​Families and DEI

By Ed Raymond

What if eight billion people looked and acted like Adam and Eve?

So, we have different fingerprints and DNA. We can transfuse people’s blood and implant organs with some limitations. With facial recognition equipment, we can identify a criminal blocks away or limit or allow access to rooms and areas. Now we have a political party that wants to eliminate DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). It’s a framework of policies designed to promote fair treatment, full participation and representation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or discriminated against.

Definitions: Diversity (representation) is the presence of differences within a setting, including race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age and ability. Equity (fairness) is the guarantee of fair treatment, access and opportunity for all, while striving to identify and eliminate barriers that have prevented the full participation of some groups. Inclusion (belonging) is the act of creating environments in which any individual or group feels welcomed, respected, supported and valued to fully participate.

Diversity, equity and inclusion are commonly used in workplaces, schools, and organizations to foster belonging and improve organizational culture. The president of the Republican states (he hates Democrats) Donald Trump and leader of the Trumplican Party which is attempting to Make America Great Again (MAGA) — which it never was — and is trying to Make America White Forever (MAWF) — which is never was — by deporting Blacks, brown folks, Native Americans, Asians and any other people who are not white and aryan.

This founding father had a very interesting DEI family

The man who wrote the word “equal” in the Declaration of Independence was a six-foot-two-inch tall white guy with red-yellow hair who owned more than 600 enslaved Black people in his lifetime. Slaves allowed him to live a life of leisure, introspection, power, and self-education. When he went to Paris to represent the United States government, he took his enslaved cook James Hemings with him to make sure he had good food to eat and would learn special French recipes. And — not incidentally — he also took James’ younger sister Sally in his entourage (with whom Jefferson fathered six children during his lifetime).

One might think we eat and enjoy a lot of macaroni and cheese because of millions of Italians who immigrated through Ellis Island. James brought it to America after learning French cooking. Jefferson reluctantly freed James in 1793.

When Jefferson was elected president, he asked James to become the White House cook. James answered Jefferson with DEI policy in mind by asking him about wages and working conditions. James never got an answer from President Jefferson and committed suicide in 1801.

Jefferson served President George Washington, who, after his marriage to Martha (who owned about 125 slaves) was considered to be the richest man in Virginia. Jefferson served as his secretary of state. Jefferson was probably the second richest man in Virginia at the time. (When Washington died he owned 300 slaves.) Jefferson was nervous about slavery, and sometimes considered slavery an institutional evil and a taint on the colonies. However, wherever he traveled, he always took slaves to serve him — and one of them was usually James Hemings.

Jefferson visited many Indian tribes in the colonies. He admired them for being able to endure torture “with a firmness unknown to religious enthusiasm.” He also praised them for their lives of liberty “having never submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power, any shadow of government.” He liked their “minimal government,” and said he preferred their type of government for the United States. Once, when discovering an Indian burial site, he dug it up so he could find out how they treated their dead. Jefferson approached problems with scientific DEI curiosity, so he gave little thought to desecrating the site.

He was also interested in the different tribal languages and said they should be studied to discover their different origins and migration. He asked Meriwether Lewis and William Clark for help in studying Indian languages because they had observed so many as they traveled West.

One of his frequent fellow travelers was James Madison, who also played a big role in the development of the U.S. government. They made an unusual pair because Madison, who later wrote the Bill of Rights and was also president, was five foot four inches tall and weighed 100 pounds.

In one trip to get acquainted with people from other colonies, the two, with their slaves, traveled 920 miles in 33 days. Madison later wrote he was somewhat surprised when Jefferson interrupted their travel to get a haircut in Burlington, New Jersey. It just wasn’t done by men, particularly with those heads of long revolutionary hair!

A family of diversity, equity, inclusion — and chaos, chaos, chaos

Anyone who has had a course in English literature has probably read these lines of poetry and remembered them:

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d

Those lines were written by Alfred Tennyson, who was the product of a family that volleyed and thundered words, curses, accusations and threats at one another throughout the lives of the thirteen people in the immediate family. Of some wealth, the family lived on an estate on the eastern side of England about a dozen desolate miles from the Atlantic. I’m going to describe the family first, because the thirteen members — seven boys, four girls and two parents — could be the main characters of thirteen novels or thirteen psychological studies.

The father served the public as the rector of a church, normally the position of a religious, godly man. Father Tennyson was different. He was an alcoholic who was often volatile and violent. He once threatened to kill his oldest son, Frederick, which could have easily happened because he was holding a knife and pistol while in an alcoholic rage. The poet Alfred, the third from the top, often would go to the church graveyard and lie on a headstone and cry and hope to die. Mother Tennyson was beautiful and beloved by most in the family and town, but she was often the victim of her husband’s domestic assaults and painful ridicule.

Son Fredrick sought solace in strange religious beliefs. Son Charles became an opium addict. Alfred, the third son and later the famous poet, was born on the same day as the famous Charles Darwin who turned many of us into evolutionists. Son Arthur turned into an alcoholic like his father and later spent time in an institution. Son Septimus was crippled by depression, was the most morbid in the family and spent much of his life in an institution for the mentally handicapped. Son Horatio, the youngest in the family, escaped family life in England and went to Tasmania and started a farm. It failed. The four daughters did not have mental breakdowns like the seven sons, probably because they spent more time with their harassed mother. Frederick, Charles, Alfred and Septimus were all published poets in their lifetime.

Alfred was the most talented and famous. At age twelve he had written a pretty good six thousand verse poem — probably to spend less time with father. He attended Trinity College at Cambridge and met a friend for life in Arthur Henry Hallam, two years younger and from a very rich prominent family. I suspect they were both gay because they studied together, vacationed together and traveled constantly together.

Alfred’s sister Emily fell in love with Hallam and it was said they were engaged. But Hallam died of a stroke at age 22 in a Vienna hotel. Alfred’s friend for life died short of it and ‘twas said Alfred spent seventeen years in grief over Hallam. An acquaintance used the term “widowed” for Alfred when Hallum died. A clue: most of the correspondence between the two was quickly destroyed by both families.

Alfred did not graduate from Trinity College because Father Tennyson died young from an illness transacted during travel in Europe and the family was soon short of money. Alfred then started to write serious poetry.

Where DEI meets Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’

Tennyson wrote his most famous poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” when he was 45 and survived family, fortune, misfortune and was called a widow after the death of his best friend in life. The poem was about a heroic but disastrous cavalry charge by British troops into a valley during the famous Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War fought against Russia. It was a slaughter into a death trap surrounded by artillery caused by mistakes made by British officers. In the short and powerful poem, Tennyson examines several themes: heroism, the sense of duty by soldiers and their sacrifice and the tragic consequences of war. The repeating of pounding hooves of horses and the sounds of the cannon killing horses and men mark the poem. Here are the last two stanzas of the six in the poem:

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They who had fought so well

Came thro’ the jaws of Death,

Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

When can that glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wonder’d

Honor the charge they made!

Honor the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred.

So, here we have a real-life event where officers blundered, soldiers might have misinterpreted orders and charged into a valley surrounded by Russian artillery. I still remember the Secretary of Defense explaining why so many American troops were killed capturing the same hill in Vietnam three times. His dramatic explanation: “S--t happens.” Now, please go back and review my first two paragraphs defining DEI and see if you think Tennyson needed DEI to write the poem.

The best description of why we need unlimited DEI and history

State Representative Lisa Finley-Deville’s column “Our History is the History of This Country” in the Fargo Forum should be required reading for everyone in the now Divided States of America. She simply but beautifully points out we all need to understand history if we are ever going to have a United States

“As an Indigenous woman and a state representative from Mandaree, I was raised to understand that land carries memory. The hills, rivers, and plains of this region hold the stories of our ancestors. That is why I am troubled by the recent secretarial order issued by Doug Burgum, which has led to the removal and alteration of historical interpretation across our national parks. Our national parks are classrooms, cultural sites, and living archives of our country’s full history.

Agencies like the National Park Service, operating under the United States Department of the Interior, have spent decades working to tell a more complete story of America, one that includes Indigenous nations, the dispossession of Native lands, and the resilience of our people. This new directive undermines that progress.

Our history is the history of this country. My own community has lived on this land for generations. Our elders fought to ensure that places like Theodore Roosevelt National Park acknowledge that the lands visitors admire today were once home to the first people that dwelled these lands. Those acknowledgments are about accepting truth. And erasing that truth does not unify us. It diminishes us.”

Amen.

Reach The Gadfly at  fargogadfly@gmail.com.