What’s So Bad About DEI?

I was born in 1944 and raised in Washington, D.C. In 1954 the elementary school I attended, West Elementary on Farragut Street, was integrated after the Brown v. Board decision in 1953.

Almost immediately, my neighborhood which had been all-white became half black because the whites cleared out for Prince Georges County in Maryland, which was still segregated, and the blacks were able to move out of where they had all been stuck in the city’s Southeast.

One of our new neighbors was a black man who was a high-ranking manager in the USPS headquarters building downtown. He was the only black who commanded a warship during World War II, a submarine tender which operated in several Pacific battle zones and had a crew of 62 men.

When this guy mustered out of the Navy after the war came to an end, he went back to his native home in Richmond, VA and was only able to get a job as a mail carrier going door-to-door with a mail sack on his back.

A couple of years later he got a job at the USPS operation in D.C., and by the time he retired, he was the second-ranking manager of the United States postal service which operates in all 50 states.

So, here’s a black man who demonstrated his ability to be a leader in two organizations where senior and even junior positions were usually given out to whites. I often…