It’s hard not to agree with Rhode Island Director of Health Nicole Alexander-Scott when she phrases her point of view like this:

“Like the governor, I also fully support diversity across the board in leadership levels … I love to say diversity brings strength. You have a variety of backgrounds, a variety of ideas, experiences that add new ways of accomplishing things. We’re in an age where we have to be creative, we have to be innovative, and the more diverse perspectives we have, the better we are at being able to achieve that effectively …”

Unfortunately, the context suggests that, like most liberals and progressives, she takes an extremely superficial, arguably racist view of diversity.  Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza lays it out with stunning clarity in his contribution to the Providence Journal’s “Race in RI” series.  With the paradoxical imperatives that we have to “focus on what brings us together” and declaring that people who disagree with him about the existence of “white privilege” should be written off, Elorza says he chooses to “focus on like-minded people.”

Apparently, having his biases confirmed is more important to the mayor than “a variety of backgrounds… ideas… and experiences” that brings “diverse perspectives” to the necessity of solving problems creatively.  The way to achieve diversity is apparently to make people who are substantively different disappear.

That point of clarity dovetails nicely with another, hidden within Alexander-Scott’s interview:

Using $2.7 million from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, Rhode Island has created 11 “health equity zones” to target the root causes of poor health, including poverty, inadequate housing and lack of nutritious food and safe recreational opportunities.

Thus money confiscated from taxpayers for the purpose of disease control somehow becomes diverted to “safe recreational opportunities,” and this is just the edge of the crowbar under the bedrock of our freedoms.  “Diversity” and “equity” are wonderful principles in the abstract and defined honestly.  In the current practice, they’re manipulative buzzwords for “like-minded people” to confiscate money and consolidate power in order to buy votes and make people dependent on government.

Far from wanting healing, the people promoting these ideas need divisions and disparities to remain.