DEI Must Change

By John McWhorter. Excerpt:

"Make no mistake: it has been high time for a major rethink on what DEI has turned into since the pandemic, with DEI becoming a term of art for what is too often an institutionalized anti-whiteness. Under this conception, if outcomes between races aren't equal, the only possible reason can be discrimination—i.e. some kind of white malfeasance, whether intended or not—and egregious enough that rules and standards must be changed. A watchcry of adherents of this philosophy is Ibram X. Kendi’s famous quote in his massively influential How to Be an Antiracist: “When I see disparities, I see racism.”

This kind of DEI took root especially in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, when a radical contingent calling for a racial reckoning enforced an allegiance to anti-whiteness on pain of social media humiliation, cancellation, and unemployment. Between September 2019 and September 2020, DEI positions jumped by 56.3%. In 2023, Tabia Lee, a Black woman, was ousted from the directorship of the DEI program at De Anza Community College for, as she alleged in her lawsuit, being insufficiently opposed to whiteness (Jews included) and “not the right kind of Black person.” Lee has said, “The default here in America especially is [a type of DEI] that focuses on racial division and perpetual strife around racialized identity.”

If all of this were somehow constructive then maybe we could talk about how you have to crack eggs to make omelettes. But none of the news about this incarnation of DEI has been good. There is copious evidence—“hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s,” write sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev—to suggest that the corporate anti-bias training central to its mission simply doesn't work. It does not meaningfully change employees’ thinking, and tends to be recalled instead as mere hoops they had to jump through. “You spend some money, you get people excited, and then a year later, you’re at the same place,” says DEI strategist Lily Zheng, the author of DEI Deconstructed. At the University of Michigan, the main result of a campus-wide DEI infusion has—according to a deeply-reported New York Times Magazine piece—been frustration, discomfort, and alienation. “The most common attitude I encountered about DEI during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain,” Nicholas Confessore wrote in The Times to summarize his months of reporting at Michigan. DEI’s casual reference to racial categories as determinative is both facile and menacing, recalling the phrenological nonsense of another time. Take the pitilessly dehumanizing conception of “whiteness” that Coca-Cola employees, for instance, have been fed in DEI trainings: If you are white, apparently you should know that you are inherently oppressive, arrogant, smug, defensive, ignorant, that you lack humility and have a hard time listening or believing, that you resist apathy, and that you embrace white solidarity.

That characterization of whiteness may sound familiar to those who read Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling White Fragility, a book that manifests another problem with post-2020 DEI: incoherent argumentation. To take one of the more absurd examples from her book, DiAngelo writes that Americans are so blithely racist as to believe that Jackie Robinson was the first Black person who was skilled enough at baseball to play in the Major Leagues, as opposed to presuming that racism had previously barred Black people from them.

Overall, this new, prevailing DEI is based on a core assumption that battling the power of whiteness be not just one goal, but the central goal of our institutions. This is a simplistic and needlessly restrictive niche ideology, allowed freer rein than any mature society should permit. Following from that vantage-point, DEI bureaucracies have swelled beyond any plausible conception of utility: in Fairfax County, Virginia, the public school system’s DEI bureaucracy now numbers some 52 employees with a combined salary ($6.4 million dollars a year) that could pay for 125 extra teachers. Only through this idea that battling whiteness’ power should be the core of human endeavor does it possibly make sense for universities to require diversity statements of applicants even to faculty jobs in STEM subjects.

We can understand these trends better if we recognize that modern DEI is equivalent to a religious faith in Europe circa 1300 A.D., fully equipped with seminary-trained clergy aglow with Good News whom it is immoral to question. DEI’s hegemony is a legacy of peak woke, freezing us in a pendulum swing to the hard left that reached its apogee sometime around June 2020. It’s been in place for a while, and to dismiss resistance to it as mere racism is reductive."