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What is DEI?
Since Donald Trump took office for the second time, he's declared an outright war on "DEI", without clearly defining what "DEI" means or why it's a bad thing. That vagueness is probably an intentional tactic: if people don't know exactly what you're forbidding, but you have a reputation for punishing people harshly for doing it, they'll voluntarily stop doing anything that it might conceivably be.
I'm not an expert on DEI as it's traditionally understood, but I gather it includes a couple of different things an organization might do:
People have made a number of good arguments in favor of diversity as an organizational goal: it'll reduce monolithic "groupthink" and enable the organization to consider a wider variety of solutions to problems; it'll enable a company to perceive and meet the needs of a wider variety of potential customers; it'll prepare students to live harmoniously in a diverse real world.
At the same time, there are legitimate arguments against certain implementations of it. We've all seen mandatory DEI trainings that everybody has to take once a year in order to check off a box, everybody forgets about as soon as the box is checked, and there's no evidence that they make any difference, which makes them a waste of everybody's time. More seriously, it's really hard to measure "how disadvantaged" somebody is and therefore how much special consideration someone should get for being a member of a historically-disadvantaged group; miscalculating this runs a real risk of actively causing exactly the discrimination (on an individual level, based on group membership) we're trying to eliminate. And if there's a widespread perception that members of historically-disadvantaged groups are now getting unfairly-favorable treatment, people will assume that they're less-qualified "DEI hires" no matter how good they are at their jobs. (Naturally, the people most likely to perceive historically-disadvantaged groups as getting unfairly-favorable treatment, and to dismiss them as "DEI hires", are members of historically-advantaged groups who sixty years ago would have said openly that blacks and women were incapable of doing certain jobs: the reasoning has changed but the conclusion is the same.)
The Trump administration's actions on the subject conflate all of the above forms of "DEI", and declare them all to be illegal and unacceptable within government, in organizations that contract with the government, and even in private organizations. Most people I know assume that this "anti-DEI backlash" is actually an attempt to reinstate historical discrimination in favor of straight-white-males, thinly disguised as preventing discrimination (just as anybody on the Trump/Musk team espousing "freedom of speech" is probably actively censoring speech).
But let's imagine, hypothetically, that some people in the anti-DEI backlash were acting out of good, noble motives, and sincerely opposed to racism, sexism, religious or political discrimination, etc. What would they be trying to achieve?
The simple answer is "a race-blind society", in which your ethnic (or religious or whatever) background not only makes no difference in your life but literally isn't recognized. We won't give you any special consideration for the fact that you were born to a group that's been historically discriminated against; the clock is reset at birth, so only your individual achievements matter. Those individual achievements are no more noteworthy for having overcome disadvantages of birth, because there are no disadvantages of birth. We won't make any special effort to reach out to historically-disadvantaged groups, because that would acknowledge the existence of historically-disadvantaged groups. Clubs and voluntary organizations cannot exclude people from membership by race, religion, gender, etc. because recognizing those distinctions perpetuates discrimination. Organizations cannot count how many employees or how many managers are of particular historically-disadvantaged groups because recognizing the existence of those groups perpetuates discrimination. In researching problems that appear particularly prevalent in particular ethnic, religious, etc. groups (e.g. AIDS, sickle-cell anemia, teen suicide, wife-burning), we won't specifically reach out to those groups because that would require the organization to recognize the existence of those groups and ask who's a member of one.
It's an attractive dream: eliminate racism and discrimination at a stroke by decreeing that they don't exist and never have existed. Indeed, racial, religious, political, socioeconomic, and gender groups themselves don't exist and never have existed; only individuals exist, and any other kind of grouping of people is artificial and harmful. We need to treat each individual purely based on that individual's complex of characteristics, not as part of one identity group or another.
Except gender: there are exactly two genders, two sexes (and those terms are synonymous); there are no anatomically or chromosomally ambiguous cases, and believing oneself to be in the wrong bucket is simply a mental illness, a delusion, like believing oneself to be the reincarnation of King Louis XIV. And since this one congenital difference is real and natural, it would be silly and unrealistic to try to achieve "equality" across it, because men and women really are different. There's no reason to assume men and women are equally capable of certain things -- indeed, we know for a fact that they're not -- so if there are an equal number of men and women in a particular organization, a particular rank, or a particular field, it probably took unfair discrimination to achieve that artificial outcome. Some jobs are just inherently male or inherently female; that's the way Nature made us, and refusing to accept that fact is again a delusion or mental illness. (You see the slippery slope we just slid down....)
Now, everybody reading this knows that gender and sex really are more complicated than that. First, almost every difference between men and women is a difference-of-means between overlapping bell curves, not a qualitative and absolute difference: yes, "the average man" has more peak muscular power than "the average woman", but you'll never meet the average man or the average woman, only individuals who can and should be judged on the individual characteristics relevant to the job. Second, maybe 99% of people can be unambiguously categorized as male or female, but the other 1% still exist, despite laws and executive orders saying they don't. And people with gender dysphoria really exist: I've never experienced it first-hand, so I'm not in a position to say what it's like, much less what treatments work for it, but I'm willing to believe that it's a real condition, and that treating it is different from treating the belief that you're Louis XIV.
And everybody reading this knows that no, the clock doesn't reset at birth. Even if society became race-blind tomorrow, your parents' finances, education, religion, politics, citizenship, and home address would still have been affected by their ethnicity, and would all measurably affect your chances of "making it in the world". The people pushing "race-blind" policies are themselves almost all congenitally rich, white US citizens with individual records of active racism and sexism.
So what would work better? Simple answers and wishful thinking don't work. By all means, let's try not to actively perpetuate racist and sexist prejudices, but without pretending that they never existed and don't still affect us. We can try to make schools in poor neighborhoods as good as those in rich neighborhoods, without pretending that they already are. We can acknowledge that some medical problems really are specific to (or manifest differently in) particular races or sexes, and use that fact to deliver medical care to everyone rather than mostly studying and treating straight-white-men's problems. Race and sex differences really do exist, and they really do have fuzzy boundaries: somebody really can be black by one definition and Asian by another, male by one definition and female by another, etc. Clubs and affinity groups (all-female, all-male, all-black, all-white, all-gay, all-left-handed, all-divorced, all-ex-convict, all-Catholic, all-abducted-by-aliens, etc.) serve a useful role, and they can decide for themselves how to handle the fuzzy boundaries, as long as they're honest about their criteria and role.
I'm not an expert on DEI as it's traditionally understood, but I gather it includes a couple of different things an organization might do:
- making (racial, religious, political, socioeconomic, gender, etc.) diversity an organizational goal, and measuring progress towards that goal by counting the representation of various races, religions, etc. in the organization as a whole or in its upper ranks;
- recognizing the (past or present) existence of discrimination and the achievements of people who have overcome it;
- allowing or supporting voluntary affinity groups within the organization based on membership in historically-discriminated-against demographics;
- favoring members of groups that have historically been disfavored, so as to achieve diversity and equality of results;
- actively soliciting applications (for student positions, internships, jobs, promotions) from groups that traditionally haven't applied, on the theory that adding them to the applicant pool will give the positions to people who are both more-qualified and more-diverse;
- doing research or public outreach on specific racial, religious, socioeconomic, gender, etc. groups for any reason.
People have made a number of good arguments in favor of diversity as an organizational goal: it'll reduce monolithic "groupthink" and enable the organization to consider a wider variety of solutions to problems; it'll enable a company to perceive and meet the needs of a wider variety of potential customers; it'll prepare students to live harmoniously in a diverse real world.
At the same time, there are legitimate arguments against certain implementations of it. We've all seen mandatory DEI trainings that everybody has to take once a year in order to check off a box, everybody forgets about as soon as the box is checked, and there's no evidence that they make any difference, which makes them a waste of everybody's time. More seriously, it's really hard to measure "how disadvantaged" somebody is and therefore how much special consideration someone should get for being a member of a historically-disadvantaged group; miscalculating this runs a real risk of actively causing exactly the discrimination (on an individual level, based on group membership) we're trying to eliminate. And if there's a widespread perception that members of historically-disadvantaged groups are now getting unfairly-favorable treatment, people will assume that they're less-qualified "DEI hires" no matter how good they are at their jobs. (Naturally, the people most likely to perceive historically-disadvantaged groups as getting unfairly-favorable treatment, and to dismiss them as "DEI hires", are members of historically-advantaged groups who sixty years ago would have said openly that blacks and women were incapable of doing certain jobs: the reasoning has changed but the conclusion is the same.)
The Trump administration's actions on the subject conflate all of the above forms of "DEI", and declare them all to be illegal and unacceptable within government, in organizations that contract with the government, and even in private organizations. Most people I know assume that this "anti-DEI backlash" is actually an attempt to reinstate historical discrimination in favor of straight-white-males, thinly disguised as preventing discrimination (just as anybody on the Trump/Musk team espousing "freedom of speech" is probably actively censoring speech).
But let's imagine, hypothetically, that some people in the anti-DEI backlash were acting out of good, noble motives, and sincerely opposed to racism, sexism, religious or political discrimination, etc. What would they be trying to achieve?
The simple answer is "a race-blind society", in which your ethnic (or religious or whatever) background not only makes no difference in your life but literally isn't recognized. We won't give you any special consideration for the fact that you were born to a group that's been historically discriminated against; the clock is reset at birth, so only your individual achievements matter. Those individual achievements are no more noteworthy for having overcome disadvantages of birth, because there are no disadvantages of birth. We won't make any special effort to reach out to historically-disadvantaged groups, because that would acknowledge the existence of historically-disadvantaged groups. Clubs and voluntary organizations cannot exclude people from membership by race, religion, gender, etc. because recognizing those distinctions perpetuates discrimination. Organizations cannot count how many employees or how many managers are of particular historically-disadvantaged groups because recognizing the existence of those groups perpetuates discrimination. In researching problems that appear particularly prevalent in particular ethnic, religious, etc. groups (e.g. AIDS, sickle-cell anemia, teen suicide, wife-burning), we won't specifically reach out to those groups because that would require the organization to recognize the existence of those groups and ask who's a member of one.
It's an attractive dream: eliminate racism and discrimination at a stroke by decreeing that they don't exist and never have existed. Indeed, racial, religious, political, socioeconomic, and gender groups themselves don't exist and never have existed; only individuals exist, and any other kind of grouping of people is artificial and harmful. We need to treat each individual purely based on that individual's complex of characteristics, not as part of one identity group or another.
Except gender: there are exactly two genders, two sexes (and those terms are synonymous); there are no anatomically or chromosomally ambiguous cases, and believing oneself to be in the wrong bucket is simply a mental illness, a delusion, like believing oneself to be the reincarnation of King Louis XIV. And since this one congenital difference is real and natural, it would be silly and unrealistic to try to achieve "equality" across it, because men and women really are different. There's no reason to assume men and women are equally capable of certain things -- indeed, we know for a fact that they're not -- so if there are an equal number of men and women in a particular organization, a particular rank, or a particular field, it probably took unfair discrimination to achieve that artificial outcome. Some jobs are just inherently male or inherently female; that's the way Nature made us, and refusing to accept that fact is again a delusion or mental illness. (You see the slippery slope we just slid down....)
Now, everybody reading this knows that gender and sex really are more complicated than that. First, almost every difference between men and women is a difference-of-means between overlapping bell curves, not a qualitative and absolute difference: yes, "the average man" has more peak muscular power than "the average woman", but you'll never meet the average man or the average woman, only individuals who can and should be judged on the individual characteristics relevant to the job. Second, maybe 99% of people can be unambiguously categorized as male or female, but the other 1% still exist, despite laws and executive orders saying they don't. And people with gender dysphoria really exist: I've never experienced it first-hand, so I'm not in a position to say what it's like, much less what treatments work for it, but I'm willing to believe that it's a real condition, and that treating it is different from treating the belief that you're Louis XIV.
And everybody reading this knows that no, the clock doesn't reset at birth. Even if society became race-blind tomorrow, your parents' finances, education, religion, politics, citizenship, and home address would still have been affected by their ethnicity, and would all measurably affect your chances of "making it in the world". The people pushing "race-blind" policies are themselves almost all congenitally rich, white US citizens with individual records of active racism and sexism.
So what would work better? Simple answers and wishful thinking don't work. By all means, let's try not to actively perpetuate racist and sexist prejudices, but without pretending that they never existed and don't still affect us. We can try to make schools in poor neighborhoods as good as those in rich neighborhoods, without pretending that they already are. We can acknowledge that some medical problems really are specific to (or manifest differently in) particular races or sexes, and use that fact to deliver medical care to everyone rather than mostly studying and treating straight-white-men's problems. Race and sex differences really do exist, and they really do have fuzzy boundaries: somebody really can be black by one definition and Asian by another, male by one definition and female by another, etc. Clubs and affinity groups (all-female, all-male, all-black, all-white, all-gay, all-left-handed, all-divorced, all-ex-convict, all-Catholic, all-abducted-by-aliens, etc.) serve a useful role, and they can decide for themselves how to handle the fuzzy boundaries, as long as they're honest about their criteria and role.