President Donald Trump is back at the White House, so politics are back at awards shows. Accepting an award for “global impact” at the Grammys over the weekend, singer Alicia Keys alluded to the president’s executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the federal government.
“This is not the time to shut down the diversity of voices,” she said. “We’ve seen, on this stage, talented, hardworking people, from different backgrounds, with different points of view, and it changes the game. DEI is not a threat. It’s a gift. And the more voices, the more powerful the sound.”
Celebrities are busy these days playing defense for DEI and anything conservatives might call “woke.”
In response to the news that Netflix is producing a “fresh take” on the iconic Little House on the Prairie series, commentator Megyn Kelly said what many fans of the 1970s show were thinking: “Netflix, if you woke-ify ‘Little House on the Prairie’ I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project.”
That didn’t go over well with little Laura Ingalls, or rather, the actress who once played her.
“Ummm…watch the original again,” an indignant Melissa Gilbert posted. “TV doesn’t get too much more ‘woke’ than we did. We tackled: racism, addiction, nativism, antisemitism, misogyny, rape, spousal abuse and every other ‘woke ‘ topic you can think of. Thank you very much.”
Keys and Gilbert may play dumb, but people are wising up to the fact that movements such as DEI aren’t as innocent as they sound. And even some Democratic politicians agree.
DEI efforts go “off the beam, to my mind, when they imply that racism, bigotry, and settler colonialism is the unique purview of white people,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) recently told the New Yorker. “You don’t need to imply that all white people are racists and that all white people are oppressors.”
Major corporations such as Google and Target are turning their backs on DEI, and it’s not because they suddenly support racism and misogyny. They’re just responding to the market, as picking employees and vendors based on race, gender, and sexuality just doesn’t have the cachet it held in 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. Today, it frankly sounds discriminatory.
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And what about “wokeness”? Did tackling difficult subjects really put Little House on the Prairie on par with what we would call “woke” today, say, a Netflix show that teaches preschoolers to come out as nonbinary? (Yes, that’s real.) In case you couldn’t tell, the answer is no. Wrestling with the darkness of the human condition and giving viewers something to aspire to really has nothing to do with the type of values progressivism pushes today, from “trans rights” to “abortion rights” to apologizing for living on stolen land.
Sorry, ladies, but the jig is up. The “it’s called being a decent human being” defense for wokeness and its corollaries is over. We know that what’s hiding underneath these buzzwords has nothing to do with human decency and everything to do with the control of language and politics. DEI is about domination, exertion of power, and influence. At least in this instance, it’s time we take a cue from Kelly and make it clear that we’re not playing along.