Boeing and DEI (587 words)
By Walter E. Block
Yes, Boeing has slipped a bit on airline safety. Alright, alright, quite a bit. However, this company should be credited with stepping up to the plate with its strong and enthusiastic support for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. That is far more important than merely ensuring that they produce reliable aircraft.
According to statements emanating from this Seattle-based firm: “Racial and ethnic minority representation in the U.S. is up to 35.3%, a four point increase from 2020 and three points higher than the industry average.” They further brag that “More than 3,300 employees across 33 countries are registered Inclusion Ambassadors — individuals committed to advancing inclusion on their own teams.” Nor are they in any way behind hand when it comes to seeking to hire new staff: “Join Boeing, where you’ll be welcomed, respected and supported. Learn about our commitment to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and search jobs and careers.”
There are some who would complain about Boeing placing DEI above safety. For them passenger protection is the be-all and end-all of what an airline manufacturing company ought to be all about. But this is extremism. This is fascism. This is meritocracy. This is color-blindedness (yet another gigantic no-no for the woke). This is, even, dare I say it, white supremacy.
There are other considerations that are of equal or even greater import than merely turning out safe airplanes. We want the employees of all American corporations to “look like America.” Merit, expertise, sometimes, no often, no, always, must take a back seat to that desiderata. To think that the only goal or even the main goal of airplane manufacturing is safety constitutes white supremacism, or, maybe, Asian supremacism.
Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 departed from Portland International Airport on Jan. 5, 2024. The door plug fell off a few minutes after take-of. Passengers filmed a hole in the fuselage where the door plug came loose on the Boeing 737 Max 9 plane. No one, happily, lost his life upon that occasion but it cannot be denied that this almost occurred. Did critics of DEI focus on this serious mishap? To ask this is to answer it: no. They forgot about all the good work Boeing was doing in promoting racial diversity, equity and inclusion.
However, matters were not quite as salutary in 2018 and 2019. In the former case, a Max 8 operated by Indonesia’s Lion Air fell into the Java Sea. In the latter, an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 crashed after takeoff from Addis Ababa. A total of 346 people lost their lives in both cases.
Can we definitively and unambiguously blame DEI on these near and actual tragedies? No. Planes have crashed long before this advent of cultural Marxism. However, if there are a bunch of kids choosing up membership for a baseball team, and one of the captains selects on the basis of athleticism, and the other is guided by the need for diverse skin color, or, indeed, any other consideration whatsoever, it does not take a genius to figure out which team is more likely to win the game. The same considerations apply in the present case.
It is one thing to apply DEI for the selection of professors of poetry (not that this is anything to sneeze at). It is quite another matter to do so for anything having to do with airplanes, whether pilots or mechanics or construction engineers. The fact that the cultural Marxists would apply this initiative to so important aspect of our economy shows just how rabid they are.
Pegs:
Boeing has embraced DEI
rivets, door plug
https://www.vox.com/2024/1/8/24030677/boeing-alaska-airlines-plane-737-max-door-plug
deadly crashes
two deadly crashes of Max jets in 2018 and 2019.
346
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=two+deadly+crashes+of+Max+jets+in+2018+and+2019.