Ah yes… so with the Winter Olympics approaching, it’s time once again for some people to indulge in stupid wishful thinking — in this case, setting quotas where none should be set:
The U.S. Olympic Committee says it’s taking its most diverse team ever to a Winter Games, an impressive and deserved boast that requires a caveat of sorts.
Yes, USOC officials are pleased the team includes more African-Americans and Asian-Americans — and even the first two openly gay men — than recent winter squads. But they also realize this year’s U.S. Olympic team, not unlike those of most other nations gathering in PyeongChang this week, is still overwhelmingly white.
“We’re not quite where we want to be,” said Jason Thompson, the USOC’s director of diversity and inclusion. “. . . I think full-on inclusion has always been a priority of Team USA. I think everybody’s always felt it should represent every American.”
Team USA numbers 243 athletes, which is the largest team any nation has ever sent to a Winter Olympics. Of that group, 10 are African-American — 4 percent — and another 10 are Asian-American. The rest, by and large, are white. The Winter Games is typically a much smaller contingent than its summer counterpart, but the demographic differences are striking. The United States took more than 550 athletes to the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. Of that group, more than 125 were African-American — around 23 percent.
I’ll play along with this little game, as long as we apply it fairly — so come the next Summer Olympics we should make the Team USA Basketball squad of twelve equally representative: it should contain at least six White guys, three Black guys and the other three can be divided among Hispanics and Asians. (If we are going to make this team truly representative of America, one of the Hispanic dudes should be an illegal alien. And if he’s gay, that would be doubleplusgood.) Of course, with this squad we would lose more than win, but who cares about Citius, Altius, Fortius when we’re more about iustitia civitate, right?
Fucking idiots. Twenty years ago there were no Black athletes in Team USA Winter Olympics because Black people didn’t do winter sports. Now the team is one-fifth Black — progress by any other name — except that this isn’t quick enough for the race-conscious quota warriors, oh no: we have to shoehorn in more Black athletes right now, regardless of actual ummm merit because slavery (or some equally-specious bullshit).
And for the few Black athletes who are given a pass onto the team regardless of whether they can compete or not, they’ll be part of Team Loser (just as the White-quota basketball players would be) but that’s okay because the United States wins too many medals anyway and it’s only “fair” that we redistribute those golds among the lesser teams who deserve it because they work just as hard as we do.
One second thoughts, these tokenist tools aren’t fucking idiots at all. They’re just adhering to Leninist doctrine, the bien-pissants [sic].
And finally: if the USOC has funding for a “director of diversity and inclusion” in their budget then we’re giving them too much damn money.
Every time I think I’m getting a grip on my high blood pressure, some crap like this comes along to push it into the stratosphere.
