DEI DIEs a Little More
Tabia Lee, a college DEI administrator, was fired for not being uncompromising enough in disadvantaging white students and male students and Jewish students. The oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is a profound moral error, which can lead folks to terrible places.
DEI began as an academic theory: group identity is paramount, and should be considered in every selection and hiring and promotion decision. Even if that creates injustices or inefficiencies on the individual level (which, of course, it will-any new hiring regime will) it will be a good thing cumulatively. In fact, it’s so good that every organization of any size should hire dozens of six-figure professionals and divert millions of dollars to this effort. These many thousands of well-paid college graduates (without any other appreciable job market skills) will never actually study ‘inequities’ scientifically, or formulate short-term or long-term solutions. Inequities will be a ‘problem’ that will never go away, and so the DEI jobs will never go away. The DEI power will never go away. We will have a new Leftist administrative class with enormous power over American life and they will direct resources and selections to their favored groups and projects. This will often disadvantage the poor, men, Asians, veterans… even Hispanics and black folks (if they’re conservative) but that is the point.
Diversity and inclusion are good things to most normal Americans. Equity sounds similar to a popular concept (equality) even though, in many ways, in implementation, it’s its opposite. DEI experienced a great deal of support from liberal arts majors who wanted lucrative jobs and, in the hysterical deformation of American politics and culture which we all experienced in 2020, it briefly became unimpeachable in many circles. Movie studios, universities, federal agencies, corporations should all be constrained from executing DEI agendas by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, of course. That assumes that there is an honest media and a legally scrupulous regulatory and litigatory regime, though. There were not.
DEI’s fortunes have crested. We’re now seeing the slow and accelerating collapse of the ideology. Ultimately its biggest obstacle turned out to be the market-the market of economic decisions, and the market of ideas: social media, alternative media, independent debate. (That is why DEI-adjacent thinkers in the West are turning towards efforts to neuter and control social media. They perceive the risks to their program of free flows of information). DEI imperatives were able to capture many of our elite institutions and if they had been able to improve their performance (or just not noticeably degrade it) it would have reigned over American life for decades, redirecting billions of dollars to privileged folks with graduate degrees, and away from plumbers and home-buyers and housewives and schoolboards. We should all take a moment and be grateful we live in this timeline. The distortions are still widespread and destructive… but they seem to be declining.
My first DEI treatment, about culture/television/film:
I’ve included more data points below. The legacy media is quite upset because they actually have to defend these proposals on their merits, which is something they are unused to doing. The act of throwing labels out (‘reactionary’, ‘misogynist’, ‘racist’) has done a lot of heavy lifting over the past decade but it has weakened with overuse. If these programs were merited or helpful then folks would be making that case. Alas, they are not. “When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." The ideal should always be (and should have always been) expanding opportunity and selecting based upon merits. Most folks-of every race and station-intuitively know this to be true.
In Understanding Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
lays out the origin of DEI in ideology (postmodern ideas, and radical political values). “Ideology is the mother of all preconceived notions.” He correctly notes that DEI arises not from a concern with improving the lives of ordinary American within the current system but from a worldview which sorts all groups in oppressor/oppressed. This binary obviously breaks down in many cases upon contact with reality. Is a black student raised in a wealthy home oppressed by the poor and adopted white student who’s competing for a college spot? Is she disadvantaged at all? DEI isn’t concerned with individuals, or even organizations. It is a naked attempt to wholly remake the society, according to a model that most Americans do not find compelling. There’s a reason these ideas originated and germinated in academic departments, formulated by folks who mostly didn’t have families or own homes-folks who had never started a business or coached a sports team. DEI is ideology, through and through, and its appeals to helping ‘representation’ and ‘marginalized groups’ are simply cover for its real goal. Ask yourself: if helping black folks was the primary goal of DEI they would be happy to increase the hiring and promotion of black conservatives, right? They would promote the ideas of black academics who came to opposite conclusions, would they not? In every case where this has been at question (that I know of) they have preferred the white candidates who share their ideology. They have repeatedly bullied and silenced the studies and claims of black (gay, female, immigrant, etc.) academics when they proved inconvenient for their ideology. These ideas are not about fairness… or even inclusion. Most people now realize this.:It also… enables them to respond to any controversy with innocuous-sounding counter-arguments that the opponents are simply opposed to “being nice.”
The hidden meaning is:
Implemented by bureaucracy behind closed doors.
Supporters of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion will constantly shift back and forth between the two meanings depending on the context. In particular, they will claim that DEI is about one thing, while it actually is about its exact opposite.
To put it bluntly DEI activists:
Change the definition of “Be Nice”
Then demand that everyone “Be Nice” by this new definition or be branded “Not Nice” in public.
This game only works for people who are very concerned with the public image that they project to others. Unfortunately, in the social media era, that is a vast swath of American society.
The concept of “Equity” was invented because it is useful to the Left:
In justifying discrimination.
Bullying organizations into distributing money and jobs to their followers.
Enables the small minority of college-educated Leftist with the Oppressed groups to rapidly rise up within organizations
Gives material incentives to Oppressed groups to pretend to be Woke while having others pay the bill.
The concept of Inclusion ignores that:
The “harm” caused by free speech is to Leftists, not to the supposedly Oppressed.
Enforces obedience within the Oppressed, who are kept on even tighter rein than Oppressor groups
Now that we see what’s going on here, let’s get into some case studies. Arguments might be compelling or popular in certain circles but they ultimately must survive contact with reality. Unfortunately for the Left, institutional power only goes so far. Reality does have an objective existence, and it must be respected… or your ideology will collapse. It can do an enormous amount of damage before it does though.
Academic Misdeeds
Our universities have seen a flurry of ethical breaches come to light in the past year. There’s an assumption that DEI will find outstanding candidates from underrepresented groups and therefore improve the entire system. If selection has been pretty fair though (and DEI advocates generally resist any objective analyses or metrics regarding that question) you’re liable to promote people above their ability. Women and gay folks and African Americans can also be lazy or incompetent and when you make an organization primarily concerned with identity group you reduce the incentives to be rigorous or hardworking or professionally impressive. The more people that are selected for their identity groups, the worse the selection process will be and the more unimpressive will be the winners of the process. Notably, these winners are nearly all from privileged backgrounds themselves. The minorities from poor and working class backgrounds (Roland Fryer, Thomas Sowell, Wilfred Reilly) have been victimized by DEI and are implacable opponents of it.
Observe the recent examples of:
Linda Oubre (Whittier College)
Ostentatious diversification of this sort serves at least three functions. First is the bioleninist loyalty function: the successful diverse candidate understands without having to be told that she owes her positions to her diversity, thereby ensuring her ironclad loyalty to the system that put her in place, as well as to the specific people who hired and promoted her. Second is as a protective screen: to criticize the person who hired the diverse is to criticize the diversity they hired, and doing that is doing a racism, a misogyny, a homophobia, and a transphobia, and you don’t want to do that, so shut your mouth.
Of course, Oubré is absolutely not above escalating her own race card to the hate hoax level.
In her talk at South by Southwest, Oubré said she has “received death threats that are racialized.” She told The Times that she and others at Whittier, including board members, have received threats, and that those are under investigation by campus security working with local law enforcement.
A Whittier Police Department spokesperson told The Times on March 21 that it had no reports of threats made against Oubré, the university or the Board of Trustees.
Claudine Gay (Harvard University)
Harvard president Claudine Gay has problems. Touted as the first black woman to run the nation’s most prestigious university, she assumed leadership with high expectations, but her tenure, which began this summer, has been mired in scandal. As dean and then president, Gay has been accused of bullying colleagues, suppressing free speech, overseeing a racist admissions program, and, following the Hamas terror campaign against Israel, failing to stand up to rampant anti-Semitism on campus.
Kamala Harris (and her academic co-author)
Her recent plagiarism scandal (mostly minimized and ignored by the media)…
only serves to reinforce the galling impression that the highest positions in the land are occupied by empty, undeserving people.
Of course certain folks have rallied to her defense, as they did Gay’s. Earnest people have actually suggested that these women are being persecuted because they’re women, or black, or black women. The question most people ask is, “Yes, but did they plagiarize?’
The rot isn’t just affecting individual reputations and careers though.
As
writes, regarding the organizational disarray at Cambridge University:This dramatic increase in mental health… is endemic across the academic sector, and indeed more broadly through society. There are probably a few things going on here. The mental health crisis amongst young people, particularly young women, and most particularly liberal young women (who comprise about half of Cambridge’s student body), is well known, and probably at least partly a consequence of social media and smart phones. At the same time, the victim worship prevailing on university campuses teaches young people to wallow in whatever emotional or psychological challenges they face, instead of learning to be resilient and engage in a praxis of self-overcoming: in other words, the ideological environment inside academia is crazy-making, especially when you add it to such notions as ‘you’re really a boy on the inside’ and ‘you’re white so you need to hate yourself’. The administrative indulgence of ‘anxiety disorders’ and ‘learning disabilities’, with extra time on tests and so forth granted to anyone claiming a diagnosis, is a further incentive to identify as disabled, since this provides a direct competitive advantage over those of one’s able-minded peers who still respect themselves enough so as to not feign insanity.
DEI negatively affects the selection processes, the culture, and the morale of members. It rewards competitors for inalienable characteristics, and therefore downgrades (or eliminates) the values of honesty and competence. There are certain points at which you will have to make a choice between a female candidate who’s less impressive and a much more competent and hard-working male candidate. Which will be chosen? DEI is clear about this, and this decision iterated 10,000x is ruining institutions.
The secondary effects of making people more brittle and dependent upon their identity groups for status and identity (rather than, say, their ideas or accomplishments) is ruining an entire generation of young scholars. There will be an enormous mess to clean up in the years to come, as there always is when bad and harmful ideas capture important institutions.
DEI doesn’t actually prioritize representation of certain groups. It prioritizes ideological conformity. Ultimately the program is about ideas, not people. When pressed to sign a statement that they disagree with, black and queer and female students are just as affected as white male ones. DEI would rather have organizations full of white progressives than ones with outstanding black conservatives or libertarians. This is an objection which, as far as I know, has never been addressed.
writes that Diversity Statements Violate Institutional Neutrality!A year ago, only three U.S. colleges and universities were officially committed to institutional neutrality:
Institutional Neutrality is the idea that colleges and universities should not, as institutions, take positions on social and political issues unless those issues “threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.” Instead, these discussions should be left to students and faculty.
Since then, the number of such schools has multiplied by more than a factor of 7. (My own George Mason University isn’t one of them, though by my count the number of official emails on current events has dropped to zero). And what the list lacks in quantity, it makes up for in prestige…
There’s also the case of the DEI College Director Fired for Not Being 'Right Kind of Black Person wherein a progressive black woman was apparently forced to resign because she wasn’t uncompromising enough against white and male and Jewsih students.
These are all recent stories about DEI and they all reflect negatively on the program. How many success stories have you seen? How many credible defenders are speaking in public? DEI is dying.
The statistical bases of DEI (never robust) have begun to crumble as well. DEI supporters don’t want social science or effective policies. They want ideological conformity. If social science contradicts their aims and values they are ALWAYS (as far as I can tell) opposed to it. The few studies which indicated some promising effects of ‘diversity’ (not DEI) have been criticized and not proven to be replicable. The initial release of these few studies was greeted with a flurry (dozens, at least) of media articles. Their re-examination has mostly gone unremarked, but corporate and business leaders are slowly becoming aware of the scientific reality.
Diversity Was Supposed to Make Us Rich. Not So Much.
New research questions the methodology of a McKinsey study that helped create widespread belief that diversity is good for profits
The Secret Service’s public failure during the first assassination attempt on Trump shone an unkind light on DEI policies. Most people would rather have competent (and tall) men around the president than less-qualified women. This is the majority opinion among men, women, racial minorities, etc. It is, very plainly, common sense. It’s not DEI ideology though.
The obvious question: Why so many female agents? The answer, unfortunately, is the same as in many other institutions: DEI. The Secret Service has highlighted “diversity” as a key priority and its director, Kimberly Cheatle, hired by President Biden in 2022, has pledged to increase dramatically the number of women in the ranks.
This is official policy. The Secret Service openly boasts that it “prioritizes recruiting women candidates” and has formulated an “affirmative action” plan to increase the number of women, LGBT, Native Americans, and other identity groups.
Cheatle herself told CBS News that her goal was to reach 30 percent female recruits by 2030: “I’m very conscious, as I sit in this chair now, of making sure that we need to attract diverse candidates and ensure that we are developing and giving opportunities to everybody in our workforce, and particularly women.” The agency is well on its way. In 2021, for the first time, the special agent training class graduated more women than men.
To say it plainly: there is no need for women in a president’s security detail. The Secret Service is an elite institution that can funnel down a large number of candidates to select the few who will protect the president. The best candidates—the strongest and fastest, the best marksmen—will be men. That’s just reality.
Then there are the instances of DEI advocates-probably not realizing how weird and disconnected their values are-presenting their ideas to the public. This is always a mistake. DEI relies upon a certain level of elite support and for the majority to hear words like ‘inclusion’, and assume that the program is centered around making application processes more friendly to poor black students, or being kind to people. As we’ve already seen it’s often the opposite. These inconsistencies must be endlessly obfuscated for the ideology to survive.
:And now, here we are again. The Department of Energy’s new Special Assistant for National Nuclear Security Administration, one Sneha Nair, is also the author of an article titled Queering nuclear weapons: How LGBTQ+ inclusion strengthens security and reshapes disarmament.
The National Nuclear Security Administration is a semi-autonomous alphabet agency responsible, as its name implies, for maintaining the security and efficacy of the USA’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Its remit also includes preventing the proliferation of WMDs, overseeing the provision of nuclear propulsion for the US Navy, and responding to radiological emergencies.
These are not small things to be responsible for, and one of their newly appointed senior administrators is apparently obsessed with painting rainbows on the warheads…
Most of the media coverage was just lol’ing at the woke absurdity of the title of Nair’s article – what could adult diapers, dildos, bugchasing, and Monkeypox possibly have to do with preventing the fiery nuclear annihilation of the human species? Aside, that is, from keeping the observably mentally ill as far from the big red button as possible? What fresh madness is this?
Here are some excerpts from this wonderful and wonderfully bizarre piece of public embarrassment:
Diversity and inclusion are especially important for the policy community dealing with arsenal development and nuclear posture. Women familiar with this “nuclear priesthood” describe it as “male-dominated and unwelcoming.” Homogenous groups like this are prone to groupthink and hostile to critical examination of baseline assumptions about how adversaries construct and identify nuclear threats and risks. For nuclear weapons policy, this has meant the perpetuation of theories like deterrence and crisis stability, which have contributed to increasing nuclear arsenals and a growing risk of nuclear use.
Including a wider range of perspectives in nuclear decision making creates a more comprehensive definition of who or what constitutes a “threat” to nuclear security. An example of this is the threat posed by some white supremacist groups with plans to acquire nuclear weapons or material, which can go undetected when a white-majority workforce does not perceive these groups and their ideological motivation as a relevant threat to their nuclear security mission. Individuals targeted by these kinds of groups—including women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community—are more likely to identify these types of behaviors and attitudes as security risks and can play a crucial role in identifying a potential insider threat.
It hardly requires stating, but no evidence is presented in support of these claims. It is clear that the author (Sneha Nair) is actually less concerned about competence or threats or nuclear decision-making or safety… and far more concerned with DEI. This is the nature of such an ideology. It eats the worldview of the believer, directing them farther and farther afield from the concerns of normal people, and from reality.
A number of liberals and heterodox thinkers have come out in support of DEI in recent years. Coleman Hughes, Jonathan Haidt,
…I once upheld the narrative driving DEI efforts and unquestioningly supported affirmative action based on race alone. I was once a diversity recruiter at Google (on the inaugural team) and created an employee resource group at another prominent tech company for ‘Asians.’ This group encompassed those descended from parents who emigrated from any country in East, South, or Southeast Asia, as well as recent immigrants from these countries, not to mention employees in Japan, Singapore, and India who never set foot in the U.S. These groups were bundled together in a single group, showing the DEI apparatus's intellectual poverty and American-centric orientation. I also was an eager participant in DEI workshops back when I thought white people were the Problem With Everything, including my career not going where I wanted. I remember having many conversations with the director of DEI at a previous company about how she was essentially hampered from doing anything because she wasn’t respected as an equal. That’s when I was actually drinking the Kool-Aid.
People who leave cults wonder how they could have joined in the first place. I lament that I stopped thinking critically about the world for over a decade. It took me embarrassingly long to realize this ideology prevented me from digging myself out of an endless depressive fog in which I also contemplated suicide many times. Nothing seemed to be making my life better. I was in therapy, have been on several medications, and even took a break from working in 2015 to attend nine hours of group therapy a week so I could function at the bare minimum. Social justice ideology was a significant force that prevented me from functioning because it encouraged me to look outward instead of within for solutions. Everything terrible in my life seemed like it was coming from white people. That was a literally insane way of looking at the world.
When your most impressive and courageous thinkers begin to flee your side, and begin publicly criticizing your movement in these terms some introspection is warranted.
DEI is dying. The signs are all around us: Hollywood, academia, news reporting, culture, business.
The final example I have is probably the most profoundly destructive to the ideology: Vice President Kamala Harris. Ms. Harris was beloved of DEI advocates from the beginning but never came close to connecting with mainstream America. In a sense, her abortive 2020 presidential candidacy can be conceptualized as a metaphor for DEI’s penetration of American life. It was all based in downward pressure, from educated women and academics and the chattering classes and DNC apparatchiks, but her policies and her carriage dissuaded regular voters from joining her campaign. Her policies seemed out of touch and her values sounded profoundly elitist and Anti-American.
She was selected as Vice President according to DEI considerations (openly so) and implemented one of the least impressive vice presidencies in American history. She was pushed into running for the highest office in the land in secret deliberations, based upon funding considerations and political expediency, and the media tried their utmost to nurture the flame to life. It’s sputtering and dying as we speak. As
writes. “Kamala Harris is really bad at running for president.” Verily.In the last election cycle, if you recall, Kamala Harris had all of the initial media hype. She was the Democratic establishment and corporate media’s preferred candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination. However, despite having a $50 million war chest, she couldn’t deliver and struggled mightily in the debates. She performed terribly on the campaign trail, too. Kamala Harris would quietly exit the race before the first primary vote, burning tens of millions of dollars in the process.
Democrat power brokers are finally coming to terms with the fact that they made a major mistake in selecting Harris without a competitive primary process for the 2024 nomination. Once Joe Biden dropped out, seemingly under duress, the vice president was able to angle her way into an uncontested ascension to the candidacy. Without a single vote cast in her favor, she became the ultimate DEI candidate. However, the downside of being a DEI candidate is becoming obvious. Chances are, the DEI candidate is simply not as capable as a candidate who outcompeted fellow Democrats on an open playing field. There’s no way that the VP would have been able to outshine the likes of Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Michelle Obama, Josh Shapiro, and countless other possible high-profile Democrats who possess superior charisma and political skill.
Vice President Harris infamously made her way up the ranks of California politics through what could be described as unorthodox methods. She got into the U.S. Senate because of the unique timing of Senator Barbara Boxer’s retirement and the powerful endorsement of former governor Jerry Brown.
When she appeared on the national stage in 2020 with hopes of securing even higher office, it marked the first time that Kamala Harris would have to truly win over the voting public. That bid failed, but in a time of hyper wokeness, she checked the boxes for the right criteria to become the perfect no-show vice president for President Joe Biden. Biden’s closest competitors for the nomination — Bernie Sanders, Liz Warren, Mike Bloomberg, and Mayor Pete — had to be ruled out for reasons of “representation,” so the gig fell into Harris’s lap.
Harris is now attempting to parlay her “experience” as vice president into a successful presidential campaign. It’s akin to installing an academic with no business experience as the CEO of Wells Fargo. Her issue is glaring: she has never been battle-tested. Kamala Harris has never earned significant support on the national stage, and it shows. Unsurprisingly, she is really, really bad at running for president. She can’t relate to voters. She’s terrible on her feet. She’s not super bright. More than anything else, she suffers from a terrible case of imposter syndrome, which further damages her confidence in these categories.
Will Kamala Harris’ campaign be the final spike in the heart of DEI? I don’t think so. It will cling to power among non-profits and heavily subsidized hospitals and universities and government agencies. Basically, wherever performance and outcomes can be shielded from the negative effects of under-performance and incompetence DEI will cling to power. It will continue to use the familiar ad hominem attacks against its critics. The movement is declining in influence though. It never made an honest appeal to Americans because it had no case to make. It’s no longer cool or vigorous or ascendant.
Soon it will be a faintly malodorous embarrassment-a concession certain organizations will make to their hyper-progressive members, with a common understanding that it won’t be openly spoken about. Then, sometime later, it will die.
If we had a fair media, this election would probably bring a social reckoning and an end to DEI nonsense. But alas...
Thanks for calling out my work, especially by such a famous philosopher as James Mill : )
For those who are interested in the subject, I have written several other articles on ideology:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/t/ideology
These two articles are probably the best place to start:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/where-does-ideology-come-from