All across the Academy, schools are requiring “Diversity Statements” as a condition for new hires. Everyone has to submit a statement explaining how they are going to contribute to “diversity”. What you’re supposed to do in these, and what everyone damn well knows you’re supposed to do, is (i) talk about your race, gender, and other “identity group” traits that it would be illegal for the university to explicitly ask you about, and (ii) talk about your activism on behalf of left-wing identity politics.
Oct 14, 2022·edited Oct 14, 2022Liked by Michael Huemer
Hi Mike. I think it's extremely important and fruitful to refer to the actual content of DEI indoctrination programs, lessons, slideshows, etc. You're talking about it exogenously, tracking the logic of the dictionary meaning of words like "diversity", but I think it's the substantive content that really exposes what this is.
Most people probably imagine a vanilla sense of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and that the implementation or instantiation of these concepts in the mandatory workplace indoctrination sessions is some sort of vanilla thing, maybe based on universal values around not being racist, benevolence, etc. If you linger on each word in the triplet, you'd probably know why "equity" and "inclusion" cannot even theoretically have vanilla implementations. It might be possible to know this if you didn't know about leftists and their ideology – I'm not sure. Equity isn't a word English-speakers used before in a core values or justice sense, but it carries the broad default momentum of goodness that equality/equal carry. Inclusion is oddly specific, structurally action-oriented, that we need to do something to "include" someone or some group, which wouldn't normally occur to us, and isn't something any other school would likely land on as a value. That's more of a childhood playground concept for most humans.
A lot of the content is Orwellian word use dictates. I expect it's extremely awkward for anyone well educated or maybe philosophically minded/independent. Like the recent Air Force Academy slides telling cadets to use alternatives to "mom and dad" (it's unclear if they mean in referring to one's own mom and dad, or if it's about other people's parents – the slides are junky in various generic pedagogy and intellectual clarity dimensions). On the same slide they say not to say things like "I'm colorblind" or "I don't see color" and "We're all just people". (I don't remember which of the first two it had, or if it was both – I'm sure of the third.)
Those phrases are just things that annoy leftists, say from past conversations. They literally add arguments or sentiments or self-descriptors that annoy them to the list of things you shouldn't say. They might try to back it by saying something about "science says" that you can't be colorblind, maybe because of implicit association tests where college kids tapping on a keyboard in response to word pairs flashing on the screen imply a valenced association attached to a race (due to millisecond scale variance in the key press responses). Obviously that's not going to tell us anything about a human being's ability to be colorblind, or to accurately say they're colorblind in their behavior or what have you. Nor does an IAT finding debunk a implicit point in a claim about us all being people, much less support indoctrination telling people never to say such things. (That the IAT findings are contested on their own terms, and may not replicate, is a separate epistemic issue – leftists don't seem to know that most social psychology findings/claims are false, which just the replication attempts show. It's actually worse than that, but they don't engage with science or reality with the baseline rigor you'd need to explain the validity issues to them, even ignoring that they don't trust outsiders and won't actually believe anything we say anyway. I don't think leftists trust themselves to think independently, so it has to come from their leaders or media intermediaries.)
The last thing on that slide was "Model humility when you get it wrong". You'll find that they always include these injunctions of supplication. It's the creepiest cult... They're saying that if you "get it" "wrong" by saying some word they've told you not to say (or those phrases), or don't use someone's bizarre pronoun, or assume that someone's parents are the usual human male/female parents, or really anything that a black person, trans person, leftist at large type person rebukes you for, you should never argue, never question, but just accept that you "got it" "wrong", and "model humility". The Navy thing on pronouns was phrased something like "assume the error is yours and learn from it", don't question, etc. That's common in all the indoctrination materials, the supplication if you get it "wrong". And that is where humans really need to be able to recognize a cult and say no.
The Pentagon diversity lady who was in the news recently would proclaim to her captive audiences things like "I can't be racist – I don't have power" (because she's black). That's standard, not controversial to leftists. We see that recitation everywhere. Their abstractions and assertions are really distinctive, and we totally failed to characterize them and call this out as arbitrary junk a long time ago. They're implying that reality is the kind of place where a human being either has or does not have "power" depending on their race and other identities. It's ironically binary both in having power and in being able to be racist. Any thinking human could just situate themselves in a typical human life and consider the values, options, constraints that a person faces at various stages, the nature of a human life course, variance in contexts, and maybe what sorts of "power" a person might have at various stages, and how much (actual quantity now, not binary). Such a thinker would have no use for the leftist abstraction of "power" at any point, this wouldn't be a simple debunking of their ideology – it would be highlighting that we just don't care about arbitrary abstractions like that, and would need some sort of explanation and body of evidence to even begin to think about this "power" they speak of.
All that doesn't even touch on what it means to be racist, a psychological and moral model of a human being, the human mind, an account of moral responsibility for different sorts of behaviors in various contexts, what humans owe or don't owe to each other, or the downstream consequences of the leftist ideology here vs. alternatives. All that is just ignored by an ideology that has these binary and unclear abstractions and makes sweeping descriptive claims about the world and humans based on those abstractions. I think the best default answer to leftist ideology is to point out the arbitrary, sweeping assertions using proprietary abstractions, without evidence, and say "Let us know when you have something." As in, something we can even work with or evaluate, because this is just arbitrary junk.
It's also worth noting that you'd have to get people when they're young to get them to embrace this, and uneducated. How in the world would someone who had read the Stoics, Aristotle, random history books of all sorts, Kant, economics, psychology, etc. embrace these abstractions, and an ideology that doesn't realize how arbitrary its starting points and structure are? If we just waited until people were 25 to fill them in modern ideologies, which is mostly the left, I think few would embrace it (conservatives don't have much, mostly default human intuitions and patriotism, and a religion that releases them of ultimate responsibility for worldly outcomes, tempering their activism; Nazism isn't much to look at in terms of an ideology or scope). There's more to it than that, since leftist ideology is generally indoctrinated, not taught as part of an intellectual landscape. For example, when they "teach kids about racism" using CRT, they're asserting motives of long dead founders, the existence of "lingering effects of slavery", and using loaded leftist abstractions like "oppression" and "systemic racism" as *descriptive* terms describing the world, which is incredibly awkward. Leftists really don't differentiate between descriptive reality and their ideology, or betray any cognizance of the nature of normative philosophy and claims. It's almost like they're no longer aware of the existence of philosophy as a field.
I’ll just say, after reading you for over a year I’ve been struck by how my reading experience has changed. At first it was, “Oh, this guy’s being willfully obtuse here, he’s interpreting things in a narrow way and missing the broader context. But he makes some interesting points.”
Now I basically just read and nod along. It’s all very reasonable!
I still have some vague sense that *something* is being missed, in this case maybe the extent to which people are mostly being dumb when they ignore other kinds of diversity, just following the cultural conversation, rather than intentionally focusing on race to the exclusion of all else. They just find it hard to see outside of the frame they’ve been handed.
I think your argument is largely good, but to play devil's advocate, I think there is value in having friends across races for the sake of improved race relations, and may bolster a feeling of "we're all in this together". I'm sympathetic to liberals who feel uncomfortable in e.g. an all-white crowd, I think the desire to include people of other races is coming from a place of benevolence (both extending benefits of group membership outside a narrow racial demographic, and sort of "keeping the group honest" in terms of not favoring one racial demographic or another in its decisions), but yeah it can definitely get out of hand.
I thought this, and the previous post about the Israel-Gaza conflict, are two of the best articles I have read for some time. Both left me feeling, 'Yes, that's EXACTLY how things are' whereas other articles I've read about DEI and Gaza over the years haven't left me with that feeling. Brilliant.
I'm a prof. I just yesterday had a session with the DEI officer for our college. He warned us about using the word "multicultural" because for many international students it has become a signifier of disability or inferiority—because they feel the the term suggests that they have been given preferences for their ethnicity/race, as opposed to their capabilities.
Re-reading this column after the more recent one on the Supreme Court's recent decision on affirmative action in university admissions, I was struck by the explanation offered in section 2.1 as an argument for affirmative action, that including people of different races is a valid way to achieve diversity of ideas. But then, when someone like Justice Clarence Thomas, or economist Walter Williams, or economist Thomas Sowell, comes along, with ideas different from many or most other Blacks, they are accused of being Uncle Toms or traitors to their race. Wokists appear to believe that ideas are determined by race, and demand that everyone fall into line with their expected thoughts. Only those who follow the party line for a given race are considered truly "valid" as people.
"But there just isn’t any argument to be made that you need a number of people from group A that is proportional to the current percentage of people in the general population of your society who belong to A."
Isn't there? That would be the equivalent of asking for democratic proportional represenation.
Excuse the source, check the links to the white papers with data backed insights that empirically dispel the idea that Black people benefit from affirmative action since that is the group that is consistently used to frame your most of the examples. It’s actually WHITE WOMEN who have gotten the most from affirmative action policies.
Personally, arguments that can not be proven with data are toxic and speculative.
Arguing that Intellectual “diversity” is equal to or superior than equal access to OPPORTUNITIES is essentially a passive form of eugenics passing as being “fair”. Access is the true ask here, not just composition based on artificial categories.
I do agree that DEI initiatives are BS. They have not addressed that lack of resources, access and preparatory experiences that certain demographics have morphed from unearned privileges to birth rights. It’s a mess.
If we truly want equitable outcomes then those who benefit most from a lack of diversity (equal access to opportunities and resources) have to be willing to accept their unearned privilege afforded to them at birth. All of us have some form or privilege, known and unknown. I’m speaking specifically to the privileges some experience based on skin tone that are often ignored but are the basis for the need to have this conversation.
Many thank's for that lucid post. Mostly of us see this, but can't talk about without be labeled as fascist or something like that to prevent the discussion to occurs and silence all who doesn't share the mainstream ideas.
Can I translate your post to Portuguese and share with link to original post?
Diversity is nothing more than racism, with nice sounding wrapper, so that people feel better about themselves. The notion that if you look a certain way that means you have similiar/same life experiences as other people who look a certain way, or have a way of thinking that is similar, or has similar capabilities IS racist.
Race has nothing to do about individual; beyond how a person looks. The rest depends on where they were born, to whom, and how they were raised.
Intellectual diversity? Try to think about it on the basis of proportion instead. If CS classroom had 0 women, and 0 black people, that looks right to you?
For example, in Brazil quotas for black, natives, mixed people were introduced for increasing their presence on superior education, which was unproportionally minimal, and it indeed has had some success.
I'm late to the party with this comment, but in case anyone is still interested:
The idea that racial/identity group diversity could be beneficial in a university setting seems plausible if you think about it for five seconds. But if you think about it for five minutes, it seems pretty implausible. Let us grant the (dubious in my view) premise that people of different races have different ideas, attitudes, and experiences, and that exposure to this diversity of ideas is beneficial. Even so, how does this work in practice?
Here is what my college experience was like (and I think my experience was fairly typical): I would enter a classroom (often a large lecture hall) and pick a desk. Then I would listen and take notes as the professor lectured for an hour. Then I left. At what point was the fact that a black guy was sitting next to me supposed to benefit my education? Maybe in the small handful of classes in which we were assigned group projects, or in which there was some amount of in-class student discussion, there was some opportunity for the students' diverse backgrounds and ideas to come into play. But I was a Computer Science major. It is very unclear that a different cultural background would be relevant to how to design a compiler, or build a robot, etc. In fact I think for the majority of college majors (including the vaunted STEM ones), the diversity of ideas of people with different backgrounds has no relevance at all.
So for diversity proponents, I ask: what exactly is the mechanism by which this diversity is supposed to benefit students?
I was expecting more comments about this.
Hi Mike. I think it's extremely important and fruitful to refer to the actual content of DEI indoctrination programs, lessons, slideshows, etc. You're talking about it exogenously, tracking the logic of the dictionary meaning of words like "diversity", but I think it's the substantive content that really exposes what this is.
Most people probably imagine a vanilla sense of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and that the implementation or instantiation of these concepts in the mandatory workplace indoctrination sessions is some sort of vanilla thing, maybe based on universal values around not being racist, benevolence, etc. If you linger on each word in the triplet, you'd probably know why "equity" and "inclusion" cannot even theoretically have vanilla implementations. It might be possible to know this if you didn't know about leftists and their ideology – I'm not sure. Equity isn't a word English-speakers used before in a core values or justice sense, but it carries the broad default momentum of goodness that equality/equal carry. Inclusion is oddly specific, structurally action-oriented, that we need to do something to "include" someone or some group, which wouldn't normally occur to us, and isn't something any other school would likely land on as a value. That's more of a childhood playground concept for most humans.
A lot of the content is Orwellian word use dictates. I expect it's extremely awkward for anyone well educated or maybe philosophically minded/independent. Like the recent Air Force Academy slides telling cadets to use alternatives to "mom and dad" (it's unclear if they mean in referring to one's own mom and dad, or if it's about other people's parents – the slides are junky in various generic pedagogy and intellectual clarity dimensions). On the same slide they say not to say things like "I'm colorblind" or "I don't see color" and "We're all just people". (I don't remember which of the first two it had, or if it was both – I'm sure of the third.)
Those phrases are just things that annoy leftists, say from past conversations. They literally add arguments or sentiments or self-descriptors that annoy them to the list of things you shouldn't say. They might try to back it by saying something about "science says" that you can't be colorblind, maybe because of implicit association tests where college kids tapping on a keyboard in response to word pairs flashing on the screen imply a valenced association attached to a race (due to millisecond scale variance in the key press responses). Obviously that's not going to tell us anything about a human being's ability to be colorblind, or to accurately say they're colorblind in their behavior or what have you. Nor does an IAT finding debunk a implicit point in a claim about us all being people, much less support indoctrination telling people never to say such things. (That the IAT findings are contested on their own terms, and may not replicate, is a separate epistemic issue – leftists don't seem to know that most social psychology findings/claims are false, which just the replication attempts show. It's actually worse than that, but they don't engage with science or reality with the baseline rigor you'd need to explain the validity issues to them, even ignoring that they don't trust outsiders and won't actually believe anything we say anyway. I don't think leftists trust themselves to think independently, so it has to come from their leaders or media intermediaries.)
The last thing on that slide was "Model humility when you get it wrong". You'll find that they always include these injunctions of supplication. It's the creepiest cult... They're saying that if you "get it" "wrong" by saying some word they've told you not to say (or those phrases), or don't use someone's bizarre pronoun, or assume that someone's parents are the usual human male/female parents, or really anything that a black person, trans person, leftist at large type person rebukes you for, you should never argue, never question, but just accept that you "got it" "wrong", and "model humility". The Navy thing on pronouns was phrased something like "assume the error is yours and learn from it", don't question, etc. That's common in all the indoctrination materials, the supplication if you get it "wrong". And that is where humans really need to be able to recognize a cult and say no.
The Pentagon diversity lady who was in the news recently would proclaim to her captive audiences things like "I can't be racist – I don't have power" (because she's black). That's standard, not controversial to leftists. We see that recitation everywhere. Their abstractions and assertions are really distinctive, and we totally failed to characterize them and call this out as arbitrary junk a long time ago. They're implying that reality is the kind of place where a human being either has or does not have "power" depending on their race and other identities. It's ironically binary both in having power and in being able to be racist. Any thinking human could just situate themselves in a typical human life and consider the values, options, constraints that a person faces at various stages, the nature of a human life course, variance in contexts, and maybe what sorts of "power" a person might have at various stages, and how much (actual quantity now, not binary). Such a thinker would have no use for the leftist abstraction of "power" at any point, this wouldn't be a simple debunking of their ideology – it would be highlighting that we just don't care about arbitrary abstractions like that, and would need some sort of explanation and body of evidence to even begin to think about this "power" they speak of.
All that doesn't even touch on what it means to be racist, a psychological and moral model of a human being, the human mind, an account of moral responsibility for different sorts of behaviors in various contexts, what humans owe or don't owe to each other, or the downstream consequences of the leftist ideology here vs. alternatives. All that is just ignored by an ideology that has these binary and unclear abstractions and makes sweeping descriptive claims about the world and humans based on those abstractions. I think the best default answer to leftist ideology is to point out the arbitrary, sweeping assertions using proprietary abstractions, without evidence, and say "Let us know when you have something." As in, something we can even work with or evaluate, because this is just arbitrary junk.
It's also worth noting that you'd have to get people when they're young to get them to embrace this, and uneducated. How in the world would someone who had read the Stoics, Aristotle, random history books of all sorts, Kant, economics, psychology, etc. embrace these abstractions, and an ideology that doesn't realize how arbitrary its starting points and structure are? If we just waited until people were 25 to fill them in modern ideologies, which is mostly the left, I think few would embrace it (conservatives don't have much, mostly default human intuitions and patriotism, and a religion that releases them of ultimate responsibility for worldly outcomes, tempering their activism; Nazism isn't much to look at in terms of an ideology or scope). There's more to it than that, since leftist ideology is generally indoctrinated, not taught as part of an intellectual landscape. For example, when they "teach kids about racism" using CRT, they're asserting motives of long dead founders, the existence of "lingering effects of slavery", and using loaded leftist abstractions like "oppression" and "systemic racism" as *descriptive* terms describing the world, which is incredibly awkward. Leftists really don't differentiate between descriptive reality and their ideology, or betray any cognizance of the nature of normative philosophy and claims. It's almost like they're no longer aware of the existence of philosophy as a field.
The switch to Substack may have confused people.
I’ll just say, after reading you for over a year I’ve been struck by how my reading experience has changed. At first it was, “Oh, this guy’s being willfully obtuse here, he’s interpreting things in a narrow way and missing the broader context. But he makes some interesting points.”
Now I basically just read and nod along. It’s all very reasonable!
I still have some vague sense that *something* is being missed, in this case maybe the extent to which people are mostly being dumb when they ignore other kinds of diversity, just following the cultural conversation, rather than intentionally focusing on race to the exclusion of all else. They just find it hard to see outside of the frame they’ve been handed.
Overall, keep up the good work.
I think your argument is largely good, but to play devil's advocate, I think there is value in having friends across races for the sake of improved race relations, and may bolster a feeling of "we're all in this together". I'm sympathetic to liberals who feel uncomfortable in e.g. an all-white crowd, I think the desire to include people of other races is coming from a place of benevolence (both extending benefits of group membership outside a narrow racial demographic, and sort of "keeping the group honest" in terms of not favoring one racial demographic or another in its decisions), but yeah it can definitely get out of hand.
I thought this, and the previous post about the Israel-Gaza conflict, are two of the best articles I have read for some time. Both left me feeling, 'Yes, that's EXACTLY how things are' whereas other articles I've read about DEI and Gaza over the years haven't left me with that feeling. Brilliant.
Hear, hear.
I'm a prof. I just yesterday had a session with the DEI officer for our college. He warned us about using the word "multicultural" because for many international students it has become a signifier of disability or inferiority—because they feel the the term suggests that they have been given preferences for their ethnicity/race, as opposed to their capabilities.
Veddy interesting, thought I.
Re-reading this column after the more recent one on the Supreme Court's recent decision on affirmative action in university admissions, I was struck by the explanation offered in section 2.1 as an argument for affirmative action, that including people of different races is a valid way to achieve diversity of ideas. But then, when someone like Justice Clarence Thomas, or economist Walter Williams, or economist Thomas Sowell, comes along, with ideas different from many or most other Blacks, they are accused of being Uncle Toms or traitors to their race. Wokists appear to believe that ideas are determined by race, and demand that everyone fall into line with their expected thoughts. Only those who follow the party line for a given race are considered truly "valid" as people.
"But there just isn’t any argument to be made that you need a number of people from group A that is proportional to the current percentage of people in the general population of your society who belong to A."
Isn't there? That would be the equivalent of asking for democratic proportional represenation.
What about the post-modern oppressor-oppressed nonsense that permeates the woke people as the underlying driver of DEI?
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/affirmative-action-who-benefits/amp
Excuse the source, check the links to the white papers with data backed insights that empirically dispel the idea that Black people benefit from affirmative action since that is the group that is consistently used to frame your most of the examples. It’s actually WHITE WOMEN who have gotten the most from affirmative action policies.
Personally, arguments that can not be proven with data are toxic and speculative.
Arguing that Intellectual “diversity” is equal to or superior than equal access to OPPORTUNITIES is essentially a passive form of eugenics passing as being “fair”. Access is the true ask here, not just composition based on artificial categories.
I do agree that DEI initiatives are BS. They have not addressed that lack of resources, access and preparatory experiences that certain demographics have morphed from unearned privileges to birth rights. It’s a mess.
If we truly want equitable outcomes then those who benefit most from a lack of diversity (equal access to opportunities and resources) have to be willing to accept their unearned privilege afforded to them at birth. All of us have some form or privilege, known and unknown. I’m speaking specifically to the privileges some experience based on skin tone that are often ignored but are the basis for the need to have this conversation.
Many thank's for that lucid post. Mostly of us see this, but can't talk about without be labeled as fascist or something like that to prevent the discussion to occurs and silence all who doesn't share the mainstream ideas.
Can I translate your post to Portuguese and share with link to original post?
Check out Place Not Race by Sheryll Cashin for a more nuanced and intellectual discussion: https://www.amazon.com/Place-Not-Race-Opportunity-America/dp/0807086142/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2GSEXNWVKQ0KT&keywords=place+not+race&qid=1663008379&sprefix=place+not+rac%2Caps%2C133&sr=8-1
Diversity is nothing more than racism, with nice sounding wrapper, so that people feel better about themselves. The notion that if you look a certain way that means you have similiar/same life experiences as other people who look a certain way, or have a way of thinking that is similar, or has similar capabilities IS racist.
Race has nothing to do about individual; beyond how a person looks. The rest depends on where they were born, to whom, and how they were raised.
Intellectual diversity? Try to think about it on the basis of proportion instead. If CS classroom had 0 women, and 0 black people, that looks right to you?
For example, in Brazil quotas for black, natives, mixed people were introduced for increasing their presence on superior education, which was unproportionally minimal, and it indeed has had some success.
I'm late to the party with this comment, but in case anyone is still interested:
The idea that racial/identity group diversity could be beneficial in a university setting seems plausible if you think about it for five seconds. But if you think about it for five minutes, it seems pretty implausible. Let us grant the (dubious in my view) premise that people of different races have different ideas, attitudes, and experiences, and that exposure to this diversity of ideas is beneficial. Even so, how does this work in practice?
Here is what my college experience was like (and I think my experience was fairly typical): I would enter a classroom (often a large lecture hall) and pick a desk. Then I would listen and take notes as the professor lectured for an hour. Then I left. At what point was the fact that a black guy was sitting next to me supposed to benefit my education? Maybe in the small handful of classes in which we were assigned group projects, or in which there was some amount of in-class student discussion, there was some opportunity for the students' diverse backgrounds and ideas to come into play. But I was a Computer Science major. It is very unclear that a different cultural background would be relevant to how to design a compiler, or build a robot, etc. In fact I think for the majority of college majors (including the vaunted STEM ones), the diversity of ideas of people with different backgrounds has no relevance at all.
So for diversity proponents, I ask: what exactly is the mechanism by which this diversity is supposed to benefit students?