Former President Joe Biden perfectly demonstrated the folly of liberal diversity, equity, and inclusion policies when he hired Karine Jean-Pierre as his White House press secretary.
Jean-Pierre was not fit for the job, everyone admits today. Her promotion to a job for which she was clearly unqualified pokes a hole in many liberal arguments for affirmative action.
DEMOCRATIC ‘FIRING SQUAD’ TOOK OUT BIDEN: KARINE JEAN-PIERRE
One useful contrast is the integration of MLB in the 1940s and early 1950s.
Most Americans believe that race should not play a role in hiring practices. Defenders of affirmative action and proponents of DEI disagree. They offer many arguments as to why their forms of discrimination are OK.
I am actually more receptive to some of these arguments than most people are. For instance, I believe that diversity is valuable in many circumstances. But the diversity argument for race-based hiring doesn’t apply to the job of White House press secretary, for all sorts of reasons.
First of all, there’s just one White House press secretary. By definition, a single position cannot be diverse. Diversity is a defensible goal when one is assembling a committee or team.
Also, diversity matters when you want various perspectives. The White House press secretary isn’t there to share her perspective. She is there to convey the views of the president and his administration.
To defend Jean-Pierre’s hire, Democrats would need another justification.
Democrats often defend race-based hiring as a correction for systemic discrimination. If the system has been discriminating against black spokesmen, or spokeswomen, or spokespeople, then, for the sake of merit, it makes sense to favor black, female, LGBT spokespeople when hiring.
This argument is valid in certain circumstances. Consider Jackie Robinson and the other black baseball players of his era. If you were a baseball general manager in the late 1940s or early 1950s, you would have done well to spend extra energy scouting and recruiting black baseball players.
Why?
Not because black men are better at baseball than white men, but because black men were being discriminated against. That is, the market was inefficient. Other teams were favoring less-qualified white players over more-qualified black players. If you knew nothing about this discrimination, you could tell it was real just by looking at the historical stats.
In his rookie year, Robinson led the Brooklyn Dodgers in home runs, games played, hits, runs scored, doubles, and stolen bases. He won National League Rookie of the Year.
We can expand beyond Robinson. Here is a list of the first 20 black men in the major leagues. It includes eight Hall of Famers, including the greatest player of all time, Willie Mays, plus Don Newcombe, who was the 1950 Rookie of the Year and a four-time All Star, who won the Cy Young and the MVP in 1956.
In other words, the first 20 black major leaguers were, by leaps and bounds, much better than a random group of 20 baseball players from that era. This is what we should expect when the group has been discriminated against — it’s not that being discriminated against or being black made them better, it’s that racism meant these ballplayers had to clear a higher hurdle to get into the majors.
Now look at Jean-Pierre. During the Biden presidency, the liberal media, due to its partisan bias, largely gave her a free pass. They didn’t want to make the Biden White House look bad, and they certainly didn’t want to attack the first black lesbian press secretary.
The media regularly celebrated Jean-Pierre precisely for the identity-politics reasons for which she had been picked. See here, here, here, here, here, and here. It’s confusing, though, because when anybody pointed out that she was hired for her race, sex, and sexual orientation, they got raked over the coals.
After Biden and Jean-Pierre left office, the gloves came off. In her recent book tour, she demonstrated very clearly that she is very bad at communicating facts and arguments through the news media, which was literally the one job she had under Biden.
THE INFIELDERS WHO CHANGED AMERICA
This shouldn’t have been a surprise. Does anyone think that in the world of Democratic staffers in the 2020s, being gay, being black, or being a woman was a strike against you? Isn’t it more likely that the opposite was true? That Democratic politicians bend over backward to demonstrate their progressivity by hiring and promoting black lesbians, especially for public-facing staff jobs?
Jean-Pierre was not Robinson. Robinson was excellent and had been kept out of the majors by discrimination. Jean-Pierre, as her performance showed, was simply not ready for the big leagues.
