When thinking about what to write about today, I happened upon an old quote from the world of baseball. Some quotes don’t just age badly; some are so ignorant they are hard to believe—not because the future surprised someone, but because the speaker never understood the subject in the first place. These are not errors of prediction; they are failures of comprehension.
In the early 1920s, respected baseball men dismissed Babe Ruth’s homerun hitting as a novelty that would never win championships, insisting that “real baseball” was about bunting, singles, and moving base-runners station to station. This wasn’t cautious skepticism—it was blindness. Ruth didn’t just hit home runs; he changed the geometry of the game, the psychology of pitchers, and the economics of professional sports. The quote revealed a mindset trapped in old assumptions, unable to recognize a fundamental shift while staring directly at it.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, an extended family member made the comment, “It’s about time a woman of color was President of the United States.” I recall turning to my wife, Bobbi, and saying, “That’s an astonishingly ignorant statement.”
The comment reflected deep confusion by assuming race and gender are qualifications rather than characteristics incidental to qualification. The presidency is a role with enormous responsibilities—executive leadership, constitutional judgment, crisis management, diplomacy, and command authority. Saying “it’s about time” is beyond shallow because it elevates symbolism over capability and removes merit from the discussion altogether.
Worse, it’s patently bigoted implying that governing competence flows from chromosomes or skin pigmentation and that a “woman of color” would govern better simply by virtue of her identity. Furthermore, leaders of every race, gender, and background have governed both well and poorly throughout history. And identify does not inoculate against corruption, poor judgment, authoritarian instincts, or ideological extremism.
The term “woman of color” itself is an umbrella phrase covering individuals with wildly different ideologies, values, skills, and temperaments. It tells us nothing about how someone thinks, what they believe, how they might govern, or how they would respond to the pressures of high office.
It also carries an implied sense of historical entitlement—as though the presidency should be allocated through demographic scheduling, a mindset that’s anathema to democratic principles. When Joe Biden selected Kamala Harris as his running mate and later pledged to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, he effectively eliminated 94 % of the available talent pool. That is not inclusivity; it’s exclusion by design!
There are statistical differences in where men and women tend to cluster professionally. But once access and opportunity are equal, success is individual, not biological. That is precisely why selecting someone because they are a Black woman—or a White man, for that matter—is regression, not progress.
The notion that merit should be replaced with symbolism revives the very essentialism civil-rights laws were meant to abolish, i.e., that identity predicts ability. Dressing up that logic as “diversity” doesn’t make it enlightened; it makes it respectable prejudice. Equality means judging people by capability, not by the box they check, and anything else is discrimination with better branding.
I’ll close this post with a simple hypothetical. If Joe Biden had needed a heart transplant during his presidency, does anyone seriously believe that ‘Dr. Jill’ would have insisted the heart surgeon be a woman of color rather than the most qualified heart surgeon available? Of course not. And the reason is obvious: when the stakes are personal, qualifications suddenly matter again.
Quote of the day: “Why would Europe agree to be net zero by 2030 when they don’t even make a battery? – Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald questioning Europe’s net-zero targets at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos.