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
At the end of this thought-provoking and challenging article, you state, "The next big conversation about race is how to move beyond it."
How to move beyond race?
By practicing the call, the admonition, found in the Bible, at Matthew 7:12 --- "Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets," or alternatively, "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets," or, “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets."
Excuse me for this joke, but I think it is related.
Two communists are having a conversation.
If you had two houses, would you give one to me?
Of course, comrade.
If you had two cars, would you give me one?
Yes of course, comrade.
If you had two chickens, would you give me one?
No.
Why not?
I have two chickens.
The difference in people talking the talk and walking the walk. Privilege is when you have two chickens.
How we discuss "issues" can bring corrective action or resentment and make things worse. Having worked for the government and corporations I've gone thru several versions of race relations training.
Incredibly, the first round included white people touching black people's hair. The last diluted black people with inclusion of white women and the WIFI password before the T was added which some black people resented. Who creates the curriculum for this stuff?
A question - what would be the best approach? Or approaches since different tribes have different issues, and sometimes they have two chickens.
Writers ignore history and economics at their readers' peril.
"Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and "war on poverty" programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.
"Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black 'leaders.'"
Thank you again Steve QJ. Agreed legacy admissions need to go. To move beyond race, treat people as individuals, expand your circle. All people are created equal.
“Inclusion” is a red flag. The goal should be non-discrimination; past that is only fanatical compulsion. You allude to this above; every department is not going to be the precise ratios of ethnicities found in the population.
If Harvard admissions were based on merit alone, the student body would look like Hong Kong. Whether or not that would be fair is too big a topic for a simple response
But when I think of DEI, I think of “trans” and “nonbinary,” not of race. And this is where “nclusion” has brought us to the bag in the airplane seat. Academic tenure is gated by a tyrannical orthodoxy around gender ideology, which is doing the fundamentally good idea a lot of harm.
I've always been in favor of small "d" diversity. It means both non-discrimination and having a goal to bring in people from a broad variety of backgrounds and creeds, not just the same old white middle class educated types. This was an important step for our society. But the "D" in DEI seems to be more about superficially plucking from non-white racial groups, LGBT, and disabled in a surface way who may all belong to the same progressive world view while completely ignoring a diversity of viewpoints.
I am for equality of opportunity, not equity. While I think affirmative action at the college or career level is way too late to make a difference, I can see having it applied in early childhood and elementary school. To achieve equality we need a revolution in early childhood and elementary education to ensure that kids from all races and socioeconomic backgrounds have access to high quality schools and teachers, and that those children whose parents are unable to keep them on track with homework and tests get extra tutoring or time after school to do their work and use school computers and facilities.
As others have pointed out, in practice the "I" in DEI often means "excluding or censoring the right people" in order to be more "inclusive." "Inclusion" is a deceptively innocent sounding term. Who wouldn't want to include everyone? But once again it is used in a way that is the opposite of how it sounds.
While as always you make some good points, Steve, I think some parts need to be better distilled.
First off, "Affirmative Action" is often the term used in the US for the concept more accurately called "Positive Discrimination" sometimes in the UK. The concept is that intentional, official discrimination now and into the future, is a helpful part of the cure for both official and unofficial discrimination in the past or present. Since technically, "Affirmative Action" can also include non-discrimination, and is specific to only the US, let's use the more accurate term for the concept - "Positive Discrimination". That acknowledges that it is indeed discrimination, while asserting that it's for a positive intention.
In much more recent times, some have used the term "DEI" as a sloppy alias for PD (or for AA). Again, it's sloppy because "DEI" is a much broader movement, and PD is at most one component.
So when we are discussing PD specifically, lets use the term PD (Positive Discrimination), not AA which is both broader (including non-PD facets) as well a narrower (AA is only applicable to the US, PD is a philosophy used in many nations). And using "DEI" as a synonym for PD is even worse.
An example. Positive Discrimination is by definition not race neutral or "color blind". You can't do "positive" discrimination on the basis of race, while being racially neutral or colorblind. So when you say "Affirmative Action, at least on paper, was meant to be colourblind" the only logical interpretation I can take is that the non-discriminatory (non-PD) subset of the broader thing called Affirmative Action was colorblind, even if the PD component was inherent color conscious. Since the topic was PD (or the PD subset of AA), that is just confounding clarity.
OK, let's move from clarifying the terminology to dealing with the content.
The original sales case for PD (then as a component of the Affirmative Action umbrella) was to suggest that if you have two candidates (for employment or admission) who were virtually equally qualified, the minority candidate should be chosen. That is, PD would consist of only a very light thumb on the scales of meritocratic selection.
Alas, many suspect that the need to meet informal quotas has resulted in a PD culture of "place as much weight on the scale as it takes to achieve the numerical outcome targets". And the selectors (for jobs, contracts or admissions) have tended to be extremely opaque about how much "thumb on the scale" they are actually using to achieve their goals - how much they are compromising merit to achieve informal quotas. The very fact that the administrators of PD are so uniformly secretive, combined with anecdotes of hiring incompetents (anecdotes do not generalize to statistics), has led to suspicion that quality has been more severely compromised than the administrators want to admit, to appease the "equal outcomes not equal opportunity" pressures.
Actually, there are two ways such Positive Discrimination (when implemented by the lowering of standards) can operate: selectively and universally. In the former, the standards are lowered ONLY for those favored by the PD; in the latter, the standards are lowered for everyone. An example of selective lowering of standards it the proposal to grade Black math students differently than white or Asian students; and example of the latter was when Oregon removed the requirement of passing some ability tests to graduate High School, on the grounds that there were too many people of color failing the tests - but the removal of that requirement was for everybody, not just people of color.
Being concerned about slippage of quality control is not the same motive as wanting to keep minorities oppressed, no matter how much Critical Social Justice ideologues try to tactically conflate those two, so they can dismiss ANY question of lowered standards as simply an expression of some ism or phobia.
So the people calling perceived incompetence being a "DEI xxxxxx" are basically asserting (in a terminologically problematic way that I have already critiqued) their perception that certain people are getting positions they are unqualified for based on meeting quotas without sufficient concern for competence.
Let's just say that a hypothesis that substantial reduction in merit based or competence based filtering is occurring in order to meet external quota goals ("a workforce more representative of the nation's demographics") is NOT prima facie ridiculous, immediately dismissible as impossible. I would like to hope that hypothesis is wrong, but hoping doesn't make that true.
But the way to show it is wrong is to show real world data to validate the opposite (no meaningful increase in incompetence based on quota filling), rather than trying to silence/excommunicate the questioner as a racist/sexist/etc. Supporters of PD almost always question the questioners' motive, while preventing any real unbiased assessment of the degree of statistical truth behind the assertion.
This question of prioritizing demographic outcomes over merit is separate from the argument over whether intentional official discrimination is a feasible path to ending or redressing the human tendency to unofficially discriminate, which you and Coleman reference. I think it's important not to suggest that anybody questioning such a well-intended strategy must be a racist right winger.
I don't get the opportunity to do this in Toronto, because racial relations are a lot less weird here, but I think if I were to move back to the US I would just treat black people with the same carelessness I do here (and they do to me). And if folks didn't like it I'd say, "This is what equality looks like."
Toronto isn't a racial paradise but it's a helluva lot better than any American city I've lived in.
You can't force people to be virtuous. The entire apparatus of state-sanctioned violence will not make people voluntarily behave the "right" way, especially if they don't want to. And it's not skin color itself; skin color is just such an easy proxy for cultural differences (and the associated xenophobia). I hate to sound callous to the people who are hurt by racism, but it's a gradual process; generation by generation, people get more and more used to being in proximity, and culture blends us together.
The problem is the scope of how you are trying to move beyond racism.
Much of what is called race is also cultural.
Maybe the problem is the great melting pot was not realistic let alone a good idea.
You’re implying that the melting pot just needs a good douse of beyond racism stirring.
I propose that the melting pot never was and was a bias idea. Better to have vibrant cultures in commodities of like minded people. What’s stopping Black Wall Street from emerging today?
Too much of the discussion assumes some goal of a homogeneous United States that has no elements of preference for people culture and their natural instinct to want to preserve their culture and community.
Have the federal government act as the big stick wielding nun forcing some higher goal morality on everybody is and always was a ridiculous concept. The federal governments role in the issues is what’s divided the country.
How about a community based concept? Is there a single community in the country you would hold up as the “beyond racism” example? Think about that. If you can’t achieve it in a community, what makes you believe it’s possible to achieve at a state or federal level.
Start thinking about moving power from the federal government to states and communities.
The gay world has created significant change by building gay communities. The states and federal government should have never dived into it. Gay marriage was necessary to achieve the same federal rights as str8 marriage. It should never have been more than that - ie position that a gay couple is the same as a str8 couple. But the politics couldn’t avoid trying to make gay part of the big melting pot.
I believe the melting pot is curdling and will never be the silky universal delicacy you and others are looking for!
At the end of this thought-provoking and challenging article, you state, "The next big conversation about race is how to move beyond it."
How to move beyond race?
By practicing the call, the admonition, found in the Bible, at Matthew 7:12 --- "Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets," or alternatively, "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets," or, “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets."
Excuse me for this joke, but I think it is related.
Two communists are having a conversation.
If you had two houses, would you give one to me?
Of course, comrade.
If you had two cars, would you give me one?
Yes of course, comrade.
If you had two chickens, would you give me one?
No.
Why not?
I have two chickens.
The difference in people talking the talk and walking the walk. Privilege is when you have two chickens.
How we discuss "issues" can bring corrective action or resentment and make things worse. Having worked for the government and corporations I've gone thru several versions of race relations training.
Incredibly, the first round included white people touching black people's hair. The last diluted black people with inclusion of white women and the WIFI password before the T was added which some black people resented. Who creates the curriculum for this stuff?
A question - what would be the best approach? Or approaches since different tribes have different issues, and sometimes they have two chickens.
Writers ignore history and economics at their readers' peril.
"Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and "war on poverty" programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.
"Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black 'leaders.'"
A Legacy of Liberalism, Thomas Sowell (2014)
https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/11/14/a-legacy-of-liberalism
Another great article!
Thank you again Steve QJ. Agreed legacy admissions need to go. To move beyond race, treat people as individuals, expand your circle. All people are created equal.
“Inclusion” is a red flag. The goal should be non-discrimination; past that is only fanatical compulsion. You allude to this above; every department is not going to be the precise ratios of ethnicities found in the population.
If Harvard admissions were based on merit alone, the student body would look like Hong Kong. Whether or not that would be fair is too big a topic for a simple response
But when I think of DEI, I think of “trans” and “nonbinary,” not of race. And this is where “nclusion” has brought us to the bag in the airplane seat. Academic tenure is gated by a tyrannical orthodoxy around gender ideology, which is doing the fundamentally good idea a lot of harm.
I've always been in favor of small "d" diversity. It means both non-discrimination and having a goal to bring in people from a broad variety of backgrounds and creeds, not just the same old white middle class educated types. This was an important step for our society. But the "D" in DEI seems to be more about superficially plucking from non-white racial groups, LGBT, and disabled in a surface way who may all belong to the same progressive world view while completely ignoring a diversity of viewpoints.
I am for equality of opportunity, not equity. While I think affirmative action at the college or career level is way too late to make a difference, I can see having it applied in early childhood and elementary school. To achieve equality we need a revolution in early childhood and elementary education to ensure that kids from all races and socioeconomic backgrounds have access to high quality schools and teachers, and that those children whose parents are unable to keep them on track with homework and tests get extra tutoring or time after school to do their work and use school computers and facilities.
As others have pointed out, in practice the "I" in DEI often means "excluding or censoring the right people" in order to be more "inclusive." "Inclusion" is a deceptively innocent sounding term. Who wouldn't want to include everyone? But once again it is used in a way that is the opposite of how it sounds.
While as always you make some good points, Steve, I think some parts need to be better distilled.
First off, "Affirmative Action" is often the term used in the US for the concept more accurately called "Positive Discrimination" sometimes in the UK. The concept is that intentional, official discrimination now and into the future, is a helpful part of the cure for both official and unofficial discrimination in the past or present. Since technically, "Affirmative Action" can also include non-discrimination, and is specific to only the US, let's use the more accurate term for the concept - "Positive Discrimination". That acknowledges that it is indeed discrimination, while asserting that it's for a positive intention.
In much more recent times, some have used the term "DEI" as a sloppy alias for PD (or for AA). Again, it's sloppy because "DEI" is a much broader movement, and PD is at most one component.
So when we are discussing PD specifically, lets use the term PD (Positive Discrimination), not AA which is both broader (including non-PD facets) as well a narrower (AA is only applicable to the US, PD is a philosophy used in many nations). And using "DEI" as a synonym for PD is even worse.
An example. Positive Discrimination is by definition not race neutral or "color blind". You can't do "positive" discrimination on the basis of race, while being racially neutral or colorblind. So when you say "Affirmative Action, at least on paper, was meant to be colourblind" the only logical interpretation I can take is that the non-discriminatory (non-PD) subset of the broader thing called Affirmative Action was colorblind, even if the PD component was inherent color conscious. Since the topic was PD (or the PD subset of AA), that is just confounding clarity.
OK, let's move from clarifying the terminology to dealing with the content.
The original sales case for PD (then as a component of the Affirmative Action umbrella) was to suggest that if you have two candidates (for employment or admission) who were virtually equally qualified, the minority candidate should be chosen. That is, PD would consist of only a very light thumb on the scales of meritocratic selection.
Alas, many suspect that the need to meet informal quotas has resulted in a PD culture of "place as much weight on the scale as it takes to achieve the numerical outcome targets". And the selectors (for jobs, contracts or admissions) have tended to be extremely opaque about how much "thumb on the scale" they are actually using to achieve their goals - how much they are compromising merit to achieve informal quotas. The very fact that the administrators of PD are so uniformly secretive, combined with anecdotes of hiring incompetents (anecdotes do not generalize to statistics), has led to suspicion that quality has been more severely compromised than the administrators want to admit, to appease the "equal outcomes not equal opportunity" pressures.
Actually, there are two ways such Positive Discrimination (when implemented by the lowering of standards) can operate: selectively and universally. In the former, the standards are lowered ONLY for those favored by the PD; in the latter, the standards are lowered for everyone. An example of selective lowering of standards it the proposal to grade Black math students differently than white or Asian students; and example of the latter was when Oregon removed the requirement of passing some ability tests to graduate High School, on the grounds that there were too many people of color failing the tests - but the removal of that requirement was for everybody, not just people of color.
Being concerned about slippage of quality control is not the same motive as wanting to keep minorities oppressed, no matter how much Critical Social Justice ideologues try to tactically conflate those two, so they can dismiss ANY question of lowered standards as simply an expression of some ism or phobia.
So the people calling perceived incompetence being a "DEI xxxxxx" are basically asserting (in a terminologically problematic way that I have already critiqued) their perception that certain people are getting positions they are unqualified for based on meeting quotas without sufficient concern for competence.
Let's just say that a hypothesis that substantial reduction in merit based or competence based filtering is occurring in order to meet external quota goals ("a workforce more representative of the nation's demographics") is NOT prima facie ridiculous, immediately dismissible as impossible. I would like to hope that hypothesis is wrong, but hoping doesn't make that true.
But the way to show it is wrong is to show real world data to validate the opposite (no meaningful increase in incompetence based on quota filling), rather than trying to silence/excommunicate the questioner as a racist/sexist/etc. Supporters of PD almost always question the questioners' motive, while preventing any real unbiased assessment of the degree of statistical truth behind the assertion.
This question of prioritizing demographic outcomes over merit is separate from the argument over whether intentional official discrimination is a feasible path to ending or redressing the human tendency to unofficially discriminate, which you and Coleman reference. I think it's important not to suggest that anybody questioning such a well-intended strategy must be a racist right winger.
Amen. How these basic principles are beyond the grasp of so many is disheartening to me.
I don't get the opportunity to do this in Toronto, because racial relations are a lot less weird here, but I think if I were to move back to the US I would just treat black people with the same carelessness I do here (and they do to me). And if folks didn't like it I'd say, "This is what equality looks like."
Toronto isn't a racial paradise but it's a helluva lot better than any American city I've lived in.
You can't force people to be virtuous. The entire apparatus of state-sanctioned violence will not make people voluntarily behave the "right" way, especially if they don't want to. And it's not skin color itself; skin color is just such an easy proxy for cultural differences (and the associated xenophobia). I hate to sound callous to the people who are hurt by racism, but it's a gradual process; generation by generation, people get more and more used to being in proximity, and culture blends us together.
The problem is the scope of how you are trying to move beyond racism.
Much of what is called race is also cultural.
Maybe the problem is the great melting pot was not realistic let alone a good idea.
You’re implying that the melting pot just needs a good douse of beyond racism stirring.
I propose that the melting pot never was and was a bias idea. Better to have vibrant cultures in commodities of like minded people. What’s stopping Black Wall Street from emerging today?
Too much of the discussion assumes some goal of a homogeneous United States that has no elements of preference for people culture and their natural instinct to want to preserve their culture and community.
Have the federal government act as the big stick wielding nun forcing some higher goal morality on everybody is and always was a ridiculous concept. The federal governments role in the issues is what’s divided the country.
How about a community based concept? Is there a single community in the country you would hold up as the “beyond racism” example? Think about that. If you can’t achieve it in a community, what makes you believe it’s possible to achieve at a state or federal level.
Start thinking about moving power from the federal government to states and communities.
The gay world has created significant change by building gay communities. The states and federal government should have never dived into it. Gay marriage was necessary to achieve the same federal rights as str8 marriage. It should never have been more than that - ie position that a gay couple is the same as a str8 couple. But the politics couldn’t avoid trying to make gay part of the big melting pot.
I believe the melting pot is curdling and will never be the silky universal delicacy you and others are looking for!