Heather Stewart Poetry

I don’t know about anyone else, but this DEI thing is rather irritating for me. Nevermind that even erasing someone’s name from an archive doesn’t actually erase what they did. Nevermind that it will be dug back up in the future and brought back to prominence.

It’s just so much work back and forth. I sincerely hope that this truly is an extinction burst of American racism. The idea that unqualified advancement has ever helped anyone other than an oppressor is ridiculous.

And yeah, I said oppressor and I didn’t say white man. Why? Because when white men oppress each other, they allow unqualified white men to advance to their own detriment. They overlook women and people of color who are better qualified to their own detriment.

Was there a time when less qualified people of color and women were helped by DEI? I’m sure that there are exceptions to every rule and I know with 100% certainty that the oppressor does it on purpose to thwart the oppressed group anyway, so yeah.

I was among the first women on submarines and two parts of my experience stand out in this. One is the idea of less or unqualified people getting things they don’t deserve.

I’ll never forget the guys I was stationed with complaining that the women were having an easier time getting qualified for things andthat people were going easy on them and they didn’t have to keep the same standard.

I looked at the man complaining about this and asked a series of questions.

Who are the people that train others on their qualifications?

The people who are currently qualified. All of which were men at the time.

Who are the people that verify and put their signature to these having the knowledge required and that they are qualified to stand the post?

The people who are currently qualified. All of which were men at the time.

Have these women been previously qualified to the extent that they would know this time is easier?

Not even one of them.

So how are the women to blame?

He just kinda stared at me. Then I reminded him to talk to his boys instead of blaming these girls who had no way of knowing what was happening to them.

It also turned out that several of them were much better than some of their male colleagues at some of these things because gender does not actually influence intelligence. That said, there is a minimum physical requirement as well that they all met, on such a spectrum that some were as strong as the weakest man and some were stronger than most of the men. There is more to physical strength than sex organs and some women have more testosterone in their system than some men. It happens.

AND the schoolhouse that everyone had to go to before getting to a submarine had plenty of empty spaces. The women were not taking space from the men, they were filling space that would have been otherwise empty. When men are more interested in filling those spaces, then we should talk about all performance in them. Individual qualification is a much better metric than keeping out whole pieces of the population when plenty of people within them can do the job just fine or better.

The second oppressor specific idea here is where they take into consideration what they think should be taken into consideration and are often wrong. Like the 100 tampons to accompany a female astronaut in space for 14 days. The government spent a bunch of money on impractical updates to the ships in order to “accomodate” women in ways that we did not care about and could not use.

The little trash containers in the stalls were custom-made and expensive and required for some reason. They were also removed and stowed, only to be moved around from time and cleaned around. They left no room for a woman to comfortable sit in the stall and do her business. It was also completely unnecessary to expect her to not be able to wrap it in toilet paper and throw it out in the regular trash that was always there less than 5 feet away.

The desire to do away with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion only serves the oppressor’s desire to not be questioned about their superiority. But they aren’t superior. They’re greedy and they’re willing to fight for things they don’t always have any business having. They also live in a delusion. You can’t keep people out of spaces they want to be in. They prove that themselves when they wrestle their way into spaces they don’t belong in.

As far as the erasure, women’s roles are being downplayed and I feel like it’s a move to start removing our names altogether. It’s a problem for a number of reason, not the least of which goes back to those empty seats. Fewer women and people of color in the service does not automatically add more people to the service. It only makes the white men that are still there more tired.

Nevertheless, I will be reminding everyone we are here and have been here. My story is told my book, Shapeshifting, and there are lots more of us whose stories have been written about in places that are not government websites and that even have movies.

Remember the Tuskegee Airmen? Yeah, me too. Mostly because of the move of the same name, followed by Night at the Museum, and then Red Tails. The 6888 are memorialized by Netflix. Hidden Figures was both a book and a memorable movie. Corsets to Camouflage is a book about women’s history in war. Liar Temptress Soldier Spy is about 4 women who greatly contributed to the outcome of the Civil War. Uncultured is about one of the first women authorized to be serve in combat in the US Army.

There are many more, those are just the first few off the top of my head. It’s women’s history month and they are trying to erase. WTF? Let’s not let it happen.