If Apple thinks having a diversity of life experiences and background is important in assembling a good team, fine, but why use skin color, national origin, and sex as a proxy for how people grew up and what they believe?
It’s a rhetorical question, of course. As Charles Cooke accurately notes with regard to a different identitarian uproar, the “endgame” is all that matters, and anyone with intellectual integrity knows this already.
This issue is a perfect example of why I will never call myself a progressive (or liberal, lefty, whatever). First of all, it’s a blatant lie. It’s a lie that people’s thoughts, character and experience can be distilled through their race, gender, or any other trendy sociological marker. It’s a lie that manipulating demographic ratios to achieve “proportional” representation in certain fields will do anything other than (temporarily) salve the consciences of guilt-ridden white progressives. It’s a lie that the injustices of race, gender, etc. will be eventually transcended by redoubling our fanatical obsession with reducing everything to race, gender, etc.
And most of all, it’s not an incidental lie; it’s close to the heart of the entire progressive worldview. The Blue Tribe has irrevocably committed itself to this stance for the foreseeable future.
Denise Smith stated a simple and obvious truth, that white people weren’t all mass-produced on the same suburban assembly line before being programmed with the same mental operating system. Being a black woman, you might think she possesses impeccable intersectional credentials to say something so banal, but identity politics has always been a form of satrapy, where superficial differences are celebrated as long as white progressives are allowed to remain in charge of deciding who qualifies as deserving of their patronizing attention. The entire rotten edifice of identitarianism is threatened by something so anodyne as an obvious truth, so, no, Smith has to be rebuked and offer an apology, and a devout progressive is required to sacrifice hizzorher intellectual integrity to the gods of the progressive polis.
Those devout progressives console themselves for their cowardly acquiescence to a blatant lie by claiming that such sacrifices are necessary to achieve an eventual greater good. Well, it is true that life presents many tragic choices, where we have to think strategically with limited resources and knowledge, but as Orwell noted when confronted with repeated clichés about “no omelettes without broken eggs,” one is entitled to ask where the omelette is at some point.
Unlike Orwell’s dramatic rendering of the choice between truth and lies at the conclusion of 1984, though, where Winston Smith is tortured into believing that two and two make five, the acceptance of this particular progressive lie is comparatively painless. It only requires believing yet another lie, namely, the facile assumption that we are wise enough to predict and control the results of our cowardly compromises. Deals with the devil don’t require threats of punishment to be accepted. They work by flattering our vanity in precisely that way, by convincing us to believe that there is a “right side of history” to be on, one that will make all our lies and compromises worth it.