What if a reboot truly committed itself to 'diversity', with merit, opportunity equality, and broader ideas and points of view? A----DEI 2.0?
Today I come to praise DEI, not to bury it. Or, more to the point, the idea of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion rather than the current iteration of DEI, which is quickly becoming a widely-acknowledged failure.
DEI isn’t a failure because it’s a bad idea—it’s because it’s an early version, 1.0 of a social justice project, implemented by the wrong damn team which lacked the proper education for the job and didn’t source enough outside knowledge to correct all its mistakes. It never even acknowledged their project had more bugs than a Brooklyn housing project.
DEI needs a reboot—a 2.0. The reboot won’t be perfect either, but it’ll be less imperfect than 1.0. Every project, technology-focused or human, needs to evolve, change, upgrade and fix. DEI’s hubris, not unlike the Democratic Party’s, was that it had all the answers and didn’t need to fix anything and brought about its own demise.
Its biggest failure is with its first initial: Diversity. It ain’t gone none.
Equity: Let’s replace it with ‘equal opportunity,’ based on merit.
Then there’s ‘inclusion’—criminy, that may be a whole ‘nother article on its own. But I’ll be brief. Let’s start from the beginning.
Diversity: Let’s add some
Angry racist black women and self-hating white progressives, here’s your pink slip. Go burn a cop car or oppress a gay kid or something.
DEI hews to a common but laughably false narrative: Critical ‘everything’ theory, but primarily Critical Race Theory. It’s pretty damn racist to all but state that white skin is a racial Mark of the Beast, when black skin used to be the Mark of the Beast of Burden.
DEI 2.0 needs more white people, but not those pandering, self-flagellating pale-faced virtue signallers, so admirably skewered in Matt Walsh’s recent Am I Racist?
DEI 1.0 teaches that all you need to know about white people is that they’re evil, part of a ‘white supremacist’ network, and should just shut up and let black people and others spew racist hate speech unchallenged.
DEI 2.0 needs more people of all colors who challenge this sick dogma. It needs those who get that we’re all 99% genetically alike under the evolutionary adaptations from whence our particular people came. That there’s virtually no difference in our cognitive abilities, our IQs, or our ability to accomplish what we want given our own personal resilience, motivation, ambition, and equal opportunity. The first three are within our own internal locus of control. The last is external, which is where genuine social justice’s job lies. You have to change you. The systemic rest, that which is truly beyond the individual’s ability to overcome, we can fix.
DEI 2.0 absolutely needs more Jews, since antisemitism has become the leading fave of ‘progressive’ racists in North America and it’s particularly virulent in black communities. Maybe a DEI class on antisemitism can begin by showing students a map where Israel is located in the Middle East, rather than the center of Wall Street or Hollywood as they imagine.
Equity: Stop putting okra in the fruit salad
We don’t need to ‘diversify’ fruit salad by giving vegetables equal opportunity. Vegetables work beautifully in traditional salad, but fruit salad is for fruits, not okra.
No one puts okra in fruit salad. It doesn’t belong. It doesn’t work well in that position.
But people aren’t vegetables (well, at least not in my circles), and there’s no group of people who ‘don’t belong’ in a particular profession except those who simply aren’t qualified to do what some numbnuts administrators need to check off their diversity list.
The human okra aren’t black people, Jews, Indians, queerfolk or women. They’re people who aren’t suited for the job.
White-boy astronaut John Glenn didn’t give a rat’s patoot that the best mathematician to send him on a life-threatening mission into space was a ‘colored woman’. He trusted Katherine Johnson’s brain above all others, and that was in 1962, when the civil rights movement was barely out of diapers. While the dramatic scene in the movie Hidden Figures never happened—Glenn on the phone saying, “Get the girl to check the numbers,” he did entrust Johnson—and only Johnson—with his life.
The West Virginian Johnson was born into a somewhat privileged family in 1918. It wasn’t abject poverty. She showed an early proficiency in math as a small child. Also critically, Johnson was eager to go to school and learn. She was selected as one of three African Americans to attend West Virginia State College and graduated at age 18 summa cum laude, with not one but two degrees, in math and French.
Not many black people, especially women, pulled that off in 1937, but Johnson did, partly because of her mild economic privilege, but also thanks to her natural talent and relentless education drive.
She and her NASA compatriots were fruit in the fruit salad, not okra.
Inclusion: It needs boundaries
‘Inclusion’ is a great idea that, like everything else in the hands of those who gild lilies as a hobby, turned from a progressive ideal into an oppressive bludgeon.
To paraphrase Rodney King, a respectable new DEI framework should be simply about understanding how to get along with—include each other. To look for the good and laudable, rather than seeing skin color or sex or rainbow hair and making assumptions based on a group rather than an individual. Which is just bigoted.
It’s not hard to include others, if you train yourself to accept others, not to mention yourself, as human, and people, rather than inextricably bound to an arbitrary collection of ultimately irrelevant identities.
One area of inclusion that will be tricky to negotiate is ‘trans inclusion’. Transactivists are pretty famously aggressive about pushing themselves in places resisted by women, and women’s rights, needs, concerns, and safety are, as always, thrown under the bus by ‘progressives’ and the DEI 1.0 set. I’ve extensively critiqued the trans movement and transactivists in other articles (you can find them under ‘Transreality’ on my navigation bar) so I won’t get into it here.
DEI 2.0 will need to balance transfolk’s right to live how they want, but train them to understand that others’ concerns matter too (which is such a ‘woman’ thing to do!), and also that fairly pedestrian problems like how some can get the pronouns wrong due to visual and audio cues (a manly jaw or voice) that don’t sync with what humans associate as ‘male’ and ‘female’ is a First World problem, not a violent ‘microaggression’. Let’s keep it in perspective.
Oh no! Include even CONSERVATIVES?!?!
DEI 1.0’s most desperate diversity need is for what happens between the ears: Ideas, narratives, values, beliefs, political positions, and points of view.
No group of people, biological or ideological, should ever run everything. It's just too tribally human to favor your own. DEI 2.0 must especially guard against marginalizing opinions and points of view. It should incorporate liberal, conservative, libertarian, and other viewpoints. It should acknowledge and respond to all sides in any given conflict, whether it’s two people of different races in disagreement about a comment, or offering an opinion on a complex topic like nations at war.
Its understanding of history must embrace a much more diversified and nuanced understanding of the world and human peoples, recognize the contributions others have made to civilization, and stop defining whole groups of people by only their bad traits or actions. It has to stop giving a free pass to miscreants and nasties of other races and cultures too. It has to recognize that almost every single culture has engaged in slavery, colonization, imperialism, genocide and horrifying torture. Yes, even Indigenous North Americans. Especially them. The Iroquois: The Lords of Pre-Contact Genocide.
DEI must purge itself of people who seem rather mentally and emotionally disturbed, actually.
Diversity dearth of thought in the academic world has created the dogmatic, authoritarian woke hellhole from which students emerge today, fit for little better than tapping away on their mobile in a coffee shop, raging against the reality that challenges everything they’ve been taught about history, science, art, literature, and sociology. It almost completely ignores human psychology.
DEI ‘whitenizes’ every new scapegoat—most recently, Asians and Jews—and teaches impressionable young people that they’re helpless against the evils of colonialism/capitalism/ white supremacy/patriarchy (take your pick) and that men, along with white people, are responsible for all the world’s evils. It keeps young people carefully sheltered from different points of view and differing ways of seeing things by denying the legacy of white Western contributions to the world and labeling anything they don’t want to learn about as ‘racist’.
(I’m pointing at you, Claudine Gay, the okra at Harvard U!)
1.0 is an abject failure but the idea is a good one and properly implemented, it could enjoy widespread appeal. The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) noted recently that, believe it or not, most Republicans and Democrats agreed on basic core values. "Roughly 90 percent of the people in the survey, Republicans and Democrats alike, said that personal responsibility, fair enforcement of the law, compassion, and respect across differences were important to them."
That’s when you’re not asking them about anything related to politics, I imagine.
‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste,’ as an old PSA once encouraged us to think. DEI’s objective of creating a more just society is laudable, and diversity starts with talking to the people you don’t like, or just don’t think you like. It must bring about diversity of thought, diversity of races and cultures and replace ‘equity’ with merit-based equal opportunity. It can be inclusive, but not trample on others’ rights.
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. DEI is a good idea; we just need to take it out of the hands of the hopelessly incompetent.
Wokeness just got dealt a likely deathblow in the United States with the anything-but-Democrats election. This is our opportunity, kids!
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