Country Killing Multiculturalism and DEI Part 2

July 15th, 2024

By Patrick Hall

Diversity is our strength. Right! Sure! Whatever! Despite what the intellectual betters who run universities dominate mainstream and social media and much of the political class we call the Democratic Party, “diversity is not our strength.”

Unity is! Unity has always been vital to consolidating and nurturing any nation, including ours. There is no cohesion when people are divided into subgroups and forced to 'identify' in their little boxes. Strength comes from people being united in what they have in common and working together.

Last summer, my wife and I flew back to the United States after visiting relatives in Germany. I believe we were flying over Newfoundland or New Brunswick when our plane hit some turbulence, which turned the flight into a bumpy and pitching ride.

The turbulence didn’t last all that long, but I was glad when it ended since I’ve always been somewhat of an anxious flyer. One thing that didn’t cross my mind during the turbulence was whether the pilot or co-pilot was diverse or part one of an officially designated oppressed group. I didn’t care if the pilot was a Black Transgender, nonbinary, female-intersex-two spirit Pan Indian. I only cared or had confidence that they had the skills and experience to fly the plane. Celebrating diversity (or the great cultural mosaic) wasn’t on my cognitive or emotional radar.

There are scores of political and socio-cultural operatives who knowingly work to fracture and turn Americans against Americans. On a macro level, this has been the purview of multicultural, DEI, and CRT secular ecclesiastics. However, the exponential growth and popularity of race, ethnicity, and cultural celebrations have been problematic at the micro-level. Some are benign, while others have metastasized to outright undercutting what it means to be proud of America. We have always had ethnic and cultural celebration days. As a kid who grew up in a mixed Italian and Irish neighborhood, there would be these festivals highlighting Irish or Italian culture. Still, they were also replete with flags of the United States, and many of them began by playing the national anthem.

Even in Calexico, California, over two decades ago, the Mexican American community began its July 4th celebration on a local campus Quad with the playing of the national anthem. Today, you would be hard-pressed to see an American flag, much less the playing of the Anthem, at a Black History, Juneteenth, Kwanzaa, Women's History Month, or Gay/ LGBTQ+ celebration. By the way, Kwanzaa was a completely made-up African Celebration conceived by a Black militant professor in the 1960s.

At the last Juneteenth Celebration, one saw more BLM banners, images of the deified “career criminal-drugged-up-thug” George Floyd, and even LGBTQ+ flags/banners dawning the festivities. The only prominent American flag I saw hung from a nearby municipal building. Now, go get me wrong; there is nothing wrong with acknowledging a “certain” amount of ethnic, gender, or transgender pride. However, being proud of America seems to be taking more of a back seat, if not becoming anathema at Women, Black, LGBTQ+, Latino, and many other diverse gatherings. The anti-United States ethos has become more than benign. It’s deliberately provocative, antithetical, and hostile to outward showing of patriotism or just appreciation for the freedoms and opportunities that have largely defined our Republic.

Of course, there have been times when we have sometimes failed to live up to those beliefs so eloquently expressed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. However, overall, in the 247-year history of this nation, the political, economic, and socio-cultural experiment called the United States has primarily worked for all of us. This is despite those wanting to denigrate the country at every opportunity. Over the past 50 years, the posture of the Cultural Left and Progressive polities has tilted tragically. Like the late Marxist Historians Howard Zinn, Eugene Genovese, and Eric Hobsbawm, they seem to cater to and find faults or shortcomings in the culture and history of our nation. When I see groups like the NAACP, the Black Congressional Caucus, NOW, and a large segment of the LGTBQ+ community constantly complaining or protesting about how bad and unfair America is, I‘m reminded of the phrase from Hamlet. “Me thinks thou doth protest too much.” Many Americans like myself are tired of being told that people from other regions are entitled to be proud of their cultures, but wanting to preserve our own culture is racist.

In retrospect, somewhere along the line, the groups and individuals who have supposedly taken up King’s legacy have, for the most part, completely abolished the spirit or nature of the Civil Rights Movement and love and appreciation for our Republic. Today, the BLM Global Foundation, Antifa, the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, White Fragility acolytes, and other race-gender-obsessed constituencies have taken the nation in the opposite direction. A direction where everything is now about race, gender, or class: beginning primarily in the late 1970s, the push for multiculturalism and diversity took center stage. Focusing on one’s race, ethnicity, and gender became paramount. Later, the antecedents for Critical Race Theory (CRT) were spun, and the black community, as well as many Americans, have pretty much forgotten King’s creed about judging by character and not the ephemerals of race, gender, class, or sexual orientation.

To reiterate, Multiculturalism and DEI have turned out to be little more than tribalism, balkanization, or the new segregation, all dressed up as congeniality. In reality, they are just discriminatory practices that one agrees with. It’s racism and sexism under new management. It is Postmodernist thinking at its worst. It has followed the practice of stuffing the complexities of political science, history, economics, and even the hard sciences into bottles labeled race, gender, and class.

We quickly categorize our fellow Americans as racist, sexist, homophobes, Islamophobes, climate and science deniers, anti-vaccines, transphobic, etc. We have cadres of individuals who believe that America is intrinsically racist and must atone for its terrible history. As noted earlier, these individuals include the first black President, Barrack Hussein Obama. A man who is incapable of seeing the United States outside the blinders of his “systemic racist and anti-colonialist” disposition. ¹
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^{1. See the book., The Roots of Obama Rage by Dinesh D’Souza}

Patrick Hall is a retired University Library Director. He graduated from Canisius College and the University of Washington, earning master’s degrees in religious studies education, Urban Anthropology, and Library and Information Science. Mr. Hall has also completed additional coursework at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University, and St. John Fishers College of Rochester, New York. He has been published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, National Catholic Reporter, Freedom's Journal Magazine, and American Libraries. He has published in peer-reviewed publications, the Journal of Academic Librarianship, and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014, he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.