I have wanted to write this article for two years, but did not want to come across like I was whining. Now, I have the courage to state the facts that brought America to this point in our history wherein standards have been so bastardized or ignored that an everyday American must not, for example, let a young black surgeon operate on him/herself. It isn’t racism on the part of the patient that guides such a decision. It is racism on the part of colleges, medical schools, residency programs, et al which places way too many black Americans (and all non-whites) in classrooms & training programs where they don’t belong and gives them credentials they did not earn.
The brilliant economist, Thomas Sowell, who happens to be black, once said that in the past he would always seek out a black doctor. Not because he wanted someone he could “identify” with, but because, before Affirmative Action, only the most brilliant black students were allowed to enroll in medical schools AND they were tested & judged more harshly by teachers than white students. Thus, Sowell knew he was getting a extraordinarily skilled doctor. He did not mention whether or not he would trust a black doctor who went through med school during Affirmative Action or DEI. He has often criticized the lowering of standards for admission & graduation which have reduced the quality of degrees from many colleges.
At an age when I am starting to visit doctors more than I want, I will not allow myself to be treated by any doctor under, roughly age 45, who is not white. If he/she got into medical school and graduated he/she must be outstanding because Diversity, Equity & Inclusion placed a much higher bar for him/her than for students with darker skin colors. White men make up about 31% of America’s population. In 2014 they represented 31% of medical students. In 2025 they only accounted for 20.5%. This decline is not due to white males getting dumber. It is due to the fact that schools are admitting “non-white” and women applicants with lower test scores than white males’ scores.^^
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BEGAN AMERICA’S DECLINE
After a century-long battle, Republicans were finally able to push through civil rights legislation in 1964 & 1965^ which outlawed discrimination based upon race in employment & education. However, blacks who were coming of age at then time had suffered from poor public school education and those already in the workforce had been held back. They needed additional help. Blacks who had lived under Southern Democrats’ Jim Crow laws needed a whole lot of help. Republican President Richard M. Nixon implemented Affirmative Action (AA) to help give these Americans a leg up in college admissions and in hirings & promotions.
Affirmative Action was not meant to be a permanent policy because blacks born, raised and educated in and after the 1960s would not be trapped behind the Eight Ball like those born before. AA was never meant to last for 51 years, much less to transmogrify into the DEI and the blatant anti-white racism it is today wherein applications from whites, especially straight men, are deleted from the HR inbox without looking at qualifications. By roughly 2000 “minorities” were no longer competing with whites for jobs and promotions. They were only competing with each other and white women.
I recall when Affirmative Action was first implemented and agreed with it. I felt sorry for how our fellow (black) Americans had been treated. No more. My sympathy focuses on straight white men. By the mid 90s I was noticing that straight white men were being discriminated against in favor of women, blacks, all who were labeled as “of color,” gays & Lesbians, “disabled” and immigrants. In this upside down workplace, dark-skinned disabled Lesbian immigrants had it made. Employers were too afraid to not hire her.
OUTLAWING APTITUDE TESTING
In 1971, the Supreme Court case Griggs v. Duke Power banned IQ tests for jobs on the basis that they were racist. Because black Americans scored much lower than whites, testing was outlawed, thus taking a valuable tool away from employers. All large & medium-sized corporations used this tool when hiring for white collar jobs. Even when they were hiring for the lowest paid, minimal-training type of job, they still tested the applicants’ aptitudes. Why? Most corporations wanted to hire people who could climb the ladder and not just stay in the same job until retirement.This fostered job satisfaction, loyalty and institutional memory.
In 1967 a naive, small town girl grasping only a high school diploma, ME, applied for a job as an Accounts Receivable clerk for Consolidated Freightways in Portland, Oregon. I scored so high on the aptitude test that I not only got the job, which paid three times minimum wage (a hell of a high wage for an 18-year-old girl back when employers were still discriminating against women), but they put me into management training.
The Griggs ruling not only tied a blindfold across employers’ eyes, ruining hiring practices, making degrees (credentialism) the only way businesses could find “qualified” candidates (forced to rely on colleges as they transformed from educational institutions into Leftist indoctrination centers), but it also set the stage for “disparate impact.” This allowed minorities to sue if some law or policy disproportionately impacted them as a racial group, even if that policy or law was neutral. Fifty years ago a college degree provided the employer with a relatively accurate measure of the applicant’s abilities. No longer. Colleges & universities block talented white men from enrolling and graduate mostly indoctrinated haters with darker skin hues and women.
FIRST TIME DIANE RUBBED ELBOWS WITH AN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BENEFICIARY
In 1979 the IRS was auditing this writer’s tax return (I don’t recall if it was our 1976 or 1977 joint tax return). It was a routine, random audit regarding minimal sums which probably explains why they gave this interview to a young (early 20s) employee who had not been on the job long. If memory serves me, there were four or five figures on our tax return that the IRS was questioning. As the interviewer dealt with each “questionable” part of our tax return he read a section of IRS regulations, then told me what it said. I discerned that he did not understand what he was reading. Reading upside down, I explained, section by section, what the regs said. He left the room three or four times to ask his supervisor if I was correct. I was. Yes, he was black.* I felt sorry for him. It was obvious that he had been hired for a job that he could not handle. When the audit was finished, we did not owe any additional taxes.
About 20 years later this same man became a client of mine. He did not let on that he remembered me, but I remembered him because he had a very unique name. Also, I have an excellent memory. I represented him in filing a bankruptcy. He had long since left the IRS and was working for a transportation company. About a decade later I ran into him at a hair salon, with his little daughter. He was working at yet another company. Being black, it seems highly likely that he was not fired from nor laid off from the IRS nor the transportation company. It was more likely that he got frustrated and stressed out because the work was too difficult for him. In other words, he had been hired/promoted above his skill level because he was black. Sad.
DISPARATE IMPACT LEAD TO MORE CRIME
“Disparate impact” is why Leftists have claimed that the criminal justice system is racist against blacks. It doesn’t matter that black Americans actually commit crimes at higher rates than other ethnic groups. What matters is that more blacks are being arrested & convicted, therefore, instead of finding ways to raise law-abiding boys, they claim laws are “inequitable.”
If that sounds like commie gobbledygook, it is, but it’s been the standard for the last 50+ years in America. THAT is why we are seeing ever more incompetent people holding high level positions, especially in government. This is painfully obvious when such employees speak at press conferences giving away their DEI status.
For decades now government agencies and private employers have funneled incapable people into jobs they cannot handle. Harmeet Dhillon, US Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, is trying to turn that ship around, but it will take at least two more generations in the workforce to return to the excellence that existed in America when I was a young adult:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Az2b!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc24db676-ddeb-4b9b-8dc9-c1c42d93fdf3_1206x1080.jpeg" \t "_blank)
Amazing that we went 60 years past the “civil rights” era with unjust discrimination in the other direction and we are only now correcting course. We’re finally starting to get from the federal government what we were supposed to be getting in 1964!!
Although the lady in the following short video grew up poorer than I did, I identify with her because my parents, who did not believe in college or careers for their three daughters, gave me no financial or moral support after I graduated from high school & left home. In other words, I worked my way through college, grad school & law school:
Follow me on X @DianeLGruber
Affirmative Action And Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: Sixty Years Of Decline
The following article was published in Palladium Magazine on June 1, 2023. Love him, or hate him, President Trump is taking steps to end the competence crisis which has developed over the last sixty years. From the end of WWII to the mid-80s, large employers routinely gave aptitude tests to every white collar hire, even for the lowliest job such as file…
^FOR A CENTURY DEMOCRATS ACTIVELY FOUGHT CIVIL RIGHTS FOR BLACKS: The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a turning point in US racial relations, but it was not the first; in fact, from 1866 to 1964 (98 years) there were 26 major civil rights votes. Republicans favored civil rights in 96 percent of the votes. Democrats OPPOSED them in 80 percent of the votes. On January 26, 1922, Senate Democrats filibustered a House bill introduced by Rep. Leonidas Dyer, R-Mo., making lynching a federal crime.
The record Senate filibuster of the watershed 1964 vote was organized by Democrat and Klan Exalted Cyclops Congressman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and Senator J. William Fulbright (Bill Clinton’s mentor & long time friend), D-AR. In all, 21 Democrat senators opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Republican Everett Dirksen broke the filibuster to get the legislation passed, as he had done with a similar civil rights bill in 1957. Dirksen received an accomplishment award from the NAACP for his efforts.
^^In 2014 law school students were 31.2% white males. In 2025 that figure was only 25.7%. Their seats are being filled by less qualified people “of color” and women.
*I am not bragging or exaggerating. This is exactly what happened.
The author, Diane L. Gruber, is a First Amendment advocate who writes for Substack. She calls her Substack newsletter America First Re-Ignited. Follow me on X @DianeLGruber.
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