Overall, this is a fine article, but I think it misses a point or two, e.g.:
"It has been high time for a major rethink on what DEI has turned into since the pandemic, with DEI becoming a term of art for what is too often an institutionalized anti-whiteness."
The problem with DEI is not that it's anti-white, but that it is racially and ethnically essentializing: it distinguishes people based on traits that they have no control over. DEI was terrible long before it became anti-white.
There are 80 years of sociological research (Tajfel, Sharif, et a.) demonstrating that the mere act of dividing people into official groups--no matter how factitious--has terrible invidious effects. There's a hell of a lot of history demonstrating this, too. Consider, for example:
This is why DEI and such programs fail so abysmally.
Eons of natural selection have imbued hominids with a powerful tribal instinct that rivals the individual survival instinct itself. The greatest challenge a society faces is to contain that instinct by suppressing the sense of distinct, separate tribes within its population. DEI does the precise opposite of that, bolstering distinctions and stoking tribal instincts.
The best possible outcome of policies that boost group distinctions is ugly, lingering ethnic tension. The worst is something far more malign. Again, some history evinces the dangers: the first instance of modern DEI was the Soviet "Korenizatsiya" policy of the 1920s. It ended disastrously, with multiple ethnic cleansings (see Terry Martin's "Affirmative Action Empire.") Yugoslavia reprised this with its own "Narodi i narodnosti" policy. We know how that turned out.
DEI cannot be reformed. It is false and racist at its core. Someone needs to start over.
Not that nothing should be done. But what should be done should move past affirmative action (60 years is enough for a temporary program that may have done as much harm as good). It has to move toward recognizing that culture matters in educational, behavioral and vocational outcomes. It has to recognize that what has happened to the Black family over the last 60 years has been a tragedy because single parents simply cannot do as good a job as parents who work together (which is easier if married).
Real Diversity is not just Black-white. Equity is not equality. Inclusion as practiced is not inclusive; it is the reverse.
OK, so what are the positive ideas on which a new pro-equality movement could be based? There are old ideas that remain relevant: Equality of opportunity. Government programs and expenditures to seek to provide equality of opportunity to children of less affluent parents--from Day One of their lives. The Constitution does not permit discrimination based on race (whatever race is) But a business could seek to help people with greater needs--same for schools. And there is plenty of discrimination to work against. But doing that could begin by saying that affirmative action is over, everyone should get jobs on merit, etc.
Colleges have a problem because there is no single admission factor. They want athletes, tuba players and mathematicians, who may not have the highest grades outside their specialities, And faculty choices are multidimensional, too. But a school's needs have to be framed in constitutionally permitted ways and then they have to be followed. No "diversity" crap such as started all this.
I spent an hour with MLK in 1964. His goals seemed so fair, so understandable--even, at that time, so apparently reachable. One cannot go backwards, but he still seems to me like a beacon.
I agree with this. Colin Powell attributed his opportunity for success to affirmative action. One of the founding principles of Catholic Social Teaching is the "preferential option for the poor," which at its core is simply to help those who are disadvantaged prior to helping those who are advantaged. Finally, John Rawls' Justice as fairness is in a nutshell Nature is unfair so we should try to rectify that by fairly distributing scarce resources: Not every kid on the soccer field gets a band aide just because the hurt kid got a band aide. On the other hand, DEI absolutely perverted these reasonable ideals and simply made racism in both directions a viable job opportunity for academic grifters. Robin DiAngelo is the perfect example.
“Outlawing affirmative action of any kind, as Trump attempts to do, will discourage institutions from trying to level the playing field at all. This overreaction to DEI’s acknowledged missteps not only sets us back—it is immorality incarnate.”
Actually I’m fine with it. In the past, I was generally ok with affirmative action. But the DEI movement has utterly convinced me that race-based considerations absolutely need to completely die forever. They are a cancer that will inevitably metastasize if not eradicated. They are an ant that will lead to an infestation from a whole colony if not crushed. They are a weed that will spread out and suffocate an entire garden if not pulled out by the roots. We now know all of this to be true. This is the lesson and legacy of DEI: just stay the hell away from considerations based on race!
DEI is the single most regressive development of American society in my lifetime. It has enshrined racism (against whites, Asians, and Jews) as the guiding principle of our most elite institutions. It has embraced censorship against dissent to an extent that would astonish even the world’s worst authoritarians. It is the inveterate enemy of our free society. It is evil to its core. And it is irredeemable.
Any and all persons or institutions who failed to speak out against the illiberalism of DEI have deeply and perhaps permanently discredited themselves. DEI is the reason why I can no longer consider myself a part of the Democratic Party (the party that institutionalized race and sex based discrimination throughout the federal government). DEI is the reason why I can no longer subscribe to once-trusted media outlets like the NYT, the WP, or NPR (each one STILL maintains a webpage declaring their dedication to diversity and inclusion efforts). And DEI may yet prove to be the reason for the death of Higher Ed as we have known it in this country. Why the hell would anyone continue paying a fortune to attend indoctrination sessions (classes) at colleges and universities?
The Left has so thoroughly discredited itself through its embrace of DEI (and the related insanity over trans rights extremism) that a plurality thought Donald Trump was the saner choice for president. And if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know then I don’t know what will.
Extremism cannot be reformed. DEI (and its precursors like affirmative action) cannot be mended. They must be ended. It’s a question of national self preservation. DEI must be burned to the ground and its soil must be thoroughly salted to destroy any and all possibility for future growth. And if Trump is the person to do that, then I’m delighted to see something genuinely good emerge from his presidency!
DEI is an excellent example of why we shouldn’t endorse (or even tolerate) extreme positions that lie in the direction we want to see things move, though beyond the endpoint we desire. This one got way out of hand, and the result is that the benevolent idea at its core has been gravely injured.
This whole business of manipulating race for social justice is corrupt in its core. Dr King was never interested in opposing white supremacy for its own sake. He had a higher vision for humanity, black, white, brown, the whole point is that race doesn't matter. As long as one is faxiated in the color of skin, s/he has no capacity to lead society to a more promising land. That has been the deficiency on the left and in academia for at least the last half a century. Accusing Trump with 'throwing baby out with bathwater' is a cover-up for the fact that there was no baby to begin with.
I don't agree with the final point. Not that the Trump EO was an overreaction (aren't they all?), but that it will have consequences that are so dire. Maybe this is McWhorter's overreaction to Trump's?
Because "DEI" is such a vague, almost blank slate, overstating things is part of the landscape. But abandoning the concept doesn't necessarily mean abandoning the good.
Diversity is an outgrowth of the core idea of desegregation. It came into existence in a world where segregation -- and most pointedly in schools -- was able to replicate itself through the generations. While the process of desegregation was painful and arduous, I think it's fair to say it worked. Three or four generations of children have grown up with exposure to classmates, even friends that they might never have encountered until adulthood.
We live in the diverse country now that the desegregationists couldn't even have imagined. Desegregation and its cousin, affirmative action, were harsh but effective tools to get us here. But maybe their time has passed, at least as a legal matter, one of micro data about kinds of races, ethnicities, and all the rest? While there can still be some arguments -- and McWhorter makes them well -- I think we've achieved a level of diversity that makes us an international model for any nation that aspires to it.
Inclusion, too, was and is an ideal that we have made a reality, and is a function of diversity. While there remain pockets of exclusionists, they are on the margins now, not in the majority. We do not need a superstructure of formal rules for inclusion -- it has been an incipient value since the founding of this country recognized the ideal (if not the reality) that all men are created equal. We do not need to idolize difference as a value in order to appreciate it, and even prize it sometimes. As with diversity, we have come an enormous distance in our acceptance of differences, and it would be hard for us to back, though if we did in some formal way, it would be time to check our moral compass.
It is the replacement of "equal" with "equity" that has caused most of the problems, and the move back to equality under the law is still the hardest journey. But it's a journey back to first principles. No two people will ever be truly equal to one another in capacities, sentiments, personalities, abilities or much of anything else. That is the nature of human nature. What our constitution guarantees is equality of treatment under the law. No more laws based on racial classifications. No more laws based on sex (with rare, socially acceptable exceptions). Those were the kinds of laws we had on the books that were a direct violation of the idea of equality, and after a long struggle in the culture and the courts, we have settled the issue as a constitutional matter: any law that draws such lines is subject to close and exacting scrutiny of its reasons and its tailoring for exactly its stated purposes.
Equity was not that, and was never intended to be that. It was an equality of result, an image of justice that provided to be unjust and harsh in its obvious consequences.
Employers, governments, people will not be prohibited from exercising inclusion and diversity in their everyday lives once whatever people thought of "DEI" is removed from its formal enthronement. We know that from California's long experience having prohibited affirmative action; California is neither exclusionary nor segregated. That's the evidence I think we should keep in mind. Trump always overstates, always blusters, always goes too far. But in this case, he went too far because the banner-carriers for DEI had gone too far. Maybe we will go too far back again in the opposite direction; that's not unprecedented. But it is better right now that the pendulum swings back toward the center of our aspirations and our sanity.
"In combating DEI, Donald Trump is doing the right thing. In that sentence I just wrote, I almost choked writing the six final words. But it is what I believe......" Why write this? One nearly stopped reading right there as the rest of the article just drips with TDS. This is not good unbiased journalism. DEI is not just "affirmative action" in another form. This dogma along with most of the Progressives Woke agenda, accusing all opponents of being "racists," glorifying identity politics, dismissing meritocracy, and all that other "gender nonsense" has been far more destructive to Western Democracies than affirmative action ever was. This article is partisan beyond belief and just another rant against the democratically elected POTUS. For once, those who write these articles should just break out of their leftist bonds and write a balanced, non biased article....please?
Is it a blinding glimpse of the obvious that the majority of the electorate believes that DEI must change? However, is this reasonable opinion also shared by those who call the shots for the Democrats? If not then DEI will be an albatross around the neck of the party for the 2026 midterm and 2028 general elections.
The purpose of affirmative action is to promote colorblind, merit based hiring in circumstances where those in charge of hiring are not colorblind and will not hire strictly on the basis of merit. The problem with DEI as currently practiced is not just what's done--idiotic trainings, pronoun mandates and language-policing, etc.--but what is undone: it has not so far significantly addressed ongoing discrimination in hiring for non-college grad jobs or occupational sex segregation which in most jobs is still the norm.
The Trump crusade against DEI has less to do with the excesses of DEI theory and practice than with an attempt to supplant it with a new theory: racial discrimination is dead in America. The legacy of a hundred years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow has been overcome. Disparities between people now simply reflect differences in merit and are the fault of those lagging behind. This is of course a much bigger distortion of the truth than even the worst of the DEI nonsense. Let's call a spade a spade and bring up that other old but resilient term: white backlash.
"if outcomes between races aren't equal, the only possible reason can be discrimination—i.e. some kind of white malfeasance, whether intended or not—and egregious enough that rules and standards must be changed." How do changed rules standards produce the intended outcomes if only 7.7 % of White persons are poor compared to 17.9% of Black persons and 16.6% of Hispanic persons? Eliminating poverty is a necessary step. Also the poor Black ghetto must be dismantled. These are only the first steps towards greater equality. For an understanding of these issues see Desmond, Poverty by America.
I'd bet $10 that when they saw "Tuskegee Airmen" they thought the video was about the Tuskegee experiment, and therefore "hurtful and divisive" and just never went back to check their work.
Overall, this is a fine article, but I think it misses a point or two, e.g.:
"It has been high time for a major rethink on what DEI has turned into since the pandemic, with DEI becoming a term of art for what is too often an institutionalized anti-whiteness."
The problem with DEI is not that it's anti-white, but that it is racially and ethnically essentializing: it distinguishes people based on traits that they have no control over. DEI was terrible long before it became anti-white.
There are 80 years of sociological research (Tajfel, Sharif, et a.) demonstrating that the mere act of dividing people into official groups--no matter how factitious--has terrible invidious effects. There's a hell of a lot of history demonstrating this, too. Consider, for example:
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/identity-politics-in-history-from-byzantium-to-sri-lanka/
This is why DEI and such programs fail so abysmally.
Eons of natural selection have imbued hominids with a powerful tribal instinct that rivals the individual survival instinct itself. The greatest challenge a society faces is to contain that instinct by suppressing the sense of distinct, separate tribes within its population. DEI does the precise opposite of that, bolstering distinctions and stoking tribal instincts.
The best possible outcome of policies that boost group distinctions is ugly, lingering ethnic tension. The worst is something far more malign. Again, some history evinces the dangers: the first instance of modern DEI was the Soviet "Korenizatsiya" policy of the 1920s. It ended disastrously, with multiple ethnic cleansings (see Terry Martin's "Affirmative Action Empire.") Yugoslavia reprised this with its own "Narodi i narodnosti" policy. We know how that turned out.
John - I love your stuff generally, but you missed the mark on this one. DEI does not need to change, it needs to die.
Civil rights 2.0 need to be engaged and it needs to only be focused on class bias.
Help lift up the lower socioeconomic class and stop fixating on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
DEI is a defection tool of the privileged and well off, a cohort that you and I are part of. It is a luxury belief ideology that is destructive.
DEI cannot be reformed. It is false and racist at its core. Someone needs to start over.
Not that nothing should be done. But what should be done should move past affirmative action (60 years is enough for a temporary program that may have done as much harm as good). It has to move toward recognizing that culture matters in educational, behavioral and vocational outcomes. It has to recognize that what has happened to the Black family over the last 60 years has been a tragedy because single parents simply cannot do as good a job as parents who work together (which is easier if married).
Real Diversity is not just Black-white. Equity is not equality. Inclusion as practiced is not inclusive; it is the reverse.
OK, so what are the positive ideas on which a new pro-equality movement could be based? There are old ideas that remain relevant: Equality of opportunity. Government programs and expenditures to seek to provide equality of opportunity to children of less affluent parents--from Day One of their lives. The Constitution does not permit discrimination based on race (whatever race is) But a business could seek to help people with greater needs--same for schools. And there is plenty of discrimination to work against. But doing that could begin by saying that affirmative action is over, everyone should get jobs on merit, etc.
Colleges have a problem because there is no single admission factor. They want athletes, tuba players and mathematicians, who may not have the highest grades outside their specialities, And faculty choices are multidimensional, too. But a school's needs have to be framed in constitutionally permitted ways and then they have to be followed. No "diversity" crap such as started all this.
I spent an hour with MLK in 1964. His goals seemed so fair, so understandable--even, at that time, so apparently reachable. One cannot go backwards, but he still seems to me like a beacon.
I agree with this. Colin Powell attributed his opportunity for success to affirmative action. One of the founding principles of Catholic Social Teaching is the "preferential option for the poor," which at its core is simply to help those who are disadvantaged prior to helping those who are advantaged. Finally, John Rawls' Justice as fairness is in a nutshell Nature is unfair so we should try to rectify that by fairly distributing scarce resources: Not every kid on the soccer field gets a band aide just because the hurt kid got a band aide. On the other hand, DEI absolutely perverted these reasonable ideals and simply made racism in both directions a viable job opportunity for academic grifters. Robin DiAngelo is the perfect example.
“Outlawing affirmative action of any kind, as Trump attempts to do, will discourage institutions from trying to level the playing field at all. This overreaction to DEI’s acknowledged missteps not only sets us back—it is immorality incarnate.”
Actually I’m fine with it. In the past, I was generally ok with affirmative action. But the DEI movement has utterly convinced me that race-based considerations absolutely need to completely die forever. They are a cancer that will inevitably metastasize if not eradicated. They are an ant that will lead to an infestation from a whole colony if not crushed. They are a weed that will spread out and suffocate an entire garden if not pulled out by the roots. We now know all of this to be true. This is the lesson and legacy of DEI: just stay the hell away from considerations based on race!
DEI is the single most regressive development of American society in my lifetime. It has enshrined racism (against whites, Asians, and Jews) as the guiding principle of our most elite institutions. It has embraced censorship against dissent to an extent that would astonish even the world’s worst authoritarians. It is the inveterate enemy of our free society. It is evil to its core. And it is irredeemable.
Any and all persons or institutions who failed to speak out against the illiberalism of DEI have deeply and perhaps permanently discredited themselves. DEI is the reason why I can no longer consider myself a part of the Democratic Party (the party that institutionalized race and sex based discrimination throughout the federal government). DEI is the reason why I can no longer subscribe to once-trusted media outlets like the NYT, the WP, or NPR (each one STILL maintains a webpage declaring their dedication to diversity and inclusion efforts). And DEI may yet prove to be the reason for the death of Higher Ed as we have known it in this country. Why the hell would anyone continue paying a fortune to attend indoctrination sessions (classes) at colleges and universities?
The Left has so thoroughly discredited itself through its embrace of DEI (and the related insanity over trans rights extremism) that a plurality thought Donald Trump was the saner choice for president. And if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know then I don’t know what will.
Extremism cannot be reformed. DEI (and its precursors like affirmative action) cannot be mended. They must be ended. It’s a question of national self preservation. DEI must be burned to the ground and its soil must be thoroughly salted to destroy any and all possibility for future growth. And if Trump is the person to do that, then I’m delighted to see something genuinely good emerge from his presidency!
DEI is an excellent example of why we shouldn’t endorse (or even tolerate) extreme positions that lie in the direction we want to see things move, though beyond the endpoint we desire. This one got way out of hand, and the result is that the benevolent idea at its core has been gravely injured.
This whole business of manipulating race for social justice is corrupt in its core. Dr King was never interested in opposing white supremacy for its own sake. He had a higher vision for humanity, black, white, brown, the whole point is that race doesn't matter. As long as one is faxiated in the color of skin, s/he has no capacity to lead society to a more promising land. That has been the deficiency on the left and in academia for at least the last half a century. Accusing Trump with 'throwing baby out with bathwater' is a cover-up for the fact that there was no baby to begin with.
I don't agree with the final point. Not that the Trump EO was an overreaction (aren't they all?), but that it will have consequences that are so dire. Maybe this is McWhorter's overreaction to Trump's?
Because "DEI" is such a vague, almost blank slate, overstating things is part of the landscape. But abandoning the concept doesn't necessarily mean abandoning the good.
Diversity is an outgrowth of the core idea of desegregation. It came into existence in a world where segregation -- and most pointedly in schools -- was able to replicate itself through the generations. While the process of desegregation was painful and arduous, I think it's fair to say it worked. Three or four generations of children have grown up with exposure to classmates, even friends that they might never have encountered until adulthood.
We live in the diverse country now that the desegregationists couldn't even have imagined. Desegregation and its cousin, affirmative action, were harsh but effective tools to get us here. But maybe their time has passed, at least as a legal matter, one of micro data about kinds of races, ethnicities, and all the rest? While there can still be some arguments -- and McWhorter makes them well -- I think we've achieved a level of diversity that makes us an international model for any nation that aspires to it.
Inclusion, too, was and is an ideal that we have made a reality, and is a function of diversity. While there remain pockets of exclusionists, they are on the margins now, not in the majority. We do not need a superstructure of formal rules for inclusion -- it has been an incipient value since the founding of this country recognized the ideal (if not the reality) that all men are created equal. We do not need to idolize difference as a value in order to appreciate it, and even prize it sometimes. As with diversity, we have come an enormous distance in our acceptance of differences, and it would be hard for us to back, though if we did in some formal way, it would be time to check our moral compass.
It is the replacement of "equal" with "equity" that has caused most of the problems, and the move back to equality under the law is still the hardest journey. But it's a journey back to first principles. No two people will ever be truly equal to one another in capacities, sentiments, personalities, abilities or much of anything else. That is the nature of human nature. What our constitution guarantees is equality of treatment under the law. No more laws based on racial classifications. No more laws based on sex (with rare, socially acceptable exceptions). Those were the kinds of laws we had on the books that were a direct violation of the idea of equality, and after a long struggle in the culture and the courts, we have settled the issue as a constitutional matter: any law that draws such lines is subject to close and exacting scrutiny of its reasons and its tailoring for exactly its stated purposes.
Equity was not that, and was never intended to be that. It was an equality of result, an image of justice that provided to be unjust and harsh in its obvious consequences.
Employers, governments, people will not be prohibited from exercising inclusion and diversity in their everyday lives once whatever people thought of "DEI" is removed from its formal enthronement. We know that from California's long experience having prohibited affirmative action; California is neither exclusionary nor segregated. That's the evidence I think we should keep in mind. Trump always overstates, always blusters, always goes too far. But in this case, he went too far because the banner-carriers for DEI had gone too far. Maybe we will go too far back again in the opposite direction; that's not unprecedented. But it is better right now that the pendulum swings back toward the center of our aspirations and our sanity.
"In combating DEI, Donald Trump is doing the right thing. In that sentence I just wrote, I almost choked writing the six final words. But it is what I believe......" Why write this? One nearly stopped reading right there as the rest of the article just drips with TDS. This is not good unbiased journalism. DEI is not just "affirmative action" in another form. This dogma along with most of the Progressives Woke agenda, accusing all opponents of being "racists," glorifying identity politics, dismissing meritocracy, and all that other "gender nonsense" has been far more destructive to Western Democracies than affirmative action ever was. This article is partisan beyond belief and just another rant against the democratically elected POTUS. For once, those who write these articles should just break out of their leftist bonds and write a balanced, non biased article....please?
Is it a blinding glimpse of the obvious that the majority of the electorate believes that DEI must change? However, is this reasonable opinion also shared by those who call the shots for the Democrats? If not then DEI will be an albatross around the neck of the party for the 2026 midterm and 2028 general elections.
Thanks for this. More John McWhorter, please: his work is always a breath of fresh air.
The purpose of affirmative action is to promote colorblind, merit based hiring in circumstances where those in charge of hiring are not colorblind and will not hire strictly on the basis of merit. The problem with DEI as currently practiced is not just what's done--idiotic trainings, pronoun mandates and language-policing, etc.--but what is undone: it has not so far significantly addressed ongoing discrimination in hiring for non-college grad jobs or occupational sex segregation which in most jobs is still the norm.
The Trump crusade against DEI has less to do with the excesses of DEI theory and practice than with an attempt to supplant it with a new theory: racial discrimination is dead in America. The legacy of a hundred years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow has been overcome. Disparities between people now simply reflect differences in merit and are the fault of those lagging behind. This is of course a much bigger distortion of the truth than even the worst of the DEI nonsense. Let's call a spade a spade and bring up that other old but resilient term: white backlash.
"if outcomes between races aren't equal, the only possible reason can be discrimination—i.e. some kind of white malfeasance, whether intended or not—and egregious enough that rules and standards must be changed." How do changed rules standards produce the intended outcomes if only 7.7 % of White persons are poor compared to 17.9% of Black persons and 16.6% of Hispanic persons? Eliminating poverty is a necessary step. Also the poor Black ghetto must be dismantled. These are only the first steps towards greater equality. For an understanding of these issues see Desmond, Poverty by America.
I'd bet $10 that when they saw "Tuskegee Airmen" they thought the video was about the Tuskegee experiment, and therefore "hurtful and divisive" and just never went back to check their work.
probably the best summation of the problem I've seen