This year Utah joined with the current trend in passing some anti DEI legislation, doing so without looking at facts or investigating the supposed problems, but instead rushing to save us from a villain created to cover up their real intent, stopping minorities from succeeding in higher education.

The current legislation is absolutely harmful to minorities. As a white man who actually works in the field, I can tell you that the targeted resources on campuses did not serve to give minorities any kind of advantage over the rest of us, but instead were much more like a prosthetic. Giving a person without a leg a prosthetic would not give them an unfair advantage but would serve to aid that person in a way that giving all of us a prosthetic leg would not. These resources gave students that needed it the opportunity to receive personalized help for problems specific to culture and their life experience. Just as the prosthetic fills a void that most of us don’t have, these DEI services helped students that had problems and concerns that others of us don’t have. Now devoid of that specifically tailored aid, we abandon them to limp on, and we pat ourselves on the back for taking their prosthetic by saying it is equality, by telling ourselves we stopped these bad actors from taking advantage of the system.

Even if there are bad actors, why not set up a regulatory process or policing body to oversee and protect from abuse instead of disrupting and destroying the system as a whole. If we can accept that there are bad actors among other entities such as police officers and not get rid of all of them every time there is one bad actor, why can we not apply that same logic to this situation? Unless stopping bad actors was never the real reason behind the legislation, but instead another false flag propagated by a weaponized media to make racist ideology easier to swallow.

Pat Dogood; Boulder, Utah