"How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up, Winston?"

If your job is "head of diversity," you don't have to design computers or software or anything like that. But you can fail at your job, and you would do that by acknowledging that there's any concept of diversity apart from what the cultural orthodoxy says. Denise Young Smith has this job at Apple, and apparently she engages in a little too much independent thought because one day she got a little tired of the idea that diversity can't be about anything but racial and sexual identity. So she said so, and that's where her trouble started:

"There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they're going to be diverse too because they're going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation. Diversity is the human experience. I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT."

If the quote sounds entirely unobjectionable to you, that's because it is. Diversity of thought and experience are much more meaningful than diversity of skin pigmentation or sexual proclivity, particularly when you consider that the former categories are much more likely to impact how a person does his or her job than the latter. Young Smith clearly got frustrated by the realization that "diversity" never seems to deal with anything but identity politics, and expressed out loud her wish that people would think more broadly about what it really means and what it can be.

Ever Notice Corporate Diversity Officers are 
Almost Always Black Women??

That, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a Thought Crime.

TechCrunch reported on Friday that Young Smith sent an email to her team at Apple earlier that day in which she apologized for her comments at the conference:

"Last week, while attending a summit in Bogota, I made some comments as part of a conversation on the many factors that contribute to diversity and inclusion. I regret the choice of words I used to make this point. I understand why some people took offense. My comments were not representative of how I think about diversity or how Apple sees it. For that, I'm sorry."

The word "diversity" is like many words the left bastardizes. It's not really about diversity at all. Denise Young Smith got out of line and thought for herself, and got it in her head that maybe diversity could be something more valuable and meaningful than the political left wants it to be. And for that, she got smacked down and thoroughly chastened. Fall into line, or else.

Today's "culture of diversity" offers no option but to fall in line. When you're a champion of diversity, there is only one acceptable way to think. Think about that.