Domestic Abuse and Diversity: Too Easy to Exploit?

We choose some unfortunate role models. While doctors risk their lives trying to stop a very scary epidemic on the other side of the globe, we are trying to figure out what to make of some scary domestic abuse from sport figures someone decided should be our heroes.

Quick to seek a little attention from the domestic abuse bandwagon, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the NFL that reinforced America’s insistence that being involved in big money professional sports qualifies you to be a role model:

We believe that these high-profile professional leagues are, in many ways, in a position of public trust and should be at the forefront of handling such incidents appropriately.¹

Congress is also in a position of public trust. That hasn’t worked out so well, either.

Domestic abuse and diversity have one thing in common

We know now that domestic abuse is not so offensive that it can’t be made worse by exploiting it with the same kind of spin we see in corporate diversity promotional pieces.

Dealing with diversity is a lot like dealing with football’s new domestic violence problem. Everyone likes to believe in diversity, just like everyone likes to believe domestic abuse is wrong. How do we show it? Corporate websites and brochures feature multi-ethnic, gender equal pictures employees must silently snicker at while sitting through meetings about the importance of diversity to business culture. Diversity is thrust at us, but for liberal America corporate diversity has to be a lie. Otherwise, women and minorities would be making piles of money, white males would be vanishing from the face of the earth, and Democrats would have nothing to whine about.

Here’s the truth. Diversity as corporate America understands it is an ugly joke, phony and damaging. It paints a false picture, like only hiring female consultants to deal with football’s PR problem tricks us into seeing domestic abuse in a different light. Is a woman’s perspective essential to understanding that large, overly strong professional athletes shouldn’t hit people, and that we have a legal system to deal with domestic abuse?

Pushing diversity doesn’t make us color or gender blind any more than making a show of hiring experts who are women makes us more sensitive to black eyes. It only exploits the situation with a PR joke that isn’t very funny.

Diversity at work in the White House

We’ve gone the presidential order route for gender and LGBT equality, minor league gestures for federal contractors that make for major league press releases (see: Is Politicizing Sexual Preference Demeaning?). Barack Obama has been a huge proponent of advancing women:

We need more businesses to make gender diversity a priority when they hire and when they promote. Fewer than five percent of Fortune 500 companies have women at the helm.²

Despite his gender-empowering words, our president has shown a tendency to replace departing female Cabinet heads with men: Jeh Johnson swapped for Janet Napolitano, Thomas Perez for Hilda Solis, and John Kerry for Hillary Clinton. A group picture of the Obama Cabinet would still work for most corporate brochures, though. He’s got the ethnic mix about right and his administration has never been shy about making sure we know it. Consider this press release from the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council:

This morning, Katherine Archuleta was sworn-in as the 10th Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and will serve as the Federal government’s personnel chief. She will be the first Latina to hold this position. Katherine shares President Obama’s vision for diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce, …³

Ask yourself: how many new employee announcements have you heard at work that include a remark about the person’s race?

If we are supposed to be blind to differences, why are color and gender continually being thrust in our faces in a manner that ensures they won’t be ignored? Government endorses, even enforces diversity. Corporate America embraces it, but then government does an about face, points fingers, and tells the country women and minorities are getting the shaft. If they are really getting great jobs in the numbers we see in stock photos and shareholder reports, does that mean Democrats are lying?

As far as professional sports figures are concerned, why do we bother to suspend players for domestic abuse, drug use, or any other bad behavior? Sanitizing football’s image to convince the public that sports heroes are worthy of our money makes us all look like fools, the same kind of fools that would swallow phony stabs at diversity that show us how the country’s liberal social agenda really works.

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