Can DEI Be Salvaged?

"Diversity" and "Inclusion" are noble goals. But "Equity" needs to be jettisoned.

I've written a lot of criticism of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) industry (for example, here and here and here and here and here). So perhaps it's worth asking the question: can DEI be salvaged?

To explore this question, let's go through each tenet of DEI.

Diversity

"Diversity" as a concept is hugely important and can absolutely be salvaged. In a pluralistic society with genuine equality of opportunity, we absolutely should see people of all ethnicities, genders, and classes at almost every level of society. To the extent that we don't, that's a problem worth investigating.

It's also clear that, while we have made enormous strides in becoming a more free and equal society, we have not yet reached perfection when it comes to equality of opportunity. Some people still face discrimination based on things like their background or their immutable characteristics. For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science published a study noting that black Americans are "10 percentage points less likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding." This is true even after the study authors controlled for the applicant's "educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics."

In an article titled "The Good News They Won’t Tell You About Race in America", center-right African American political scientist Wilfred Reilly noted that race relations have improved dramatically but are still not perfect. For example, a Memphis study found that "black rental applicants were not offered an apartment in 8 to 9 percent of situations whereas essentially identical white counterparts were." The same kinds of prejudice show up in politics too: "Per 2015 Gallup data, 8 percent of Americans would not vote for a qualified black candidate for president running on their party’s ticket."

Or as Reilly puts it, "Obviously, racism does exist in the 21st-century United States, and no-nonsense folks on the right and in the center need to state this openly."

As DEI becomes another lightning rod in the culture war, good-faith critics of DEI can sometimes get lumped together with genuine racists who are using the flaws of DEI as cover to race-bait or try to roll back the clock to the 1950s on race relations. For instance, Bo Winegard, executive editor of Aporia Magazine, wrote that "black underperformance" in the United States was caused by "innate race differences in cognitive ability and self-control." To take another example: the GOP's Senate candidate for Delaware in 2020, Lauren Witzke, posted a video on X (formerly Twitter) seeming to suggest that there was a problem with African-American pilots. The tweet racked up 27,000 Likes.

If we want our criticisms of DEI to carry the day, we have to differentiate ourselves from the race-hustlers and hereditarians who don't trust people of a certain skin color. The best way to do this is to make it clear that diversity is a net good and something that we should strive for…even if we disagree with how DEI advocates are going about pursuing it.

Inclusion

Again, the concept of "Inclusion" is hugely important in a pluralistic democracy. Just like with diversity, I would argue that we often need more inclusion.

There are lost of areas, for instance, where we need more representation by class. Camilo Ortiz, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at Long Island University and an expert on child anxiety, argues that "one big problem with the field of academic psychology is that it has become limited to the privileged and the wealthy." When the average therapist has never experienced real adversity, they can develop a skewed perception of how bad adversity actually is. They can accidentally coddle children and teens, hurting them in the long term, because they don't have the practical experience of overcoming adversity and growing as a result. If the profession was more inclusive towards people from poor backgrounds or broken homes, Ortiz suggests, there might be less coddling and more focus on helping kids to develop the antifragility necessary to navigate life as successful adults.

There are also areas where I think we need more inclusion by race. Coleman Hughes makes a strong argument in The End of Race Politics that police forces should resemble the racial makeup of the communities that they serve in order to build trust. "A police force that consisted of all white men would not be perceived as legitimate by a population as racially diverse as New York," he writes. In fact, racial inclusivity is so important to the good functioning of a police force that ethnicity could actually be a hiring factor. “We want police forces that maintain race-neutral standards of entry and are racially diverse," Hughes writes. "But insofar as there is an inherent trade-off between those two goals—and there very well could be in some cases—it could make sense to compromise on the former.”

Again, in order to differentiate ourselves from race-baiters and hereditarians, we need to make it clear that inclusivity in and of itself is a net good–even if we disagree with DEI advocates about how to pursue it.

Equity

Here's where things get tricky. I actually don't think "equity" as a concept is salvageable. There is no conception of "equity" that is consistent with the Enlightenment ideal of treating everyone equally, or the pursuit of equality of opportunity.

Why not? First, let's define equity. A resource put out by the County of Marin Department of Health and Human Services puts it well: "Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome." Or to put it more succinctly: "equality" focuses on equality of opportunity. "Equity" focuses on equality of outcomes. 

Let's take a concrete example. Black Americans represent 13.6% of the population. Equality suggests that every black American should have the same opportunity as a white or Asian American to become a professional swimmer–but whether they do or don't is up to them. Equity tells us that the world of professional swimming needs to be about 13.6% black.

If the world of professional swimming isn't about 13.6 percent black, then that's a big problem. It's a sign of a structural issue. As Ibram X. Kendi put it, "As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism."

There are two problems with pursuing equity. The first is that some inequalities come from genuine systemic problems (for example, the study above showing that black rental applicants get accepted less than white rental applicants even ceteris paribus), while other inequalities come from cultural differences. The pursuit of equity doesn't recognize this as a meaningful distinction.

For example, in 2021 73.2 percent of all NBA players were black. By contrast, only 16.8 percent of players were white. This is in spite of the fact that white Americans represent 58.9 percent of the population. But does anyone think this disparity represents a problem, or systemic barriers towards white children?

Let's take another example. As Hughes points out, roughly 80 percent of the world's top pianists are Chinese, despite the fact that Chinese folks only make up about 18 percent of the world's population. Does this mean that non-Chinese people are discriminated against when it comes to the piano? That seems unlikely.

A better explanation is culture. As Hughes explains, "mastery of classical concert piano is highly valued in modern Chinese culture. A higher proportion of parents start their kids on piano at a young age, and those kids are reinforced by the fact that many of their friends play piano as well." "That fact alone," he suggests, "is enough to create a benign disparity in which Chinese people are 'overrepresented' at the highest levels of piano playing." The same is true of sports, music, food (how many top Chinese chefs are from Mexico?) and other activities. These differences aren't just benign–I would argue that they're actually good. Do we really want to live in a world in which every culture prioritizes the same sports, the same music, the same food? That doesn't sound like it would create very much diversity.

But there's a bigger problem with the pursuit of equity, besides just making out that benign differences between cultures are some sort of existential threat. Some cultural differences are not benign. For example, white people ages 15-24 are 61 percent more likely than black people aged 15-24 to commit suicide. The idea that this is an example of systemic oppression towards whites seems unlikely. Far more likely, this is a cultural problem in the white community.

If we recognize this as a cultural problem, then we can fix it. One solution might be for white parents to start giving their kids more independence, more free play, less therapy, and fewer Xanax. But we can only get there if we properly locate the problem as coming from inside the community rather than from external factors. If instead we think of it as caused by systemic factors outside of the community, then we're liable to misdiagnose the problem and offer the wrong intervention.

Instead of equity, what we need is equality of opportunity. This gives us plenty of tools to fix systemic, or pipeline, problems (as Coleman Hughes documents in his TED Talk "A case for color blindness") while respecting individual preferences. It lets us address areas where the playing field is truly not level, without throwing the cultural baby out with the systemic-racism bathwater. 

The Other "E": the Enlightenment

There's another E that DEI focuses on, and it's the rejection of this E that many critics object to most vociferously.

The intellectual backbone of many strains of DEI is Critical Theory, which is explicitly anti-Enlightenment.

In their book Is Everyone Really Equal? Robin DiAngelo and Özlem Sensoy say that Critical Social Justice (part of the intellectual foundation of much of the DEI movement) initially advocated for "a type of liberal humanism (individualism, freedom, and peace)” but emphasize that it "quickly turned to a rejection of liberal humanism.” One reason is that CSJ rejects "the logic of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism."

In their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic are even more explicit. "Critical Race Theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order," they argue. It is opposed to "equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law."

Many DEI scholars explicitly reject the idea of epistemic liberalism, one of the foundations of the Enlightenment. DiAngelo and Sensoy, for instance, take issue with the scientific method and the very goal of objectivity.

 "[Critical theory] scholars argue that a key element of social injustice involves the claim that particular knowledge is objective, neutral, and universal," they write. "An approach based on critical theory calls into question the idea that objectivity is desirable or even possible." In fact, they argue that Critical Theory, "developed in part as a response to this presumed superiority and infallibility of the scientific method."

In Hypatia, professor Alison Bailey even rejects the idea of critical thinking:

" …the tools of the critical-thinking tradition (for example, validity, soundness, conceptual clarity) cannot dismantle the master’s house: they can temporarily beat the master at his own game, but they can never bring about any enduring structural change (Lorde 1984, 112). They fail because the critical thinker’s toolkit is commonly invoked in particular settings, at particular times to reassert power: those adept with the tools often use them to restore an order that assures their comfort."

Or to put it another way: critical thinking is bad because people on top might use it to maintain their power.

The point isn't that rejecting foundational Enlightenment ideals is bad (I would argue that it is, but that's a book-length topic). The point is that we should peel back the curtain. A lot of folks support DEI because they support ending racism and sexism and homophobia, not realizing that many DEI practitioners also have in their sights the foundational ideals of the American experiment (While DEI is a big field with lots of different supporters who believe different things, the condemnation of DEI by eminently fair-minded scholars like Jonathan Haidt makes me suspect that these problems run deep). People should still be free to support DEI if they want to, of course; but they should at least be clear on what prominent DEI practitioners are actually saying.

What Should Replace DEI?

So if DEI needs to go, what should be pursue instead? I think Liberal Social Justice (LSJ) is a great place to start. What is Liberal Social Justice? As Rio Veradonir explains in Queer Majority:

"Liberal Social Justice (LSJ) can be summed up as the belief in the equality of individuals: equal treatment under the law, regardless of sex, race, sexuality, gender identity, religion, etc. This is what 'social justice' traditionally meant, and it was how most abolitionists, civil rights campaigners, and LGBT rights activists used and understood the term, despite some internal disagreements within these movements."

As Veradonir notes, liberal social justice has made immense gains on issues such as "same-sex marriage, LGBT acceptance, attitudes about interracial marriage, and civil protections from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexuality, or gender identity." Liberal social justice focuses strongly on diversity, inclusion, and equality of opportunity; while also being founded on and focused on the core tenets of the Enlightenment. That's the type of social justice that I think is worth fighting for.

So what's our exercise this week, as a community of practice? It's not just to criticize DEI or support Liberal Social Justice. Instead, I want to go after something bigger and less divisive:

Read primary sources.

DEI is a huge field. Most fields are huge. And I don't think we can learn about a field just by reading critics of it. If we only read critics of XYZ, we're going to end up with a very flawed idea of what XYZ is. At the same time, if we only read people who support XYZ, we're going to end up with a perhaps equally flawed idea of what XYZ is. If we want to understand XYZ, I think the only way is to read actual practitioners, scholars, and activists for XYZ. Peel back the curtain.

If we all do that, we may still not find that we all agree. But at least we'll be arguing over the same thing.

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