DEI
Characteristics
Keith Martin Smith's Integral Critique of DEI
Keith Martin Smith:
Simplistic View of Privilege
"The first sin discussed is the simplistic view of privilege, which reduces complex social dynamics to binary categories of oppressed and oppressor, often based solely on visible identity markers like race and gender. This perspective neglects the multifaceted nature of privilege, which can encompass factors like socioeconomic status, education, and geographic location, leading to an incomplete understanding of how privilege operates in society.
To address this sin, the solution proposed involves broadening the conversation around privilege to include its more nuanced aspects. This means acknowledging the complexity and intersectionality of human experiences, where privilege and disadvantage can coexist within individuals and communities. Encouraging deeper, more empathetic discussions that recognize the full spectrum of privilege can lead to more informed, effective DEI strategies that truly address inequality.
Limited View of Diversity
The second sin highlights a limited view of diversity that focuses predominantly on physical or cultural differences, overlooking the rich diversity of thought, experience, and perspective. This narrow approach can stifle the potential for true inclusivity and innovation, as it prioritizes visible diversity over the diversity of ideas and viewpoints that can drive collective growth and understanding.
Expanding the definition of diversity to include diverse thought and perspective is crucial. Encouraging environments where a multitude of voices, including those that may dissent from the majority, are heard and valued fosters a more vibrant, dynamic community. This approach not only enriches discussions but also contributes to a more inclusive culture that celebrates differences as a source of strength and creativity.
DEI Can Be Intolerant (Ironically)
Intolerance, the third sin, refers to the tendency within some DEI efforts to suppress dissenting opinions or critique, often under the guise of promoting inclusivity. This can create environments where individuals feel unable to express differing viewpoints for fear of being labeled as bigoted or out of touch, which ironically undermines the very diversity and openness DEI initiatives aim to promote.
Creating spaces where differing opinions are welcomed and valued is essential for combating intolerance. This means fostering an atmosphere of open dialogue and mutual respect, where all members feel safe to share their perspectives. Such environments not only enhance understanding and empathy but also drive innovation and problem-solving by leveraging the full range of human experiences and insights.
Overemphasis on Oppression and Power
The fourth sin involves an overemphasis on oppression and power dynamics to the exclusion of other factors that influence human relationships and societal structures. While recognizing the reality of oppression is crucial, an exclusive focus on these elements can lead to a worldview that sees interactions primarily through the lens of victimhood and power imbalances, potentially obscuring pathways to empowerment and collaboration.
Adopting a balanced perspective that acknowledges both systemic issues and individual agency is vital. Recognizing that people have the power to affect change, both within themselves and their communities, alongside understanding systemic barriers, offers a more holistic view of social change. This approach encourages solutions that empower individuals while addressing the structural inequities that limit opportunities.
quality of Outcomes : Racist and Sexist Policies
The fifth sin critiques the goal of equality of outcomes, arguing that it can lead to policies that, while well-intentioned, inadvertently reinforce racial and sexist biases by imposing arbitrary quotas or standards that do not account for individual choice or circumstance. This approach risks valuing numerical representation over genuine equity and disregards the complexity of human aspirations and capabilities.
Shifting focus from equality of outcomes to providing equal opportunities for all is proposed as a remedy. Ensuring that every individual has access to the resources and support they need to achieve their potential creates a truly equitable environment. This approach respects individual choices and acknowledges that success can look different for each person, promoting a culture that values merit and diversity in its truest sense.
Tribal Identities
Tribalism, identified as the sixth sin, refers to the division of society into increasingly fragmented identity groups, each vying for recognition and power. This can exacerbate societal divisions and distract from shared goals and common humanity, leading to a polarized environment where solidarity and understanding are undermined by allegiance to narrow group identities.
Embracing a more holistic view of individuals, which considers a wide range of factors beyond race and gender, is the suggested solution. Acknowledging the full complexity of human beings fosters a more respectful and accurate perception of individual identity. This approach promotes unity and understanding, transcending tribal divisions to highlight shared values and common ground.
DEI Can Be Anti-Liberal
The final sin, anti-liberalism, criticizes the tendency of some DEI initiatives to suppress free expression and enforce conformity to specific ideologies. This approach contradicts liberal values of open debate, freedom of thought, and the importance of diverse viewpoints, potentially stifling dialogue and innovation. Promoting a culture of open debate and the free exchange of ideas, where diverse viewpoints are not only tolerated but encouraged, is vital. Recognizing that robust discussions and the challenging of assumptions are foundational to progress, this solution advocates for a return to principles that value the diversity of thought as a cornerstone of a truly inclusive society."
(https://integrallife.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-dei/?)
History
Richard Hanania:
"Under affirmative action guidelines as applied to government contractors, it is no exaggeration to say that businesses are forced to be obsessed with race and sex. Long before people noticed that identity-related issues had consumed American universities, something resembling modern wokeness had already been forced on big business. Affirmative action is required for every employer with fifty employees that does at least $50,000 worth of business a year with the federal government, and every subcontractor with at least $10,000 in business. Government regulations specify that a “central premise underlying affirmative action is that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce, generally, will reflect the gender, racial and ethnic profile of the labor pools from which the contractor recruits and selects.” If a contractor falls short in any particular area, it must take “practical steps” to make up for its deficiency.
One of the most sinister aspects of all this is that it forced managers at businesses who might want nothing to do with leftist ideas to become foot soldiers in the project of identity-based governance.
The employer is required to participate in a detailed process of identity-based classification and analysis. Middle managers for construction companies and retail store owners become social scientists. First, employers are forced to create an “organizational profile,” defined as “a detailed graphical or tabular chart, text, spreadsheet or similar presentation of the contractor’s organizational structure.” The contractor must break his business down into “organizational units,” and record the race, gender, and ethnicity of the supervisor of each one. Within each unit, the business must record the number of males and females of each of the following groups: blacks, Hispanics, Asians/Pacific Islanders, and American Indians/Alaskan Natives. Race and sex are to be determined by self-identification, with the employer prohibited from overruling an individual’s selection, although visual classification is acceptable under certain conditions. The next step is engaging in a “workforce analysis,” which divides the employees of a company by job title. Those with titles that are similar in terms of work and pay are combined into “job groups.”
This initial work is required to get to the “job group analysis.” This means comparing the number of women and minorities in each job group to their estimated availability in the population. And how does one determine availability? By coming up with a number for the “percentage of minorities or women with requisite skills in the reasonable recruitment area.” When a particular demographic is underrepresented in a job group, the employer must create “placement goals” to correct its deficiency…
Every aspect of employers’ analysis is reviewable by government bureaucrats. For the same reason that a contractor can always get around affirmative action requirements, the government can always find grounds to apply pressure on a business. From the contractor’s perspective, all they can know for certain is that they must go through the motions, and that hiring and promoting more minorities and women will be less likely to get them in trouble."
(https://www.richardhanania.com/p/thoughts-on-trump-ending-affirmative)
From Affirmative Action to Identity Politics to DEI: the betrayal of the black working class
Charles McKelvey:
"Affirmative action, initiated in the 1960s, departed from the spirit of King’s proposals, and in addition, it stood against the American Creed of equality for all, in that it mandated preferential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex. Moreover, affirmative action was flawed from the perspective of social justice, because it provided support for blacks and women who had credentials to enter competition for highly valued employment and prestigious universities, but it provided no support for blacks and women who lacked the minimal credentials to enter the competition.
Affirmative action would have been a good measure, if it had been conceived and presented to the people as a temporary correction for past discrimination, and if it had been accompanied by a broad-based program of educational and economic reforms. However, in spite of its evident limitations, the great majority of whites accepted affirmative action. And through the decades, white attitudes became increasingly race neutral, moving away from the racist beliefs of the pre-1965 era. At the same time, racial inequalities in income and wealth persisted, as a result of the inherent limitations of affirmative action and the absence of a broad-based movement for economic reform. Affirmative action reflected the particular interests of the black middle class.
The Rainbow Coalition led by Jesse Jackson in the 1980s responded to the stagnation that had set in with respect to the process of change. It sought to form a political coalition of all racial and ethnic groups and social sectors, including white workers and businesspersons. It put forth a comprehensive program of economic and social change to the benefit of all non-elite social sectors. And it proposed a reorientation of U.S. foreign policy from East-West confrontation to North-South cooperation, appropriating ideas that previously had been expressed by Pan-Africanism, Malcolm X, the black power movement, the student anti-war movement, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Rainbow Coalition was a positive and constructive effort to revitalize the Civil Rights Movement.
By the 1990s, the Rainbow Coalition had dissipated without attaining reforms, and identity politics emerged. Identity politics is an accommodationist project that abandons the goal of transformative social change of the African-American movement of the period 1966-1972 and of the Jackson presidential campaigns of 1983 to 1988. It seeks greater inclusion in the institutions of the nation of blacks, women, Latinos, indigenous peoples, and LGBT persons. Identity politics assumes the inclusion of such groups will create a greater diversity of viewpoints, and thus it will strengthen the institution in the attainment of its goals, and in some situations, could lead to change in the definition of institutional goals. The corporate elite supports identity politics, because it is in a position to control changes that might emerge from it, guaranteeing that its own power and privilege is preserved. At the same time, identity politics can add to political stability, by channeling radical impulses among the excluded sectors toward inclusion in the structures of authority in the established order.
In the 2010s, in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and the rapid dissemination of the notion of the 99%, academics and activists put forth the notion that white racism was the cause of the persistent racial inequality in wealth and income. In a 2018 article in Dialectical Anthropology, “Antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left,” Adolph Reed Jr., Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and a recognized black political scientist, maintains that the new anti-racist politics is incompatible with leftist politics as conventionally understood; it is in fact anti-leftist. It “is fundamentally antagonistic to a left politics of broadly egalitarian social transformation.” It does not seek the elimination or reduction of economic inequalities of the nation; it only seeks equal access to the hierarchical distribution of goods and services. It is committed to the pursuit of racial parity within the established order; it does not seek to forge a large, broad political base seeking social transformation. It is rooted in the social position and worldview of governmental administrators tied to the Democratic Party, news analysts and commentators, educational administrators and professors, corporate administrators, social service and non-profit sectors, and the diversity industry. The members of this stratum are in agreement that race and other ascriptive identities should be central to the framing of social justice issues.
The claim that white racism is the cause of persistent racial inequality in income and wealth ignored other factors, such as familial and societal disintegration, as several black conservative scholars today argue. It ignored the analysis of the African-American sociologist William J. Wilson, who maintained that the outmigration of the black middle class from historically black neighborhoods had resulted in socially isolated lower-class black neighborhoods with high levels of poverty, welfare dependency, youth joblessness, male joblessness, street crime, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, and female-headed families.
In a Heritage Foundation program, three black intellectuals/activists (Glen Loury, Ian Rowe, and Robert Woodson) noted that the income gap between blacks and whites had declined in the 1950s and 1960s, during the Jim Crow era; but the racial income gap increased in the 1960s and 1970s, following the civil rights reforms and the adoption of government policies to reduce poverty. The reasons for the racial gap, they maintain, are the rise of single-parent families, a decline in family stability and functionality, the declining influence of the church, the prevailing belief that the government is responsible for rectifying social problems, and the emergence of a narrative that stresses black victimization. They noted that the consequences of the racial income gap today are most fully experienced by the black lower class. See “Conservative black intellectuals speak: We are responsible for our own community development,” August 5, 2022.
To be sure, racism continued after 1965, but it took a different form. Blatant racist attitudes were greatly reduced, but the economic consequences of historic racism continued to have an impact on black society. For the most part, racism after 1965 was subtle, characterized by an ethnocentric indifference to the needs of black society or African-American history and culture. But in this indifference to others, the great majority of whites were similar to the great majority of persons in the modern era, including blacks who migrated out of the traditional black neighborhoods, with little attention being paid to the consequences with respect to the development of the neighborhood left behind. (See “The causes of racial inequality in USA: A look at historic, economic, and cultural factors,” January 14, 2022).
“After equality of opportunity: King’s call for a multiracial coalition seeking economic justice,” March 17, 2023
The anti-racist ideology, particularly its use of the term “systemic racism,” is rooted in the post-modern turn of higher education, which began in the 1980s, especially among white feminist scholars at elite universities. Post-modernism is not a threat to the elite, because post-modern epistemological assumptions send the people into a bewildering morass of conflicting subjectivities, rendering them powerless to defend their interests. At the same time, with the people reduced to babble, the capacity for advances in human civilization is undermined.
For post-modernists, reality is not reflected in political-economic dynamics, such as the changing customs with respect to race in the USA after 1965. Rather, reality is defined by words, by discourse, by the way people speak. What is more, the true meaning of words is discerned by specialists, who are able to discern a racist meaning that was not necessarily intended by the speaker. In this way, the idea has been disseminated that white society is racist, not so much in its political-economic practices or social customs, but in its language, which is pervasive, or “systemic.”
Those who claimed that the USA today is characterized by “systemic racism” often used a leapfrog rhetorical maneuver. They move in their discourse from one social and historical context to another, from slavery times or the era of Jim Crow to exemplifying incidents of the present day, disdaining any effort to understand the real racial political-economic system today and the dynamics of its evolution since 1965. The leapfrog maneuver reflects the post-modern tendency to forge truth on the basis of one’s personal truth, feelings, and lived experiences, rather than seeking to understand objective reality. The overall effect of the post-modern scholarship with respect to race has been to create the myth that whites continue to be racist, just as they have been since slavery times.
Who would create such a myth, and to what purpose? Black conservative scholars have done excellent work in exposing the game. They note that it is in the interests of the black middle class, especially in the context of an American economy that has passed its historic stage of expansion, because it ensures continued preferential treatment in the competition for admission to exclusive universities and in employment. “Race hustlers” among politician, activists, and academics have emerged, whose careers are fueled by racial injustices, real or constructed, creating new opportunities for black professionals and the black middle class, especially in an expanding diversity sensitivity industry.
The false and superficial claims of academics and activists served the particular interests of the black middle class, because they kept affirmative action alive long past its time, and they facilitated the expansion of affirmative action in the more advanced form of DEI, which became a new “service” industry, authoritarian in its tactics, due to its lack of reasonable grounds for its defense."
(https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/p/the-national-turn-against-dei?)
Discussion
Steven Lawrence on Organic DEI
Steven Lawrence:
"In the year 2023 alone, a growing number of institutions, state legislatures, and local governments throughout the United States and other English-speaking countries are dropping DEI frameworks altogether, adopting instead a more merit-based approach that focuses on building equality of opportunity for all people, rather than equality of outcomes that are often enforced by policies of positive discrimination in which groups that are deemed marginalized are provided opportunities ahead of demographic groups that are deemed privileged by followers of identity-based Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories.
But, I think we need to be careful not to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
We can and should critique and even remove DEI programs that rest exclusively on the principles and practices of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories of race, gender, class and other sociocultural identities, as they often lead to inter-group resentments and potential legal entanglements due to the unfairness of such principles and practices. But, while we may need to roll back some of these practices, we should continue to strive for inclusiveness to the best of our ability in our public and private policies, practices, laws, institutions, and societal norms.
As a longtime educator in both the private and public sectors—and as a person who has served in what the Department of Interior’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Civil Rights has designated as Minority Serving Institutions (MSI)—I can confidently attest to the need for our educational institutions to attend to the specific needs and rights of students from all backgrounds, including students of color, LGBTQ students, women, men, and all others.
We can do this by adopting more organic approaches to DEI. To do this effectively, we need to work consciously at avoiding the dogmatic ideological approaches that justify punitive and retributive interpersonal abuse against disfavored demographic groups, the double standards for hiring and job performance that has been adopted by an increasingly large number of institutions and companies, and the commitment insisted upon by some of the most vocal advocates of CSJ to applying interpretive absolutism in the analysis of all interactions between people categorized as belonging to marginalized and privileged identity groups.
By rigidly clinging to the pre-formed belief that bigotry and bias are the only explanatory factors in the outcomes of these interactions or in the life prospects of different communities, we close ourselves off from more accurate, or at least more complete, interpretations of scenarios and the possibility of finding optimal solutions to the problems we want to solve.
And, as many on all sides of the social and political spectrum will agree, the classroom from Kindergarten to college is the place where all of these questions and issues have the most potential for having a large impact on the direction of our society. There is no question that in the 2020s, the classroom on all levels of the educational arc has become the one of the main battlefields for the fights around cultural, social, economic, political, and even spiritual issues.
Because of this, we need to find a more unifying path that can protect the rights and dignity of all people. And that path must be organic."
(https://groundexperience.substack.com/p/organic-dei-empathy-beyond-ideological)
Status
Legal status of U.S. federal DEI legislation after Trump's second mandate
Christopher Rufo:
"President Trump signed an executive order abolishing the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy in the federal government.
The move marks a stunning reversal of fortune from just four years ago, when Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and DEI seemed unstoppable. Following the death of George Floyd, left-wing race activists made a blitz through America’s institutions, rewriting school curricula, altering government policy, and establishing DEI offices in major universities, big-city school districts, and Fortune 100 companies. The Biden administration immediately followed suit, mandating a “whole-of-government equity agenda” that entrenched DEI in the federal government.
No more. President Trump has rescinded the Biden executive order and instructed his Cabinet to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions,” and “all ‘equity action plans,’ ‘equity’ actions, initiatives, or programs.” In other words, President Trump has signed the death warrant for DEI within the federal government."
(https://christopherrufo.com/p/trump-abolishes-dei-for-the-feds)