The last thing someone being prepped for surgery wants to hear is that the person performing the procedure got into medical school by way of affirmative action.  This also goes for passengers on a jet liner when they're being told about the pilot. Ability is more important than accidents of birth.

As we continue to suffer through today's woke hangover, we are constantly being told that what someone is is much more important than who he is.  Imagine our current vice president.  She checks both the sex and pigmentation boxes...but if ability were an important consideration, we wouldn't even be talking about her.

It is an obvious fact that inner-city youths do poorly on those nasty standardized tests.  But it's not because of their ethnicity.  It is because the educrat monopolies are cheating them...in many ways.  They are being cheated by what George W. Bush called the "soft bigotry of low expectations."  Rather than lower the achievement bar, as they are doing, they should rather double down on, particularly, language skills.  Math and science can come next.

In further pursuit of this dumbing down process, in 1996, the school board of good ol' Oakland, CA proclaimed common street slang to be a formal language — called Ebonics.  Upon hearing this silly news, I jokingly asked my neighbor, who was once a Tuskegee Airman over Korea, if he could explain Ebonics to me.  He told me that his family originally came from Haiti, and that they were likely slave-owners.  Enough said...almost.  The Reverend Jesse Jackson was initially very critical of the board's decision because it was so contrary to educational advancement, but the forces of imposed ignorance got to him, and he changed his mind.

Actually, we already have plenty of diversity.  We are a nation of individuals.  Our inherited ethnic characteristics, however, should have no relevance toward our pursuit of happiness.  But that gets in the way of those who survive by way of political exploitation.  And many of them survive very well.  Just ask Rep. Maxine Waters, who lives in a six-million-dollar mansion way outside her South Central L.A. district.

There are some in the political punditocracy who trace this exploitation back to Nixon's 1968 "southern strategy."  Mossback Southern Democrats were over time replaced by overtly conservative Republicans.  This left the Democrat party under the control of the inner-city (ahem) community organizers, with just a few exceptions.  Also, this process was under way prior to Nixon, but he gave it a serious boost.

Back to the virtues of language proficiency.  It's all about communication, both sending and receiving.  The USA is an English-speaking country.  Folks can still use any language they chose for private, personal communication.  But when it comes to official documents (such as ballots and contracts), they need to be in English.  As it currently stands, people here who are not sufficiently fluent in English are at a severe economic disadvantage.  Not only do they struggle to send and receive communication, but they are not easily trained for work situations as well.

Sadly, there are also way too many native English-speakers who are functionally illiterate.  They still get passed through school in order to prop up the statistics of the afore-mentioned educrat monopoly.  I knew such a person, a high school graduate from Oklahoma.  I was helping him design a flier and asked him what he thought of my prototype.  He stared at it for a bit and then got all sad and blurted out, "I can't read!"  Brings to mind Marlon Brando's most poignant line in Viva Zapata...but that was in Mexico.

Obviously, we're not all Einsteins.  But woke "sensibilities" are encouraging mediocrity, especially among those who could do better if they weren't shamed away from making the effort, or who are just being protected from possibly helpful scrutiny.  We are paying an enormous price.  This pathology is deeply embedded in the culture of the public sector, which includes the political establishment.  And, in this age of Orwellian language manipulation, "diversity" really means "strict orthodoxy" — severe adherence to the dictates of our political masters.

Image: Tom Arthur via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.