Trump’s comments in
the wake of the air disaster last week were appalling by any civilised
standard. Declaring, without evidence, that it was the result of diversity
policies, along with his suggestion that the job of Air Traffic Controller can
only be done by geniuses and that those geniuses are exclusively to be found
in one particular demographic, managed to showcase his racism, misogyny,
ableism, transphobia and homophobia almost in fewer words than it takes to list
them. Like other opponents of diversity programmes, he seeks to deliberately
mislead people about the nature of such programs, suggesting that they imply
employing people who can’t do the job but match an under-represented
demographic, rather than seeking to ensure that, in identifying and appointing
people who can do the job, there is no direct or indirect discrimination
against certain demographics and that employers attempt to reflect the diverse
nature of the society in which they operate within their workforce.
His comment that
people need to be geniuses to become Air Traffic Controllers rather begs the
question about who decides what a genius is, and on what basis. We already
know, of course, that Trump is himself a genius and a very stable one at that.
We know that because he has told us so. Is his definition good enough? To put the question
another way, if you were about to take a flight into US airspace, and you knew
that the Air Traffic Controller handling the landing at your destination
airport was only in post because he was an able-bodied white heterosexual male in
possession of an official certificate stating that he is a Trump-level genius,
would you still want to board the plane? It might help to reduce
aviation-derived emissions in the US, I suppose.
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