By Selwyn Duke
When hearing people boast that they’re “inclusive,” your first response should be, “Of what?”
After all, to include some in a limited-size group means excluding others. Enter The Walt Disney Company — and billionaire industrialist Elon Musk.
Early yesterday evening, Musk posted on X a Disney document that outlines discriminatory hiring practices justified as “inclusion standards”; in fact, it lists precise quotas for what it calls “Underrepresented” groups.
The document lists four standards, A through D, with the first being “ON SCREEN REPRESENTATION.” It then states, “At least THREE of the following FIVE areas need to be met to fulfill Standard A”:
- A1 Characters: 50% or more of regular and recurring written characters come from Underrepresented Groups
- A2 Actors: 50% or more of regular and recurring actors come from Underrepresented Groups
- A3 Secondary Characters: Meaningful inclusion of Underrepresented Groups as secondary or more minor on-screen individuals, including background actors
- A4 Series Premise: Meaningful integration of Underrepresented Groups in overall themes and narratives
- A5 Episodic Storytelling: Ongoing meaningful integration of Underrepresented Groups in episodic themes and narratives
The term “underrepresented groups” is peppered throughout the document, written as a proper noun (i.e., “Black” instead of “black”). The entire document follows.
An anonymous source just sent me this from Disney. It is mandatory, institutionalized racism and sexism! pic.twitter.com/npMy8YfA1j
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2024
As indicated above, Musk said an anonymous source gave him the document. While I don’t doubt this, I did some research and learned that it’s actually available online here. The Wayback Machine Internet archiving service has copies of the page dating back to April 28, 2022, and the page’s URL appears to indicate it was posted on “6-16-21.”
So why is this still a story? First, that such a document has been floating around for this long and, it appears, didn’t attract attention until now again illustrates how ubiquitous the destructive “inclusion/diversity” agenda is. Second, what inspired Musk to highlight the document helps expose the lie of what’s within it.
That is, the document was posted shortly after attorneys for conservative actress Gina Carano announced that Musk’s X company was funding them in a legal case against Disney. “Carano, who starred as Cara Dune on the Disney Plus series ‘The Mandalorian’ until her dismissal in February 2021, sued the businesses this week in California, claiming that she was harassed and bullied for disclosing her conservative political views on X and other social media sites,” Times Now World writes, providing details. The point?
Is Disney — which boasts of its ostensible “commitment to diversity, equity & inclusion” (DEI), as the company puts it — being inclusive of Carano?
Is it being inclusive of the group of people to which her views are common?
In point of fact, conservatives are not only grossly “underrepresented” (and “Underrepresented,” too) in modern entertainment employment — they’re purposely excluded.
Of course, it’s well known and taken for granted that the DEI agenda is about promoting certain groups. That’s the point, too:
“Inclusion” is a lie.
Worse still, many responsible are lying to themselves, which makes self-correction less likely.
Note here that when traditional groups, such the ancient Greeks or Amish today, exclude people (ostracism or “shunning”), they don’t pretend they’re doing otherwise. They say, “You did ______ wrong, and now you must be a person apart.” You may disagree with their moral standards or methods for enforcing them, but at least they’re honest in deed — and word.
The latter matters so much that millennia ago, ancient sage Confucius emphasized it when stressing the “rectification of names.” In essence, he said it’s impossible for matters to proceed properly and constructively in society if, with your words, you’re lying about what you’re doing.
Good people use honest language. Bad people act as the communists did when they called their brainwashing centers “reeducation camps.” As for DEI, would its rank-and-file enablers so blithely discriminate unjustly if, instead of labeling their behavior with the value-signaling term “inclusion,” it was actually branded as discrimination? Poison goes down far better when sugarcoated.
Then there’s the concept of “underrepresented groups.” It’s not just that every group is “underrepresented” somewhere (e.g., whites and Asians in the NBA). It’s not just that groups constituting less than one percent of the population may be called “underrepresented” if they’re not 10 percent of film characters. It’s also that there’s an almost limitless way of grouping humans.
How visible in movies are MAGA-hatted bow hunters? And how visible are Anabaptists, Zoroastrians, Jains, Mandaens, or adherents of the Baha’i, Yoruba, or Mami Wata faiths?
You may laugh. But would focusing on an unusual group of believers be any more bizarre than fixation on an odd grouping based on anomalous sexual inclinations — namely “LGBTQ+”? How would someone transported to our time from the ’50s view our sexual devolutionary obsession?
We accept it, or at least tolerate it, only because of conditioning. The abnormal has been not just normalized but idealized as a result what G.K. Chesterton predicted, in 1926, would be our next great heresy: an attack on morality — sexual morality in particular.
There’s nothing strictly inclusive about “inclusion”; there can’t be, as everyone draws lines. Why, if the Left truly treasured inclusion, would it so zealously exclude people with cancel culture?
And that’s what this is really about to the civilization destroyers: Canceling everything that may in some way reflect God’s image and replacing it with their own.
Addendum: Below is Disney’s Karey Burke, “the mother of one transgender child and one pansexual child,” talking in an older video about how she wants “50% of characters to be LGBTQIA and minorities.”
Throwback to when Disney’s Karey Burke said, "as the mother of one transgender child and one pansexual child," she wants "many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories" and wants 50% of characters to be LGBTQIA and minorities
— Ashley St. Clair (@stclairashley) February 6, 2024
pic.twitter.com/AkkomqwdOU
This article was originally published at The New American.
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