Frederick Douglass would recognize every argument of DEI.

“We are better. You are inferior. We will think for you.”

I recently received an email from the Texas Public Policy Foundation decrying DEI as being anti-American. By all appearances TPPF is a good organization that does good work in Texas, but like many mainstream organizations they are afraid to speak the blunt truth about evil. While they are not alone in their refusal to face the reality of what DEI is, Monday morning’s email epitomized this blindness. Recognizing evil and calling it what it is has become embarrassing. No one wants to be mean; no one wants to lower the discourse.

And so we get statements like this, criticism in name only, that strive so hard to be reasonable that they forget what they are criticizing:

What to know: Chris Rufo, writing in City Journal, reports that the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Communication promotes the idea that “objectivity,” “individualism,” and “worship of the written word” were all “characteristics of white supremacy culture.”

The TPPF take: What is “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI), really?

“The bedrock belief of DEI is that racism is not an individual act of evil, it is a structural system, geared toward preserving white supremacy,” says TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester.

This is bullshit. The bedrock of DEI is that racism is right and that the racists of the past were right to segregate minorities and manage their affairs for them. They’re not even trying to hide it.

Anyone who claims that objectivity is white, that individualism is white, that literacy is white, that we need separate spaces by color for official accommodations, is not only profoundly racist, they are the same kind of racist as the slaveholders who preached that blacks could not reason as men could, that blacks must be managed as any herd animal, that blacks should not be taught to read because reading is beyond their capacity.

DEI is pure, old-school racism. It isn’t racism in pretty words or obfuscated language. Frederick Douglass would have immediately recognized the racism in DEI. He cherished the ability to read as the beginning of freedom and the end of slavery. He knew that the denigration of reason was the foundation of slavery. Abraham Lincoln would have immediately recognized the same old argument of kings and tyrants, that some men were born to be ruled and others were born to rule them.

Lincoln would have immediately recognized "independence is white culture" as pro-slavery.

Until we acknowledge that the tenets of DEI are no more than the tenets of racism, it will continue to gain ground among racists. They will continue to teach this blatant racism unchecked because we are afraid to call it the racism that it is.

As long as we are afraid to call their racism racism, racists will continue to flourish.

Racists always want to subjugate the targets of their racism by denying them the ability to reason, to read, to manage their own affairs as their own responsibility.

There is nothing new about slavery and there is nothing new about the DEI defense of it. Calling egalitarianism and freedom racist is as old as history itself. The slaveholders of the old south did it to the abolitionists. The Spartans of Greece did it to those who advocated freeing the Helots.

The same old arguments of the left: segregation is good for you. Education is bad. And you have not evolved enough to handle personal responsibility.

This isn’t some new “soft bigotry of low expectations”. It’s the same old bigotry that calls another people inferior, lower than human. That’s what it means to say that someone cannot reason. The ability to reason is the basis of humanity. Deny reason, and slavery always follows.

Racists know what they mean when they say that a people cannot reason and cannot act individually. The fundamental tenet of DEI is that other people are no more than herd animals that must be domesticated. It is time we acknowledged DEI’s racist evil as the evil it is.

It is no coincidence that DEI proponents seek to segregate children by color, that they denigrate literacy as white culture, that they denigrate the very idea of individual responsibility as a universal human freedom. DEI is the same old ideology of the slavers, returned unchanged and for the same reason: to justify slavery and dehumanize slaves.