“‘Shocked and dismayed’: Civil rights group blasts DeSantis’ Disney district for eliminating DEI programs” (USA Today):
When announcing that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ district governing Disney World abolished its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, District Administrator Glen Gilzean Jr. name-dropped his previous employer, the Central Florida Urban League.
“Our district will no longer participate in any attempt to divide us by race or advance the notion that we are not created equal,” Gilzean, who is Black, said in the Tuesday announcement. “As the former head of the Central Florida Urban League, a civil rights organization, I can say definitively that our community thrives only when we work together despite our differences.”
But that civil rights organization is an affiliate of the National Urban League, which, in a statement sent to the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida, blasted Gilzean and the decision.
“The National Urban League and our nationwide movement of more than 90 local affiliates are shocked and dismayed by Glen Gilzean’s betrayal of the values at the very core of our mission,” said Marc Morial, its president and CEO, in a statement to the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida.
“His rejection of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion principles is a rejection of the Urban League Movement and the pursuit of racial justice itself,” Morial said. “We vigorously and emphatically reject any implied association with Mr. Gilzean’s current words or actions. His crass political expediency is all the more offensive given his previous vantage point to the harm he knows it will cause.”
The district, which DeSantis now appoints the board of, said its decision came after an internal investigation found its previous leaders “implemented hiring and contracting programs that discriminated against Americans based on gender and race, costing taxpayers millions of dollars.”
The district says “gender and racial quotas” were also given to contractors, which drained it of cash as it looked for complying businesses, which were “aggressively monitored” for their racial and gender practices.
“The so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives were advanced during the tenure of the previous board and they were illegal and simply unAmerican,” Gilzean said.
Race-based college admissions was recently ruled illegal/unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. But the Urban League says that promoting race-based hiring and contracting is the “very core” of its mission.
Separately, here’s Oga’s Cantina in Hollywood Studios, June 19, 2023:
(Not to be confused with Mos Eisley Cantina in Episode IV!)
Related:
- Will Harvard apologize for discriminating based on skin color if this is found unconstitutional? (2022; answer: no! In fact, “Harvard united in resolve in face of Supreme Court’s admissions ruling” says that the university will do its best to continue to sort applicants by skin color; in the same article, the president of Brown says “our values have remained constant” (i.e., they still value something that the Supreme Court says is unconstitutional))
Here we have a civil rights group labeling one of their own former leaders as crass, offensive, and cynically warping his views for political expediency, not because he really believes in them.
If the group would do this to their own former official, just imagine the rhetoric the unleash against someone white and unaffiliated. I think they might blow right past “racist” and into “white supremacist”.
It took over 100 years to return to the race neutrality set forth in the 14th Amendment and that required lots of Supreme Court cases and military force in places like Alabama. The battle this time will be long too but will be fought in places like California and Massachusetts and NY. There will be contention for many years and if the composition of the Supreme Court changes gains can be reversed. The Plessy court essentially vitiated a large part of the 14th Amendment and that injustice took around 60 years to correct. Which means that these sorts of efforts to reinstitute racism will likely continue for a long time.
Certainly the National Urban League will be appalled by any efforts to change the status quo. A slippery slope might endanger the yearly salaries of its president ($1,139,194), its SVP of development ($329,093) and its COO ($291,416):
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131840489
Equity indeed.
The Catholic take on DEI makes use of two papal encyclicals written decades ago. Prof. Edward Feser has a good article about this topic:
https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/01/barron-on-diversity-equity-and-inclusion.html
SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, 2022
Barron on “diversity, equity, and inclusion”
The article begins:
In a recent Word on Fire video, Bishop Robert Barron comments on the currently fashionable chatter about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (or DEI, as they are commonly abbreviated). In much political and cultural debate and institutional policy, these have come to be treated as fundamental and absolute values. Indeed, as Bishop Barron notes, the trio has come to have the status that liberty, equality, and fraternity had for the French revolutionaries. But like the latter notions, DEI rhetoric is not as innocuous as many suppose. As the bishop argues, diversity, equity, and inclusion can have only relative and derivative rather than absolute and fundamental value, and some forms of them are bad.
I’ll summarize Barron’s points and then add some reflections of my own….