Our View: Say RIP to racism, injustice and privilege

The national debate over so-called “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies is nothing more than a shell game to institutionalize the opposite. And now, it’s just plain embarrassing how state lawmakers are trampling on civil rights over these three values through shoddy proposals on hiring practices and programs.

Just as you often can’t follow a huckster’s pea under one of three fast-moving shells, Republicans are conveniently twisting language in an attempt to halt decades of efforts that give real chances to people who are not White to participate in the American Dream. In short, they want to take us back to Jim Crow, tenant farming and indentured servitude — not, perhaps, to a master, but to the privileged of today.

Diversity, equity and inclusion are bedrock principles of American freedom, as evidenced in the opening words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But narrow-minded South Carolina leaders are caught up in a national authoritarian fervor that feeds on taking away freedoms, privacy and security from everyday Americans. Like their compadres in Washington, they’re trying to change the frame and language on how we view civil rights.

For a couple of years, they focused on the nebulous “critical race theory” concept in education. But regular people didn’t understand how that was a horrible thing, particularly with the word “theory” in the phrase. So some Washington policy geek flipped a switch and got the GOP lemmings to go after something more concrete — diversity, equity and inclusion.

So now, they’re telling us that trying to infuse the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion — to consider more than White people, to be fair and to include everyone in a search for the best — is bad. But what are they really doing? Demonizing these three very principles to give preferences to people who already are in the system, not those on the edges.

It’s wrong. It’s un-American. It’s a runaway train of distraction that needs to stop.
The issue came up this week in a House hearing on an anti-DEI proviso when S.C. Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg, succinctly noted: “I just don’t understand how there is this automatic assumption — not on your part, but on the part of some of your colleagues — to automatically assume that because one is Black or Brown that he or she must’ve been given something and if one is not of color that they got it on their merit. Help me understand the merit argument.”

The answer is they can’t really explain it without going down the rabbit hole of splitting America into the camps of us and them.

So let’s pose two questions to these anti-DEI fanatics: If you’re not for diversity, equity and inclusion, it follows that you’re for the opposite. Does that mean you’re for racism, injustice and privilege (RIP)? Shouldn’t we really be having a conversation in the public sphere about why 70+ House members want to support bills and provisos that essentially institutionalize (again) racism, injustice and privilege?

These RIP values have no place in the South Carolina Statehouse. They should be tucked away to rest in peace.