DEI Doldrums
The ‘woke’ agenda holds on, despite the very high costs.
If Donald Trump is cracking down on race and gender preferences in Diversity, Equity Inclusion (DEI) programs on campus and in the workplace, Delta Airlines sure hasn’t heard about it.1
At least from the recent trip I took. Why, you’d have thought Joe and Kamala were running the outfit. From the LGBTQ+ posters on the jet ramp to the gender-fluid flight attendants to the in-cabin announcement touting the airline’s new female pilot on board.
Of course, there’s certainly nothing wrong with a woman pilot—unless she was hired because she was one in order to comply with some ‘diversity’ metric. Unfortunately, in the aviation industry these days, you never know.
It wasn’t that long ago when United Airlines proudly proclaimed that “our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes every day. That’s why we plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.”2
Which begs the question, what happens if said 2500 don’t have the most experience and aren’t the most qualified? Are you putting them in the cockpit anyway?
Delta, meanwhile, remains downright defiant, doubling down on DEI just last month. The airline’s executive VP of external affairs said the airline wasn’t bothering to reconsider its DEI programs or, for that matter, its ESG (environmental, social, and governance) policies.3
Nothing like an airline with a gargantuan carbon footprint lecturing its customers on the ‘climate crisis.’
Lots of self-loathing white liberals sold the nation on the virtue of quotas and for a time the peer pressure worked. At least as long as it was relegated to the halls of academia, journalism or even a nauseatingly ‘woke’ NFL.4 But in things that actually matter, no one ever really bought into abandoning meritocracy for the most important workers.
You know, like plumbers—not to mention pilots, surgeons, architects, etc.