'Diversity and Inclusion' Stops When a Black Woman Praises God at the Oscars
For one of the most conspicuous defenders of wokeness within the video game industry, your ability to be represented as a minority stops the moment you mention God.
Meet David Jaffe, if you haven’t already had the displeasure of doing so. He’s known as a video game designer and director — and in that capacity, he’s not awful. He’s best known for being the man behind numerous “Twisted Metal” and “God of War” games, including the first two iterations of those franchises, on Sony’s PlayStation consoles.
He has a sideline in cultural commentary with a slant toward games, however. Here’s where he’s a bit of a tool; consider this YouTube video about the crisis enveloping narrative design consultancy/wokeness factory Sweet Baby Inc., which is being hit by a boycott. If you have a problem with “forced diversity,” Jaffe says, “you either have a problem with bad writing in media or you have a problem with the fact that you’re a racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic a**hole.”
The implication is obviously that you’re the latter, although he finds a circuitous way to get to it. Those involved in the boycott (which we’ve covered in some depth here at The Western Journal) are, Jaffe sardonically said in a video earlier this month, “suddenly … these great protectors of great writing and great visions for your whole lives but you’ve never said anything.”
“But now — when it is coming from more of a liberal progressive direction as it relates to people who get hired and … the characters in those stories that those people tell — then it’s ‘Oh, well, no, no, no.'”
Jaffe hath spoken! Don’t take the mic away from these storytellers by boycotting products that they have for sale! If you don’t buy them, you heard the man: you’re a racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic bodily orifice.
Unless, of course, Mr. Jaffe has to sit through a speech in which a black woman mentions God at the beginning, then our truth-bombing white-privileged knight turns into a foaming stereotype of the balding, paunchy, bearded male internet atheist we’ve all come to know and loathe.
For those of you who watched the Oscars — and I know you probably have something better to do with 18 hours of your time on a Sunday, but bear with me here — you’ll know that Da’Vine Joy Randolph had one of the more uplifting speeches of the night when she won for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “The Holdovers” — a period piece set in the early 1970s where she plays the cafeteria manager at an elite boarding school who is mourning the loss of her son in the Vietnam War.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph wins the award for actress in a supporting role at the 2024 #Oscars pic.twitter.com/2p5zrSx4yK
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) March 10, 2024
Guess which part of this emotional speech Jaffe had a problem with? Yes, apparently, Rudolph was forcing a little too much of her diversity on him when she mentioned the Big Guy.
“Have not seen THE HOLDOVERS, hear it’s amazing and she is wonderful. Sounds like a very well deserved award. Congrats to her,” he said in a post on X on Oscars night.
“But opening her speech with repeated ‘GOD IS GOOD’s is simply vulgar at this stage in humanity. Such a lack of awareness of all the horrors going on out there and she thinks God made sure she got her little statue? Come the f*** on.
“She can live in her delusion. She doesn’t need my permission to but she has my support to do so. But man, how many people watched this and had the narrative that God (assuming he’s a real thing) gives a s*** about us at all drilled into their brain just a little bit deeper?” he continued.
“And even if he is real, what DOES he care about that he lets Israel go down in October and Gaza since then? He lets kids die of poverty and abuse? But the instant he can sway awards for acting or victories for football teams? Well then, he steps right up and gets busy working his magic! Come the f*** on.
“You can say I am being a d*** but this s*** needs to no longer be normalized cause it contributes to us being dangerous idiots,” he added, finishing with “I love you :). Well, not YOU, but everyone else.”
Just one week apart, too! Funny how quickly that dedication to diversity and inclusion tends to fade, huh?
The comments section got ugly, with Jaffe’s responses from the usual “how did you get into college when you clearly didn’t comprehend my own post facto interpretation of my prior idiot ramblings?” to conceding that maybe Randolph wasn’t talking about God being good for giving her the trophy. Which, duh:
How can you have gotten into college but you read the first sentence of this paragraph from my tweet and you typed what you just typed? Who is telling her to step in line?!? pic.twitter.com/Z14tKV52KZ
— David Jaffe (@davidscottjaffe) March 11, 2024
If you read it that way (your first sentence) I think you have a good point. Had not thought of it in that way.
— David Jaffe (@davidscottjaffe) March 11, 2024
He apparently didn’t watch the rest of the speech where she made it obvious she was talking about the blessings and opportunities she’d received by following her existential calling. Thus, because he didn’t hear anything after the G-word, I can only assume he goes into a foaming rage whenever God is mentioned and blanks out until he’s done bashing his collection of Sailor Moon UFO catcher plushies with every Richard Dawkins book in his library. (To ensure Mr. Jaffe — should he stumble upon this essay — short-circuits at this point and drops to the floor in an irate fit, let me trigger him now: God! God! God! God! God! God!)
OK, now that that’s out of the way, it’s worth noting that yes, this is a diversity issue; black Americans are significantly more religious than Americans as a whole in every category polled by Pew Research in a survey conducted between 2019 and 2020. Furthermore, they are primarily connected to God through religious congregations that are majority black.
One cannot say one wants diversity and then turn around and say that, no, what you really want is a smorgasbord of ethnicities, genders and other identitarian groups who think, talk and act exactly like you do. This isn’t just throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it’s essentially admitting that all you want is the bathwater and that the baby can — quite literally, in this case — go to hell for all you care.
Furthermore, while I’ll concur the world is in a worse state than it was five years ago, we’re pretty much close to the best we’ve ever been in terms of material and physical comforts — Jaffe seems to be woefully unhappy that anyone can mention that God is good “at this stage in humanity.”
Let’s leave aside the fact that the stage humanity is at has no bearing on whether God exists or not and whether or not He is good. I’ll even spot Mr. Jaffe those arguments, despite the fact that the case for God’s goodness and the problem of evil have been addressed in innumerable philosophical and theological texts that he, from all appearances, desperately needs to read.
If humanity were to ditch God at some particular stage, that stage would have been the bubonic plague, the Hundred Years’ War, the Holocaust, the sack of Rome, World Wars I and II, the Mongol Invasions, etc., etc. Don’t get me wrong, what happened on Oct. 7 and in subsequent months has been horrific, but murder, death, terrorism, brutality, poverty, food insecurity and general well-being are, on a relative historical timeline, far better than they were — and not because of godless bearded keyboard warriors like Jaffe reducing the influence of religion, but instead in spite of people like him.
And yet, look at where he lays his contempt. First, it was against anyone who had a problem with buying a game worked on by a company notorious for pushing wokeness. Second, because he had to sit through a black woman saying “God is good.” For free, mind you. He didn’t have to pay for it. All he had to spend was his time — which he had already dedicated to watching the Oscars, apparently.
This is your daily reminder that wokeness has nothing to do with diversity. Its defenders may claim such and say that it’s a byword for centering varying perspectives from all different walks of life. And, like Mr. Jaffe, let its defenders talk long enough and you’ll realize they’re only interested in a panoply of people who may look different than them but will say, do and believe exactly the things that they do.
Beyond that, they have no tolerance for anyone else.
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