DEI Is DOA In A Sports Meritocracy. Why Has It Succeeded Everywhere Else?

"When you're a hammer everything looks like a nail.”

Yes, sport may be grown men or women playing children’s games. But the meritocracy of sport also has the power to strip away the unnecessary, the convenient, the trendy in a way no other element in society can. Take the current exposure of Diversity Equity Inclusion (DEI) 

For this we can thank Mark Cuban, the dynamo who owns part of the NBA Dallas Mavericks and is a panelist on NBC’s Shark Tank. In many respects Cuban is a pistol who speaks his mind and is often on the cusp of change. He is distributing $35 million in bonuses to his Mavs employees after selling part of the franchise. In this case, however, his embrace of DEI has exposed the hypocritical nature of progressive radical thought on what used to be called affirmative action.

Cuban was flushed out on the subject of quota hiring by the dramatic fall of Harvard president Claudine Gay whose sketchy scholarship and pandering to the Hamas lefties at her school showed the worst of DEI. (Gay ‘s resumé had only 11 publications and no books, like an associate professor. But her specialty was grievance studies). In the name of inclusion, Gay was thrust beyond her academic merits after more capable candidates were eliminated for nothing more than skin colour or gender. All to placate white liberal guilt.

The idea was she’d grow in the job and Harvard ‘s bonafides would be burnished. Nice try. To most in today’s society, Gay’s ascension came as no surprise. Elite schools and corporations have been furiously hiring minority candidates for some time now lest they be targeted for abuse by the quasi-Marxist mobs online and in the streets. A cursory glance at the Woke casting in TV programming and commercials will reinforce the idea.

Using this specious reason, after the BLM riots post-George Floyd, corporate America went on a hiring spree that produced just six percent white hires.The rationale for pushing candidates beyond their skill sets is now seen as short-term pain for the long-term gain of a rainbow corporate and academic elite. Despite legal judgements finding the exclusion of Asians racist, schools like Harvard believe you have to break a few eggs to get an LGBTQ omelette. The Obama/ Trudeau culture encouraged it.

Which brought Cuban to social media to square the NBA’s position on merit. The league is 77 percent black. Yet no one has suggested anything but merit as a method for greatness. There is no media honeymoon for more whites in the NBA. In the black-dominated NBA and NFL, equal opportunity does not mean equal outcomes. But don’t tell Cuban, who castigated those who made the comparison.

On X Cuban tried to make the case for Harvard or other corporations using DEI to decide hires. Cuban’s point is that opportunity needs a helping hand.  “Treating people equally does not mean treating them the same.  I made the mistake for a lot of years thinking it did.  Equity is a core principle of business.

Put your employees in a position to succeed.  Recognize their differences and play to their strengths where ever possible. It is not a hard concept. But it is not easy to implement.  Most workforces don't have the depth of management to do this well. When it's not done well it can create  tension and resentment.”

Cuban suggests that corporations are missing large segments of the culture unless they unbalance their meritocracies. In essence Cuban is saying that in Woke hiring, the public has to let the illuminati decide according to their political bias, not merit.

Christopher Rufo, the journalist who exposed Gay’s less-than-scintillating academic record, captured Cuban’s DEI flaw. “Mark Cuban needs to think beyond euphemisms. His support of DEI is like hearing about "re-education camps" and thinking: "Great idea. I support education and I love camping. Read your Orwell,.“ Elon Musk was also baffled by Cuban. Elon Musk @elonmusk Jan 8 If mental gymnastics were an Olympic sport, Mark Cuban would be a perfect 10

In her 2018 book The Diversity Delusion, Heather Mac Donald traces the DEI insanity to higher education in the Obama years. “The roots lie in a charged set of ideas that now dominate higher education: that human beings are defined by their skin color, sex, and sexual preference, that discrimination based on those characteristics has been the driving force in Western civilization; and that America remains a profoundly bigoted place, where heterosexual white males continue to deny opportunity to everyone else.

A vast administrative apparatus, the diversity bureaucracy promotes the notion that to be a college student from an ever-growing number of victim groups is to experience daily bigotry from your professors and peers.” 

This DEI apparatus then embedded itself like a tick in the corporate world— and by extension, sports. In August of 2017 we wrote about the CFL’s naive acceptance of Justin Trudeau’s Diversity Delusion. “We have seen the incursion of social issues into sport in the past decade. Leagues have had players wearing pink to support for breast-cancer research. There have been badges demanding No To Racism in soccer for a while now. Teams have also taken to wearing khaki or cammo gear to honour the military.

But pro athletes wearing the political slogans of a ruling government— then denying the political nature of the campaign— seems a whole new frontier. (But) in what-me-worry Canada the Diversity Is Strength campaign doesn’t seem to have bothered many in the lapdog media. Oh, c’mon, it’s just a slogan . What harm could it do? Wake me up when the shirts read Balance The Budget.” 

America’s flirtation with quota hiring is an echo of what happened in India after Independence in the 1970’s and 1980’s. India was above or at least at par with China on a GDP per capita basis. But when they went to a ‘take care of the minorities’ for hiring, the country soon went into an economic tailspin. It is starting to recover as so many of people not qualified to lead are retiring. The India Institute of Technology, India Institute of Math, and India Institute of Science now enroll students based on 100 percent merit.

Make no mistake, the DEI hires aren’t going away. They’ll remain in organizations— even if they fail. Which leaves us with the conclusion that the North American economy may not right itself until the hires of today are retiring.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.