The Left gets in high dudgeon every time someone calls Vice President Kamala Harris a diversity, equity, and inclusion hire. Joe Scarborough, whose morning show on MSNBC sets the agenda for the wokeati, railed that it was racist—right before his guest, Katty Kay, called former President Donald Trump “old, white, and male.” 

But none of these truths should offend supporters of either candidate.

Trump is 78, white, and famously male.

As for Harris, if she or anyone else has a problem with her being associated with DEI, they should take it up with President Joe Biden himself. It was Biden, after all, who, when he was first casting about for a running mate, said he wanted a woman of color.

“Whomever I pick, preferably it will be someone who was of color and/or a different gender, but I’m not making that commitment until I know that the person I’m dealing with I can completely and thoroughly trust as authentic and on the same page,” he said in 2019. 

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By “a different gender,” Biden presumably meant a woman, though given the deep commitment of his entire administration to extreme gender ideology, one can never be sure.

After choosing Harris as his running mate in 2020, Biden said that “little black and brown girls who so often feel overlooked and undervalued in their communities” would welcome his pick.

This is the heart of DEI—choosing people because of their race, ethnicity, or sex, and thinking that we are a tribal nation in which we should identify with “people who look like us” rather than any of our compatriots, no matter their national origin or sex.

This, of course, ignores the fact that most U.S. citizens are “Heinz 57” Americans, sharing many different ancestries, which is one reason why DNA services such as Ancestry.com are in such high demand.

Harris herself is a compendium of different races and origins. Her father, Donald J. Harris, is a Jamaican of mixed European and African ancestry. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a Tamil Brahmin who hailed from India’s Tamil Nadu state.

The two are also many other things that are much more important than their skin hew. Donald Harris is a highly regarded economist partly influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx and has admitted that his ancestors owned slaves. The late Dr. Shyamala Gopalan was a biomedical scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Nobody, in other words, looks like Kamala Harris, nor was she a marginalized minority suffering from want.

But such is the poverty of the ideas of DEI that our vice president is constantly spoken of as “the first African American” this, or the “first Asian” that. 

One must say that in this obsession with race, the far Left and the far Right approximate each other and form a perfectly united Venn diagram, as race and national provenance are also the first things that some addled minds on the Right think about.

By saying that he was looking for a woman of color to be his running mate, Biden did Harris no favor, as most of the public believes that people should be hired and promoted on the strength of their ability, character, and grit. 

Harris may indeed have been hired on the strengths of those attributes, but what we got from Biden was that he was looking for race, sex, and ideological compatibility.

The president’s shortsighted hiring criteria also helped determine his one nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, since when he looked around for someone to nominate he said he was looking for a black woman as a candidate.

It is indeed obnoxious to assume or call any member of a minority a “DEI hire.” That is why my colleague Jonathan Butcher and I defended Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott in the Chicago Tribune in April against people who were calling him that. “Whoever said so understands neither diversity, equity, and inclusion nor the ballot box. Scott was elected,” we wrote.

But Biden specifically said that, when choosing both Harris and Jackson, he had narrowed his aperture to race and sex. 

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Harris, moreover, is a huge supporter of DEI—especially its most troubling part, equity. She has made it very clear that she thinks that equity is the functional equivalent of equality. Under equity, Harris has said, the government and the private sector should treat people differently solely because of their race. In doing that, Harris has signed up for the most insidious aspects of DEI.

If you’re going to live by these rules and think they are legitimate and fair, then at least admit it openly. “I am the perfect affirmative action baby,” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in the 1990s. “My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale.”

Former Cabinet member Julian Castro says the same. He told the New York Times in 2010 that he “got into Stanford because of affirmative action. … I scored 1210 on my SATs, which was lower than the median matriculating student.”

Some of us may wince at these assertions. Some of us feel deep pride in who we are, in our family, in our ancestors, and what we are trying to build for generations to come, and we want our successes to be the result of the sweat of our brow. That is why we want to build a society that allows and rewards merit. 

But if you believe the government should hand out privileges because of race or sex, then it is better to be like Sotomayor and Castro and be up-front about it. Shills such as Scarborough and Kay are making fatuous claims.