African American writer William Spivey apparently had no compunction about writing a non-satirical essay in Medium and the web magazine “Level” with the title,”Where Are the Black People in Shogun?” This means that he didn’t think the headline and multiple statements in the article would make rational readers laugh coffee out of their noses. It also means, I think it’s fair to conclude, that he has been conditioned/indoctrinated not to be able to enjoy any dramatic presentation that doesn’t include “people like him,” narrowly defined in his case as “people who are the same color or a reasonable approximation thereof” rather than “human beings with emotions, feelings, thoughts and activities that we all can relate to, learn from and find engrossing, entertaining, moving or enlightening.”

I very much doubt that Aristotle, who thought a lot about such matters, would be writing laments headlined, “”Where Are the Athenians in Shogun?” even if he had been bombarded with DEI and woke craziness like we have been. After all, Aristotle had an independent and logical brain that wasn’t easily overwhelmed.

The headline and the essay also mean that the poor guy is incapable of enjoying a good story and dramatic presentation (Everyone’s saying that the “Shogun” remake is good; I haven’t see it). His attention always goes immediately to bean-counting demographics, because he believes that “diversity” must be imposed on every aspect of our existence whether it makes sense or not. I feel sorry for him; I also feel sorry that his ilk are multiplying around us like cancer cells.

Do I really have to fisk this thing? I’m not going to do it: you can see without reading the whole screed why it is a Great Stupid symptom in black and white. The answers to Spivey’s question should leap to any relatively functioning mind: the FX mini-series that dramatizes James Clavell’s novel about 17th Century Japan doesn’t depict black people because they have nothing to do with the story, because whatever blacks were in Japan at that time were few and far between, because having black characters would add nothing of value to the production, because it would be a distraction that would jar audience members out of the show, like gratuitously dropping in four-foot characters because “they had midgets in feudal Japan too!” and because asking “Where Are the Black People in Shogun?” is like asking “Where Are the Japanese People in ‘Fiddler in the Roof?'”

Spivey’s argument essentially consists of evidence that there may have been one blackish Shogun. “According to multiple sources, one of the early real-life Shoguns, Sakanoue no Tamuramaro (758 – 811), was Black, though denied by others,” he writes. “There is a consensus he was something other than pure Japanese, and he is often considered descended from the Ainu, the darker-skinned indigenous people of northern Japan who were subjected to forced assimilation and colonization.”

Of course, the Ainu are not black. There was also a one-armed major league baseball player, Pete Gray. I look forward to Spivey’s next brief, “Where Are the One-Armed Players in ‘42‘ ?”

After that story, anything else seems relatively normal. I just finished perusing a bar association’s monthly magazine that was entirely about the crucial importance of DEI efforts in the law. Repeatedly, in multiple articles, I read the assertion that research has confirmed that diversity—defined as a demographically-mirroring assortment of race, ethnicity, gender, disabilities, sexual proclivities and religions—among its lawyers will make a law firm better at serving the public. There is no such respectable research, and that claim about diversity is in the category of imaginary information that has become “fact” by constant repetition.

The best law firms are the ones with the best—smartest, most experienced, most creative and innovative, most competent and ethical, hardest working and dedicated—lawyers, and what their various physical characteristics are don’t matter. The argument—another one that appears in multiple articles—that black lawyers can best serve the needs of black clients is racist, but, I know, “good racism.” The way to increase the numbers of black lawyers in law firms is to increase the numbers of excellent, qualified, talented black lawyers who would be hired based on their credentials if they were turquoise.

Lawyers like Fani Willis don’t bolster the argument for diversity for diversity’s sake. They rebut it.

Turning to the world of business, CVS, which has seen its customer service standards dive since the pandemic, apparently has a bonkers, DEI-obsessed training program. The Daily Wire has the details, and you can read them there. That earnest U.S. job seekers have to let themselves be subjected to intense ideological indoctrination to work for a drug store chain is no less than frightening, but maybe the fact that in my local CVS, finding any evidence of management—or employees—at all is a challenge suggests that there is still a critical mass of non-weenies in this country who recoil at such 1984-style brain-washing to foil fascist companies’ attempts at promoting lockstep non-diversity of thought.

I sure hope so.