BARI WEISS ON AMAZON’S WOKE SMOKESCREEN:
The playbook explains that “the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion requires all of us to disrupt those biases, and the longstanding customs and practices in the industry, in order to achieve real, lasting change. This work is not easy to do, but don’t worry, we’re in this together.”
Are we, though? I wonder how the Amazon drivers afraid to take a bathroom break in order to keep up with their delivery quotas would feel about that. Or the workers in JFK8, the company’s Staten Island warehouse, who labor under the all-seeing eye of Jeff Bezos. More than 60 percent of the people who work in that warehouse, which is the size of 15 football fields, are black or Hispanic. And, according to a recent New York Times investigation, black workers at JFK8 were almost “50 percent more likely to be fired.”
I would really love for an Amazon executive to explain to me how understanding the difference between Disabled and disabled — Amazon’s Inclusion Playbook told me that Disabled with a capital “D” refers to those who are culturally Disabled, whatever that means — makes an actual difference in the lives of anyone at all.
As Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon has noted: wokeness is, almost always, a smokescreen. By focusing the attention and energy of the rich and powerful on say, whether using the word Latinx is preferable to Hispanic, we let them off the hook for actually doing something about the fact that Latinos remain more than twice as likely to live below the poverty line as whites and Asians.
Batya put it to me this way: “‘Doing the work’ means hiring diversity specialists to call their children white supremacists in a prep school class they can put on their transcript to help their chances of getting into Harvard. It has absolutely nothing to do with asking those who could actually make a difference with regard to true inequality to sacrifice anything of themselves.”
It is an amazing thing to behold Amazon executives LARP as gender studies majors.
Speaking of woke smokescreens, as I mentioned earlier this week: Star Wars prompts fan backlash for removing ‘Slave-1’ ship name.
“Star Wars” fans are outraged — again — over a decision to remove the “Slave-1” name from one of their iconic space cruisers.
Disney has quietly dropped the moniker — which some fans consider canon to the franchise — from the ship that belongs to intergalactic bounty hunter Boba Fett
The change came to light with LEGO’s latest “Star Wars” build, a 478- piece set to create Boba Fett’s “Starship,” as it’s now dubbed.
“We’re not calling it Slave I anymore,” said LEGO “Star Wars” lead designer Michael Lee Stockwell, Jedi News reported. “Everybody is [dropping the name],” he added, apparently referring to Disney studios.
That’s nice. Also Disney: Disney Defends Mulan Filming Near [Uighur] Internment Camps In China.
