multi-causal and are well beyond the ability of the military to control. 18-yr olds show up as they are.

Specifically, we are going to look at officer numbers in, as best one can do during a coffee break, the specific metrics they choose to track. We are going to look at one simple variable of objective criteria which is required to be even considered for an officer program; you have to have earned a college degree.

NB: this is simply an opening argument exercise. There are a lot of nuances to this variable that can adjust the numbers a few percentages here and there. Not all institutions are the same or are looked at the same. Not everyone has the same GPA. Not every degree is as desirable to the Navy as another. Performance in one objective area does not necessarily get reflected in another … but they are objective criteria. Having a college degree is just one variable but is arguably one of the most significant and rigid ones. It, like the others, has significant differences in results based on sectarian divisions of race and ethnicity that the Navy’s branch of the diversity industry likes to track in order to justify its job.

As per the above and the fact that these data sets are not all from the same year (each year can be a percentage point or two from another), these are not the perfect numbers – but they are good numbers. I would put a +/- 5% margin of error if you held a gun to me.

I believe the spreadsheet is self-explanatory, but let me kickstart if for you.

Let’s assume you have a population of 18-yr olds we would like to be officers. In order to make the smaller numbers work as we run through results, let’s say that population is 400. I make no difference here in male and female, just on the racial and ethnic sectarian lines the Navy does, and this population of 400 exactly matches the racial and ethnic makeup of the USA.

Our single objective criteria we’re going to run is college graduation. I almost used 4-years, but that would make the differences even more stark. Instead, I would used 6-years as many NROTC, OCS, and USNA athletes take more than 4 years to graduate. It rounds the numbers a bit. 

Take a look.

So, tell me what you see here that screams that the Navy suffers from institutional racism? This is only one variable. There are others which make it clear there are other reasons - especially when done under a proper regression analysis - for differences.

The US military and its Navy is one of the least racist places not just in the USA, but in the world. This is something we - and our senior leadership - should be proud of and defend at an institutional level. We live it, we know it. And yet, we accept the worst smears from the worst people for reasons best understood by those whose spirit is broken or have soaked in DC’s swamps too long.

Never forget this is a zero-sum game when it comes to selection and promotion. There are only so may places, so to give to one person you must take from another. Fair minded people will accept this if they see the system as fair based on objective criteria. When the system is seen as worm-ridden with favoritism and corruption, it destroys the entire performance of the system. That is why we got rid of segregation and race-based assignments in the middle of the 20th Century.

We are better than this. Our new Sailors – officer and enlisted born in the middle of the first decade of the 21st Century deserve an inheritance better than this.

The commissariat defines an excess of a minority group in an area as “more diverse” – a positive. The other side of that coin is that if the majority group in an area is in excess, then that is “problematic” – a negative.

That is a rather blatant position of favoring one racial group over another simply for their self-identified status. One sectarian group is favored, another is regretted. We should talk clearly with each other on this topic and call this was it is – official, sanctioned bigotry. 

To add insult, it is all based on a view of Americans that is retrograde in the extreme. A much higher percentage of people listed with that not even 20th but 19th Century “one drop rule” view as one specific race who are that glorious American mixture of the best of this or that. Each year more and more people are biracial or multiracial … yet our system has incentives and disincentives for them to force to choose one group or another. Forced division and strife. Who can support that?

The almost farcical “Hispanic” category that means nothing anywhere else in the world is also sloppy. We know of people whose parents were from Germany who immigrated to Puerto Rico but were raised in CONUS calling themselves “Hispanic,” while I know people whose parents were from Spain with Spanish last names who classify themselves as “white.” We all know people who exercise a graduate level of racial self-identification fraud. 

All these bring these numbers being used to make life altering decisions in to question. If you really need to move this or that group up or down 10% … are you really?

What are you doing besides corrupting a system and the nation it serves, all the while sowing the seeds of division and strife?

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Data sources: 

- governing.com 

- insidehighered.com

- americanprogress.org

- research.com

- nces.ed.gov and again