Team USA’s Olympics success shows positive power of diversity

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At least the so-called “anti-woke” crowd isn’t in charge of putting together America’s sports teams.

Team USA topped the medal count at the Paris Olympics with 126 total, including 40 gold, all thanks to the power of the “gumbo” spirit.

Just as a good gumbo depends on a variety of flavors and ingredients, an effective organization — whether an Olympic squad, a corporation, or the elected government of the United States — depends on diversity and inclusion.

Every athlete, regardless of race, ethnicity, or background, earned their place on Team USA with their blood, sweat, tears, and talent. But if the “anti-woke” policies that extremist activists and politicians are trying to promote applied to sports, many of the Black athletes wouldn’t have been there at all.

Contrary to the lies of anti-racial justice extremists, the purpose of DEI is to open doors for everyone, not to shut anyone out. But Black athletes for decades were shut out of many of the sports that now celebrate diversity. The USA women’s gymnastics team, in particular, captured the world’s attention due to the historic exclusion of Black women from the sport. Nearly a century after the first modern Olympics in 1896, Dominique Dawes became the first Black gymnast ever to qualify in 1992. She and the other members of the “Magnificent Seven” in 1996 won the first-ever women’s team gold medal for the United States.

The argument that Black women were missing from Olympic gymnastics due to a lack of talent is just as absurd when applied to executive leadership in the nation’s top corporations, admissions to elite colleges and universities, or the Oval Office.

For nearly 100 years, Ty Cobb’s batting average of .367 was celebrated as the greatest in professional baseball history. It wasn’t. Josh Gibson’s average of .372 is. But because Major League Baseball did not embrace DEI for the first seven decades of its existence, their teams were deprived of Gibson’s talent. Gibson, who played in the Negro Leagues from 1930 to 1946, died three months before Jackie Robinson broke the MLB color line.

All-time gymnastics great Simone Biles mocked those — including a major-party presidential candidate — who apparently believe Black Americans belong in low-wage, unskilled jobs. with a much-shared social media post declaring “I love my black job.”

The anti-DEI movement is fueled by the racist assumptions that organizations can diversify only by lowering standards. The success of Team USA shatters that myth into smithereens.

Anyone who wonders what the United States would become if extremists succeed in slamming shut the gates of opportunity by eliminating DEI policies needs only to imagine American sports without athletes of color … consistently losing to teams that embrace diversity.

It’s clear, however, that some would be content with that scenario. The anti-racial justice extremists who want to ban DEI policies would rather dominate second-rate institutions than collaborate to build world-class organizations.

They would doom Team USA to mediocrity just to assure their own place on the roster.

Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League and was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Sun-Times.

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