Diversity is now a code name for the amount of melanin one has. It’s not the variety of ideas represented; in fact, quite the opposite. Diversity simply means to have a color wheel of skin tones in one room at any given time. Whether it’s a neighborhood, grade school, university, church, movie, team sport, or place of employment, diversity has been redefined as a myriad of melanin mixtures at said establishments. Now, in Chicago, this has been taken to another level in the field of journalism.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, approaching the halfway point through her first term, has added a colorful spin to how she does interviews. She told the city’s media outlets that she would grant one-on-one interviews to mark the occasion, but with one condition: She will only speak with journalists of color.

What in the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory is going on in Chicago? What in the Hershey’s Kisses does skin color have to do with conducting interviews about local government? Isn’t this racist? Can you imagine a conservative, white, male mayor saying such a thing and it not causing a riot in the streets?

Lightfoot said in her retort: “I ran to break up the status quo that was failing so many. That isn’t just in City Hall. It’s a shame that in 2021, the City Hall press corps is overwhelmingly White in a city where more than half of the city identifies as Black, Latino, AAPI or Native American.”

She is deeply concerned about the brown skin tone of journalists at City Hall but has yet to go hard on the crime of hundreds of brown boys shedding blood in the streets of the Windy City. Mayor Lightfoot should put the heavy foot on gang crime in Chicago, but she’s got more “diverse” things to accomplish.

She doubled down, saying, “Diversity and inclusion is imperative across all institutions including media. In order to progress we must change.” She continued, “This is exactly why I’m being intentional about prioritizing media requests from POC reporters on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of my inauguration as mayor of this great city.”

Lightfoot called the racial make-up of the City Hall press corps “an imbalance that needs to change,” adding that Chicago’s local media “should reflect the multiple cultures that comprise [sic] it.”

What does skin color have to do with talent or expertise? Nothing. Journalists do a job that has nothing to do with their melanin count. True diversity is about having a variety of ideas and approaches. Getting people in a room with different viewpoints than your own would yield much better results than having merely a mixture of people with different skin tones.