DEI need to DIE. It is a divisive, destructive and illiberal construct backing a power grab by collectivist radicals who also desire to profit from it within the hive of their useless consulting practices and NGOs. It not only does not solve any of the problems it professes to target, it creates a much bigger mess of resulting from the erasing of merit as the primary hiring, promotion and reward factor.
Here is were we should be at this point in our fantastic social justice and civil right progress... everything should have shifted from race and other victim group identity advocacy to 100% other-group-blind economic class advocacy.
Today there is no material Institutional racism nor gender bias. Females in fact dominate much of the economy today. However, outcomes for certain races, for example blacks, remain problematic. Forcing society to give preference based on race has three key problems while failing to actually solve the problem of improved group outcomes.
1. It is racist itself, immoral, illiberal and likely unconstitutional.
2. It reduces organizational performance as criteria other than demonstrated performance merit are used to select and promote people within a role.
3. It negatively impacts those given preference as bypassing the development learning process they need to be successful long-term.
The focus instead should be to completely reform the public education system to focus on preparing each and every student for his next step toward the goal of an economically self-sufficient life, while also implementing robust incentives to bring in more good paying manufacturing, industrial, trade and service jobs into labor surplus areas.
The problem is that the type of people attempting to benefit from victim advocacy don't support these things. They don't support the school reform need because the public education system is a unionized public adult jobs program and the unions donate money and personnel time almost exclusively to the same Democrat party that pushes DEI... the unions don't support the type of changes required and the Democrats benefit from the control of the education system that plants ideological ideas of government dependency into the heads of young voters instead of teaching them self-sufficiency. On the business side, these advocates don't play in the sandbox and cannot make enough power and money from it.
So these same advocates for blacks are the biggest roadblock for fixing the problems in the black community. DEI, as well as reparations, is their desperate deflection from this truth because as the black community figures it out... their race-baiting power and money making industry is done.
Shirky principle—on steroids. . .I think that sums up the ways of many people who engage organizations in what they call anti-racism or DEI. As Upton Sinclair said: “It’s hard to get a man to understand something that his paycheck depends on him not understanding. [Or, at least, pretending to be oblivious.]
Most DEI work doesn’t work, and many who claim to want a particular outcome might feel they are getting what they desire until they are not.
Others have been working with organizations to produce results that managers and individual contributors benefit from in tangible and intangible ways.
If more DEI practitioners follow a path similar to what Dr. @Rachel Kleinfeld lays out in her article, organizations and institutions will benefit in myriad ways if those skill sets and mindsets are mindfully developed.
Good job. I see it the same. But I'm frustrated that there seems to be a lot of us who understand but can only comment. I think Persuasion needs to think about how to help us collaborate on ways to get the word out more simply -- as you are explaining it. Persuasion could help us make our voices heard in ways that Persuasion's philosophical essays don't -- I'm not opposing those, I just think there are other possibilities and lots of talent hidden in the subscriber community.
This is the same old same old. Anybody who piously capitalizes "White" gives the game away. As long as the set of assumptions underlying "diversity training" start from "dominance" or "power," as long as certain people are identified as in need of "diversity training" because they themselves are alleged to lack "diversity" or to be insufficiently aware of their "dominance," as long as earnest warnings about devious folk determined to "turn back the clock" block any skepticism about the project, we might as well be honest and acknowledge that what is proposed here is a more subtle version of the same rigged game of "oppressed vs. oppressor." It's impossible to be too cynical. The game may change, but the rules will stay the same. I don't mean to say, either optimistically or pessimistically, that the "dominant" will stay "dominant." I mean to say that I confidently expect that in any system of "diversity training," any formal attempt to inculcate "pluralism," some people will get to insult other people with impunity, some people will get to have an identity of their own and others will have one assigned to them. That is what this sort of stuff is supposed to prevent. Instead it sets it in stone, even if its practitioners think that turning the stone upside down makes a righteous difference. How about stopping this stuff? How about letting people get on with it and sort themselves out? The society has changed enormously and is going to continue to change. Fine. Let's just live with it and stop fussing about whether everybody changes in the same way at the same time. If the devious folk are out there--I think they're overrated--so what? No society is perfect, and no change is complete.
This is an excellent and thoughtful essay. Yet, can DEI be reformed? More importantly, should it be? I don’t think so. Anyone who has suffered through a DEI program understands the totalitarian nature of the movement. Glossaries are provided that redefine common words. DEI statements are required, thus compelling speech. Solzhenitsyn and Havel convinced me that totalitarians hold power by forcing citizens to repeat what they know to be lies. It weakens the will and makes resistance difficult.
The DEI movement seeks not to unite, but to divide. There is no pluralism. It does not celebrate differences. We need look no further than the capitalization of White and Black, which others have commented on.
Ideologues have long robbed people of European descent of their ethnic and cultural uniqueness. Somehow, the Irish, Portuguese, Germans, and Sicilians are indistinguishable. Try filling out a death certificate or hospital admissions paperwork. There will be six or seven types of Asian, numerous islanders, and so forth. I have never seen Basque, which I would prefer if forced.
The same is now true for African Americans with Black. In Florida, where I live, the unique ethnic heritage of African Americans is central to the civil-rights movement. The first NAACP chapter in my community was started by a Bahamian immigrant who chafed under the degrading treatment of “black folks” that dominated the culture. Just as with White, Black seeks to erase the cultural differences of African Americans. Haitians are lumped in with Jamaicans, and Africans. The term people-of-color is worse, since it only means anyone who is not white, the biggest and most nonsensical erasure of differences ever imagined.
I love living in an ethnically diverse community. My next-door neighbor is Chileno, not Latinx as anglophone DEI adherents would force upon him. Across the street, Argentinian, three doors down Cuban. We need to reject the totalitarians and the cultural imperialists of DEI.
You state "While White men as a group remain at the top level of dominance in money and power in American society, many individual men are nowhere near that level." This is not true. Asians have higher median family incomes than any other ethnic group (whew I almost wrote "race.") As a white, straight, reasonably successful male, I get very weary of being called an oppressor and considered the enemy by PBS, the NYT and similar, well, Woke institutions. I think maybe the woke themselves need to be awakened to their own exorbitant privilege - that is: the profound good fortune to live their lives in the United States
I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I also have a lot of sympathy for Lucy T's position. Perhaps this is an intermediate position. First note that you point out
"But it sure looks as if DEI as it is currently being practiced is adding bricks to the very wall its proponents claim to want to knock down"
Agreed. But you need to take the next step. This is no accident. The higher the walls the more they can claim DEI is needed. Knock the walls down and they are out of a career with no real skill. To see this in spades, read Kendi and Peniel Joseph of respectability politics. Kendi goes so far as to call his parents ideas racist because they taught him to value hard work and education. Both of them sell the idea that no one in the ghetto should take the path they took (and escape).
Combine this backward motive with some knowledge of CRT's long-term program, which is to destroy capitalist culture so we can reach utopia, and you will end up very near Lucy T. Step 1 is to totally dismantle DEI and get those ideologues out of here. As you've shown we make progress quickly without them. Then some programs that simply encourage contact would seem fine. But don't try to reform DEI.
Sure thing. “My parents followed Norton’s directive: They fed me the mantra that education and hard work would uplift me, just as it had uplifted them, and would, in the end, uplift all Black people. My parents, were susceptible to the racist idea that it was laziness that kept Black people down, so they paid more attention to chastising Black people than to Reagan’s policies.” page 27, Chapter 2, How 2 B an Antiracist. This view only comes to him after grad school, his PhD dissertation acknowledgments are over-the-top grateful (as they should be), but by the time he writes How to Be... they are insulting in their brevity.
Thank you for writing this. I appreciate the thoughtful prescriptions for how to do better, the empathetic understanding of what DEI was meant to achieve (a more diverse, empathetic, inclusive society), and the importance evidence that current practices are undermining these goals. I think this article can be shared with existing DEI advocates and participants and persuade at least some of them that there is a much better way. I especially appreciate that you do provide some solutions and that this is about how to fix DEI - not destroy it. I will be thinking on Social Contact theory and looking for further reading. Thank you.
The vast majority of rich, powerful people are white men. The vast majority of white men are neither rich nor powerful. Know both facts, and don’t confuse them.
DEI need to DIE. It is a divisive, destructive and illiberal construct backing a power grab by collectivist radicals who also desire to profit from it within the hive of their useless consulting practices and NGOs. It not only does not solve any of the problems it professes to target, it creates a much bigger mess of resulting from the erasing of merit as the primary hiring, promotion and reward factor.
DEI is the Shirky Principle on steroids.
Here is were we should be at this point in our fantastic social justice and civil right progress... everything should have shifted from race and other victim group identity advocacy to 100% other-group-blind economic class advocacy.
Today there is no material Institutional racism nor gender bias. Females in fact dominate much of the economy today. However, outcomes for certain races, for example blacks, remain problematic. Forcing society to give preference based on race has three key problems while failing to actually solve the problem of improved group outcomes.
1. It is racist itself, immoral, illiberal and likely unconstitutional.
2. It reduces organizational performance as criteria other than demonstrated performance merit are used to select and promote people within a role.
3. It negatively impacts those given preference as bypassing the development learning process they need to be successful long-term.
The focus instead should be to completely reform the public education system to focus on preparing each and every student for his next step toward the goal of an economically self-sufficient life, while also implementing robust incentives to bring in more good paying manufacturing, industrial, trade and service jobs into labor surplus areas.
The problem is that the type of people attempting to benefit from victim advocacy don't support these things. They don't support the school reform need because the public education system is a unionized public adult jobs program and the unions donate money and personnel time almost exclusively to the same Democrat party that pushes DEI... the unions don't support the type of changes required and the Democrats benefit from the control of the education system that plants ideological ideas of government dependency into the heads of young voters instead of teaching them self-sufficiency. On the business side, these advocates don't play in the sandbox and cannot make enough power and money from it.
So these same advocates for blacks are the biggest roadblock for fixing the problems in the black community. DEI, as well as reparations, is their desperate deflection from this truth because as the black community figures it out... their race-baiting power and money making industry is done.
Shirky principle—on steroids. . .I think that sums up the ways of many people who engage organizations in what they call anti-racism or DEI. As Upton Sinclair said: “It’s hard to get a man to understand something that his paycheck depends on him not understanding. [Or, at least, pretending to be oblivious.]
Most DEI work doesn’t work, and many who claim to want a particular outcome might feel they are getting what they desire until they are not.
Others have been working with organizations to produce results that managers and individual contributors benefit from in tangible and intangible ways.
If more DEI practitioners follow a path similar to what Dr. @Rachel Kleinfeld lays out in her article, organizations and institutions will benefit in myriad ways if those skill sets and mindsets are mindfully developed.
Good job. I see it the same. But I'm frustrated that there seems to be a lot of us who understand but can only comment. I think Persuasion needs to think about how to help us collaborate on ways to get the word out more simply -- as you are explaining it. Persuasion could help us make our voices heard in ways that Persuasion's philosophical essays don't -- I'm not opposing those, I just think there are other possibilities and lots of talent hidden in the subscriber community.
This is the same old same old. Anybody who piously capitalizes "White" gives the game away. As long as the set of assumptions underlying "diversity training" start from "dominance" or "power," as long as certain people are identified as in need of "diversity training" because they themselves are alleged to lack "diversity" or to be insufficiently aware of their "dominance," as long as earnest warnings about devious folk determined to "turn back the clock" block any skepticism about the project, we might as well be honest and acknowledge that what is proposed here is a more subtle version of the same rigged game of "oppressed vs. oppressor." It's impossible to be too cynical. The game may change, but the rules will stay the same. I don't mean to say, either optimistically or pessimistically, that the "dominant" will stay "dominant." I mean to say that I confidently expect that in any system of "diversity training," any formal attempt to inculcate "pluralism," some people will get to insult other people with impunity, some people will get to have an identity of their own and others will have one assigned to them. That is what this sort of stuff is supposed to prevent. Instead it sets it in stone, even if its practitioners think that turning the stone upside down makes a righteous difference. How about stopping this stuff? How about letting people get on with it and sort themselves out? The society has changed enormously and is going to continue to change. Fine. Let's just live with it and stop fussing about whether everybody changes in the same way at the same time. If the devious folk are out there--I think they're overrated--so what? No society is perfect, and no change is complete.
Brilliantly written and spot on! I appreciate the depth and rigor that you put into this piece, thank you.
This is an excellent and thoughtful essay. Yet, can DEI be reformed? More importantly, should it be? I don’t think so. Anyone who has suffered through a DEI program understands the totalitarian nature of the movement. Glossaries are provided that redefine common words. DEI statements are required, thus compelling speech. Solzhenitsyn and Havel convinced me that totalitarians hold power by forcing citizens to repeat what they know to be lies. It weakens the will and makes resistance difficult.
The DEI movement seeks not to unite, but to divide. There is no pluralism. It does not celebrate differences. We need look no further than the capitalization of White and Black, which others have commented on.
Ideologues have long robbed people of European descent of their ethnic and cultural uniqueness. Somehow, the Irish, Portuguese, Germans, and Sicilians are indistinguishable. Try filling out a death certificate or hospital admissions paperwork. There will be six or seven types of Asian, numerous islanders, and so forth. I have never seen Basque, which I would prefer if forced.
The same is now true for African Americans with Black. In Florida, where I live, the unique ethnic heritage of African Americans is central to the civil-rights movement. The first NAACP chapter in my community was started by a Bahamian immigrant who chafed under the degrading treatment of “black folks” that dominated the culture. Just as with White, Black seeks to erase the cultural differences of African Americans. Haitians are lumped in with Jamaicans, and Africans. The term people-of-color is worse, since it only means anyone who is not white, the biggest and most nonsensical erasure of differences ever imagined.
I love living in an ethnically diverse community. My next-door neighbor is Chileno, not Latinx as anglophone DEI adherents would force upon him. Across the street, Argentinian, three doors down Cuban. We need to reject the totalitarians and the cultural imperialists of DEI.
You state "While White men as a group remain at the top level of dominance in money and power in American society, many individual men are nowhere near that level." This is not true. Asians have higher median family incomes than any other ethnic group (whew I almost wrote "race.") As a white, straight, reasonably successful male, I get very weary of being called an oppressor and considered the enemy by PBS, the NYT and similar, well, Woke institutions. I think maybe the woke themselves need to be awakened to their own exorbitant privilege - that is: the profound good fortune to live their lives in the United States
I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I also have a lot of sympathy for Lucy T's position. Perhaps this is an intermediate position. First note that you point out
"But it sure looks as if DEI as it is currently being practiced is adding bricks to the very wall its proponents claim to want to knock down"
Agreed. But you need to take the next step. This is no accident. The higher the walls the more they can claim DEI is needed. Knock the walls down and they are out of a career with no real skill. To see this in spades, read Kendi and Peniel Joseph of respectability politics. Kendi goes so far as to call his parents ideas racist because they taught him to value hard work and education. Both of them sell the idea that no one in the ghetto should take the path they took (and escape).
Combine this backward motive with some knowledge of CRT's long-term program, which is to destroy capitalist culture so we can reach utopia, and you will end up very near Lucy T. Step 1 is to totally dismantle DEI and get those ideologues out of here. As you've shown we make progress quickly without them. Then some programs that simply encourage contact would seem fine. But don't try to reform DEI.
A favor. I don't doubt that Kendl said that, but if possible could you please tell me where and in which book. I would like to quote it.
Sure thing. “My parents followed Norton’s directive: They fed me the mantra that education and hard work would uplift me, just as it had uplifted them, and would, in the end, uplift all Black people. My parents, were susceptible to the racist idea that it was laziness that kept Black people down, so they paid more attention to chastising Black people than to Reagan’s policies.” page 27, Chapter 2, How 2 B an Antiracist. This view only comes to him after grad school, his PhD dissertation acknowledgments are over-the-top grateful (as they should be), but by the time he writes How to Be... they are insulting in their brevity.
Thank you for writing this. I appreciate the thoughtful prescriptions for how to do better, the empathetic understanding of what DEI was meant to achieve (a more diverse, empathetic, inclusive society), and the importance evidence that current practices are undermining these goals. I think this article can be shared with existing DEI advocates and participants and persuade at least some of them that there is a much better way. I especially appreciate that you do provide some solutions and that this is about how to fix DEI - not destroy it. I will be thinking on Social Contact theory and looking for further reading. Thank you.
The vast majority of rich, powerful people are white men. The vast majority of white men are neither rich nor powerful. Know both facts, and don’t confuse them.