Joe Biden, Black Women and “Diversity”

President Biden’s recent insistence that his Supreme Court nominee will be a black female fails under the slightest bit of scrutiny.

There are many reasons people are turned off by the mainstream left (e.g., people like Biden). But its intellectually shallow and highly divisive acts on matters of “diversity” must surely top the list.

What’s meant by “diversity”?

We already have women on the Supreme Court. There’s also someone who’s black on the Court.^[1]Since the left is obsessed with quotas, Clarence Thomas, as one of nine Justices, means blacks make up 11% of the Court. Adding another black would push black representation to 22%, well above the … Continue reading One hopes more of each will fill the Court.

But if the objective for Biden is diversity why not nominate a person of Vietnamese or Greek or Pakistani or Japanese descent? Why not someone who identifies as gay or Eastern Orthodox or Muslim or even atheist?

One thing we all need to do is stop conflating diversity with adding black people. Black people should receive no more preferential treatment at Hollywood casting calls or for governmental nominations than countless other categorized (and purportedly under-represented) groups of people.

Saying simply that a person’s skin color definitively connects them to “400 years of slavery” and its attendant sufferings is not only disingenuous it’s intellectually lazy and highly dismissive of (to use a favorite term) their “lived experience”—not to mention those of others.

Common sense comes calling

You see, people want common sense. They respect it and when it’s given to them they feel respected. They likewise detest a lack of it.

In the eyes of millions, Mr. Biden—capitulating to the left’s obsession with diversity, which has become an absurdity—has shown an utter lack of it.

Biden is unabashedly pandering. But to whom? Woke America or black America?^[2]These are after all two very different things. On many issues, from school choice to defunding the police, individual black Americans are more conservative than the guilt-laden woke who believe they … Continue reading If it’s the latter and he wants a court that’s truly “representative” of that America, as liberals want people to believe, then the nominee can’t be liberal but will have to be moderate.

Every so often a politician engages in an act judgment so poor that it reveals a great deal about their character. It renders them untrustworthy on crucial matters.

For Bill Clinton such judgment was a pathology. Mayor Bloomberg did it in 2004 when he showed greater concern for the grass in Central Park than people’s right to protest the Iraq War. Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump have all spoken clearly through their actions. And now so has Boris Johnson.

Each politician in the process gave people a clear reason not to vote for them. With missteps like this Biden may be adding himself to that list.