You Can't Spell Divisive Without DEI

Skin tone isn't a sports team

Every few decades, to set up a serious conversation about racism, a black person has to die. Usually, in horrifying circumstances.

In 2020, George Floyd triggered a long overdue discussion about police brutality, but only after he was filmed slowly suffocating to death.

In 1998, James Byrd Jr. convinced Texas lawmakers to strengthen hate crime laws, but first, three men tied him to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him down an asphalt road.

And in 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till became the catalyst for the most significant racial progress America had ever seen. All he had to do was spend a day being tortured to death.

One of several reforms signed in the wake of Till’s murder was Executive Order 10925, requiring government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated […] without regard to their race, creed, colour, or national origin.”

Affirmative Action for short.

And as soon as it passed, lawmakers who’d spent decades upholding and endorsing racial discrimination were suddenly deeply invested in fighting it.

Critics argued that Affirmative Action would discriminate in favour of minorities, supporters insisted that they wanted equal treatment, not special treatment, and the truth turned out to be somewhere in between.

Affirmative Action, at least on paper, was meant to be colourblind. But in an age when getting black students into white-majority classrooms required an intervention from the National Guard, how could anybody trust that employers would take “affirmative action” to get black employees into white-majority workplaces? 

How could they be sure employers would work to increase “diversity”? How could they keep track of a company’s efforts to be “inclusive”?

It turns out, 1960s America wasn’t ready to treat people without regard to their race. So, some tried the opposite approach.

After six decades of trial and error, that opposite approach became DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), an assortment of race-conscious policies and practices designed to…well, that’s part of the problem.

As is too often the case with modern antiracism, hardly anybody can agree on what DEI is, never mind what it’s supposed to do. And so, as is also too often the case, we get a lot of silly in-fighting and thinly-disguised racism.

Grifters who aren’t quite brave enough to use the n-word pin tragic accidents on “DEI” mayors, Fox News hosts blame DEI doors for falling out of planes, and Twitter racists complain about “DEI” skiers harmlessly enjoying the slopes, and “DEI” pilots replacing “silver-haired Mavericks.” 

Meanwhile, so-called antiracists use DEI seminars to call white people “demons” and rant about their “biologically transmitted proclivity” for psychopathy, the Robin DiAngelos of the world charge tens of thousands of dollars while cracking jokes about black women’s hair, billion dollar corporations advise their staff to “be less white,” and none of them seem to understand that if DEI should be doing anything, it should be countering racist garbage like this.

After all, if basic common sense wasn’t evidence enough, study after study after study show that this childish, divisive name calling has little-to-no effect on discrimination and can even make it worse. 

After years of corporate seminars (not to mention billions of dollars), minority representation in boardrooms and C-suites has hardly budged (this despite the fact that black CEOs, on average, tend to be more qualified than their peers). 

And perceptions of race relations, for white people and black people, have been plummeting for the past ten years.

Because, shockingly enough, you cannot create a society that treats people without respect to their colour while insisting on treating people with respect to their colour.

In 1961, people attacked Affirmative Action because they were racist. Because, it opened doors that, until then, only white people had been able to walk through.

But today, people attack DEI because…well, in some cases, because they’re racist. But also because DEI, and especially the obsessive racial focus it encourages, is racist. And self-contradictory.

You can’t create diversity by only hiring employees “who are just like you.”

You can’t foster inclusion by calling entire groups of people “demons” and “fragile” and “psychopaths.”

And that’s before we even talk about a “Department of Antiracism” monitoring the proportions of each racial group in society. As Glenn Loury points out:

You’re not really taking ‘groupness’ seriously if you think that we’re supposed to have the same proportion of Jews, African-Americans, Korean-Americans, Mexican-Americans in every department in a university, in every professional line of activity.

Treating each other as human beings instead of racial identities, has always been the goal of genuine antiracism.

Even if some people still aren’t quite ready for that.

On June 29th, 2023, the same day the Supreme Court struck down Affirmative Action, Coleman Hughes wrote a damning critique of racial preferences in college admissions:

Imagine if every college rejection letter contained an honest account of why every kid was rejected. Imagine, for example, if the Asian-American kid who would have gotten into Harvard were she not Asian received an honest statement attesting to that fact in her rejection letter:

“We regret to inform you that you’ve been rejected in part because you are Asian-American. Had you been black or Hispanic with otherwise identical qualifications, we would have accepted you.”

How long would “Affirmative Action” survive in this scenario? If your intuition is “not very long” (that is mine), then what does it tell you that secrecy is the main reason “Affirmative Action” survived as long as it did?

Hughes is right that this model of Affirmative Action wouldn’t have survived long. But he’s wrong about why. And we don’t even need to use our imaginations to prove it.

Legacy preferences (aka Affirmative Action for rich people) have survived for over 100 years (thirty-eight years longer than Affirmative Action) with minimal secrecy. A 2019 study found that if legacy students were treated without regard to their parents’ wealth, roughly 75% of them would be rejected.

Racial segregation (aka Affirmative Action for white people) survived for over 100 years without secrecy. Colleges and workplaces openly rejected black people because of their “race.” Businesses hung signs in their windows telling black people and dogs to stay out.

And if your intuition is that most of the people complaining about DEI have been entirely silent about policies that have benefited rich white people for over a century (that is mine) maybe there’s hope after all.

Because the white people who only began to care about racism once it affected them, and the black people who suddenly stopped caring once it didn’t, are both suffering under the same misapprehension; that black people and white people are players on opposing teams. That for one side to win, the other has to lose.

The next big conversation, the same conversation people have been trying to have since the 1960s, is how to treat everybody without respect to their colour.

Let’s hope nobody needs to die to set that up.

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