The Federal Aviation Administration recently faced intense backlash after its “diversity and inclusion” recruitment efforts surfaced online.
Among the many demographics the FAA is currently recruiting, the organization actively seeks people with severe physical and mental disabilities to join its ranks.
“Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” the FAA says. “They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”
At first glance, the FAA’s new diversity initiative seems absolutely deranged. However, anyone who has attended a university or worked in a corporate setting in the past few years likely would not be surprised. Diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology has engulfed virtually every major institution of American society, tossing aside qualifications and merit in favor of so-called “equity.”
Diversity initiatives are nothing new. They have been a cornerstone of the corporate world since the conclusion of the Civil Rights Movement, an effort to help black Americans gain access to institutions that historically excluded them. These initiatives, which were initially exclusive to blacks, quickly expanded to include other supposedly oppressed groups, such as Native Americans and Latinos.
Though one can argue these initiatives may have been well-intentioned, it is clear that they ended up empowering groups to cash in on grievances — whether justified or imagined. For instance, the second-generation offspring of two wealthy Nigerian American corporate executives benefits from the same diversity hiring initiatives as a poor slavery descendant living in rural Mississippi. The narrow definition of “diversity” in these initiatives makes them easily corrupted by people who share superficial commonalities with the intended class but ultimately do not share much in common with them at all.
Americans were always uneasy about giving certain preferred groups advantages in competitive arenas such as hiring and university admissions to remedy the past. How can a society fix discrimination by actively discriminating?
A June 2023 Pew Research Center poll confirmed that Americans are largely divided on DEI efforts in the workplace. Fifty-eight percent of respondents indicated support for efforts to increase diversity and inclusion in the workplace. However, only 32% of respondents agreed that racial diversity is “extremely or very important” in their workplace. A plurality, 38%, answered that diversity is “not too/not at all important.”
These results suggest that though Americans support diversity as a broad ideal, they do not view it as a priority in a workplace setting.
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Furthermore, more “benign” forms of affirmation, such as outreach efforts, have been replaced by hard quotas. In 2021, United Airlines faced backlash over setting a goal of enrolling a pilot-training class composed of 50% women and minorities.
As the mounting backlash against DEI continues, will institutions continue the quest for equal outcomes, even at the expense of becoming less safe and competent? Is it worth making Americans more suspicious and resentful of each other?
Corey Walker is a Washington, D.C.-based reporter who focuses on institutional capture, education, and public safety.