Xanthippa's Chamberpot

Here is a most excellent rant by a 14-year-old of my acquaintance:

Diversity. It sounds pretty good in theory, right? Lots of cultures and ideas coming together to get the best out of all of them. However, due to each culture’s history, some jobs attract different classes of people more. Office jobs often attract lots of white people, mostly males, basketball has a lot of African-Americans, and so on. That’s ok. People can do what they want. However, some people decided that everyone needs to be so politically correct that they not only avoid using derogatory terms, but actually make sure that they get a certain amount of visible minorities in certain jobs.

Why? That makes about as much sense as going through each box of Smarties and making sure each has an equal number of each coloured Smarty. There’s so much political correctness going around that even if you meant no harm, if you accidentally say something someone somewhere might find offensive, you can get sued for thousands of dollars by people who aren’t even the offended party, and they don’t even give that money to those who are offended.

When you own a corporation, you need to make sure you have at least a certain number of visible minorities working for you, or else the PC police get all up in your jimmies. Let’s say you start a company with lots of computers involved. Let’s say when going through your applications, you hire the best people for the job, ignoring their race. Then when they show up for work, they’re all white males. You now need to look in the applications for the next best application of people who are also visible minorities, even skipping the application of a boring white male who is better qualified. All this so you don’t seem racist to the PC (Politically Correct) police. Do you see the problem? You need to hire people NOT by how qualified they are, but how qualified they are AND their race/gender. That is almost a textbook example of racism or sexism. You need to be a bigot to look like you’re not a bigot!

And this is no small issue; this is a huge problem. You don’t really hear people talking about this in public, and that is because they don’t want to be sued. This is holding back freedom of speech, while taking lots of time and money to ensure people follow regulations. Not many people even know that this is a problem.

So you see, diversity is not always so good. Especially when it’s enforced. In fact, it is counter-productive a lot of the time, and puts a huge metaphorical boulder on everyone’s back. Toss away the boulder, get a back massage, work on your posture, and choose your employees based on skill, not race or gender.