Thread by @Hebro_Steele

"I pastor one of Chicago's toughest neighborhoods on the South Side and @mcuban's defense of DEI is deeply flawed for one reason: this poisonous ideology has no impact on my community, the very community it professes to help." -- Pastor @CoreyBBrooks

A 🧵in the pastor's words:

From my church located in one of Chicago’s most violent South Side neighborhoods, I watched with disquieting fascination the public trial of Claudine Gay. I followed the debates on the influence and impact of the DEI movement not just in the case of Gay but throughout America.

What I heard was that these DEI policies were being done in the name of my community. Sometimes I laughed out loud at some of the claims.

It was like listening to people who don’t know you talk about you as if they knew you deep down.

Perhaps the most visible example was @mcuban's response to @elonmusk’s claim that “Discrimination on the basis of race, which DEI does, is literally the definition of racism.”

.@mcuban responded: it is “a given that there are people of various races, ethnicities, orientation, etc that are regularly excluded from hiring consideration.”

The implication here is that USA is systemically racist. I agree there is racism but not in the way that he thinks.

.@mcuban then wrote, “By extending our hiring search to include them, we can find people that are more qualified.” This rather simple sentiment is one that most people would find agreeable and I do so to a certain degree.

What this ignores is how profoundly education and skill development has declined in our community for generations. We are behind in nearly every social and educational metric and while living in an ever-changing world that seems to be speeding beyond the grasp of our fingertips.

If @mcuban came into my community it wouldn’t take him long to understand that this DEI ideology is profoundly flawed, has no impact upon us, and creates more racial divisions.

The reality is that the countless of diversity programs that came into being since the late 1960s have been abysmal failures. Nearly every one of them, if not all, professed to have the goal of uplifting poor blacks after centuries of racial oppression.

The original intent of Affirmative Action was true uplift by providing bootstraps: better schools, teachers and resources to uplift the undereducated segments of the black population.

However, this process of development was too slow for the many white university presidents who wanted to increase the diversity on their campuses now. They moved away from development to cold racial preferences. Diversity, not development, became the new virtue of our times.

At the same time, our community was bombarded with one liberal policy after another since the 1960s. We were encouraged to move out of our homes — many admittedly not in good condition, but which we owned — and into housing projects where we had zero equity.

Man-in-the-house rules broke apart too many families. Our schools produced far too many illiterates. For decades, our culture rewarded black deviancy shown on countless of @BET rap videos. The only way too many of our children know how to buy food is with Uncle Sam’s dollar.

Instead of embracing freedom and responsibility, too many of us allowed ourselves to be seduced into the culture of dependency. Those who could escape and make a life for themselves did and many did.

But for those of us who have been caught up in the multigenerational cycle of societal and governmental dependency, that is the only world they know. And we ask them to believe in the American Dream?

This is the world of bad faith that I’m trying to reverse every day with my work in the streets, which includes overseeing the building of a community center that came after long years of struggle.

I have encountered far too many tragedies. A young man I mentored since he was knee-high was shot dead and all I could think about was the promising future he had been working toward. Another kid I mentored made a dumb mistake and is now on trial for murder.

But many kids in my neighborhood have made it out — one of them was just awarded a prestigious fellowship at NASA.

Here's a picture of DeMario at NASA, second from your left.

The only tool I used with these youths: the American principles. Be on time. Say, yes sir, no sir. Respect your elders. Be responsible. Be accountable. Save money. Build credit. Plan for the future. Be a parent. Get married. You fall, get back up. Never give up. Just do it.

That is why I laugh out loud when I heard DEI advocates describe merit and punctuality as white supremacist values. Too many people were destroyed by this culture of dependency and now they want to take away all the remaining lifelines to a life of possibility and future?

I know @mcuban surely doesn’t believe in this ridiculousness — he is a businessman. I also hope that he surely recognizes how racist it is to create the belief that standards — educational to societal — across America must be lowered in the name of helping black people.

What Cuban doesn’t realize from his post is that the systemic racism that my community faces is not white supremacy but post-60s liberalism. With diversity and not development as its focus, every one of those principles was created in the name of our inferiority.

That is why it was disappointing to learn how little Gay produced by way of academic merit and yet rose to the presidency of Harvard because of race. Seeing people like @mcuban defend this only reminded me of how profound the stigma is that we cannot succeed without race.

That is why it is my mission in life to develop strong individuals to the point where the thought of using race as an advantage would be an insult to their well-earned pride. We are only at the beginning of reversing the fortunes of our community and we have a long ways to go.

We may not save everybody. But we know the harsh realities and it is our refusal to look way to some false ideological comforts that gives us the best chance of giving these young Americans a good life. That is how you create a deep and meritorious talent pool. -@CoreyBBrooks

***Also, today is Pastor @CoreyBBrooks' birthday!