What's wrong with DEI?

I mean, who could be against diversity, equity, and inclusion, right? (The devil is in the details.)

I recently had an experience where someone I consider a friend was taken aback by my stated antipathy to DEI programs. From his perspective, the only reason one might take this position is being snowed by FOX News propaganda. I told him I was not brainwashed by right wing talking points, that I remain a center-left Democrat who voted for Harris (and before that, Biden, Clinton, Obama, etc.), and that I would do some research and get back to him with the particulars of the case against DEI. So I created this Substack to do exactly that.

It’s hardly new for a movement to brand itself with a name that seems hard to argue with. This is not only true for DEI and BLM (“what, you don’t think Black lives matter?!?”), but also George W. Bush’s Orwellian creations like the USA PATRIOT ACT and Clear Skies Initiative (which would have allowed more pollution and was opposed by every major environmental org). So let’s move past the hazy generalities of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” and look at what actual DEI programs (and their philosophical underpinnings, so-called “anti-racism”) are up to.

A New York Times headline posed the question, What if Diversity Training Is Doing More Harm Than Good?

Over the years, social scientists who have conducted careful reviews of the evidence base for diversity training have frequently come to discouraging conclusions.[…]

Many popular contemporary D.E.I. approaches…often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary reunderstanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems. And they often blame white people — or their culture — for harming people of color. For example, the activist Tema Okun’s work cites concepts like objectivity and worship of the written word as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” training sessions are designed to make white participants uncomfortable. And microaggression training workshops are based on an area of academic literature that claims, without quality evidence, that common utterances like “America is a melting pot” harm the mental health of people of color. Many of these training sessions run counter to the views of most Americans — of any color — on race and equality. And they’re generating exactly the sort of backlash that research predicts.

Large numbers of hiring managers report pressure to “stop hiring white men” (who can’t help that they were born white and male):

A recent survey of 1,000 hiring managers in the United States found that one in six, or about 16%, have been told to stop hiring white men. Additionally, 14% of hiring managers said they have also been told to deprioritize hiring white women.

The survey, published by Resume Builder and Pollfish on Wednesday, found that 52% of hiring managers believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” – passing over members of racial and gender majorities in order to meet diversity benchmarks.

This is explicitly acknowledged in a case involving a federal program:

At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a large hiring initiative targets specific racial groups—promising to hire 18 to 20 scientists “who are Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander.” Discussing a related University of New Mexico program, one professor quipped in an email, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”

Both initiatives are supported by the National Institutes of Health through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First. The program gives grants for DEI-focused “cluster hiring” at universities and medical schools, promising eventually to spend about a quarter-billion dollars.

Newsweek reported on a professor who in fact was herself a DEI director:

Tabia Lee, who is Black, was recently terminated from her position at De Anza Community College, located in Cupertino, California, as a full-time, tenured member after working in the education field for approximately two decades.

A 53-page lawsuit filed July 10 claims that she encountered a hostile department "illegally targeting White people on the basis of race." It also says she was accused of "whitesplaining" and not being the "right kind of Black person," and claims she was vilified for refraining from invoking racial stereotypes and refusing to use the term "Latinx" instead of "Latinos."[…]

[She] told Newsweek that what she encountered there was something she never previously experienced—including a constant "focus on whiteness" and "white supremacy culture," which she said was weaponized against her and other faculty members as part of the chilling of free speech and academic freedom.

The lawsuit says that she "objected to racial stereotypes peddled by Defendants that targeted both White and Black Americans, bizarrely celebrating Blacks as incapable of objectivity, individualism, efficiency, progress, and other grossly demeaning stereotypes, while condemning Whites for promoting these same values, which Defendants label 'colonialism' and 'White supremacy.'"

The friend I referenced in my opening paragraph has insisted that DEI is just about overcoming unfair roadblocks in the way of qualified applicants for jobs. But I would ask him if he really believes that in 2025, a straight white man with a freshly minted Ph.D. has a greater chance of being offered a full time, tenure-track faculty job at a prestigious institution than does a Black lesbian? Come on now, the latter is going to be an extremely hot commodity with a plethora of job offers, while the former (if his Ph.D. is in an overcrowded field like literature or history, and does not come from an Ivy League institution) will be lucky to get a lowly adjunct gig somewhere.*

While racially gatekeeping which recipients of humanities doctorates get good jobs is simply unfair to straight white male scholars, doing the same for medical doctors is potentially dangerous to the public at large, who count on their physicians to protect their health and potentially save their lives:

In 2021, the average score for white applicants on the Medical College Admission Test was in the 71st percentile… The average score for black applicants was in the 35th percentile—a full standard deviation below the average white score. The MCATs have already been redesigned to try to reduce this gap; a quarter of the questions now focus on social issues and psychology.

Yet the gap persists. So medical schools use wildly different standards for admitting black and white applicants. From 2013 to 2016, only 8% of white college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs and below-average MCAT scores were offered a seat in medical school; less than 6% of Asian college seniors with those qualifications were offered a seat, according to an analysis by economist Mark Perry. Medical schools regarded those below-average scores as all but disqualifying—except when presented by blacks and Hispanics. Over 56% of black college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs and below-average MCATs and 31% of Hispanic students with those scores were admitted, making a black student in that range more than seven times as likely as a similarly situated white college senior to be admitted to medical school and more than nine times as likely to be admitted as a similarly situated Asian senior.

What’s next, insisting that doctors or nurses who are from “underrepresented groups” no longer have their mortality rate from medical errors tracked? After all, those might turn out to be higher than for white doctors, especially given the above.

Also directly impacting public safety: DEI thumbs on the scale in hiring air traffic controllers:

In 2012, Team 7 members met with the secretary of the Department of Transportation, the FAA administrator, and senior FAA leaders to discuss diversity, after which the FAA commissioned a "Barrier Analysis" with a number of recommendations. Central to this: the cognitive test posed a barrier for black candidates, so they recommended using a biographical test first to "maximiz[e] diversity," eliminating the vast majority of candidates prior to any cognitive test:

“We recommend using a version of the multiple hurdle approach in which components with the least adverse impact are used first in the hiring process to identify applicants with maximum potential. We recommend that stringent but defensible pass scores be set for these front loaded components. Then the components that have the most adverse impact [i.e., the ones Black applicants were having trouble passing] are used in the latter stages of the hiring process. Given that a large portion of the applicant pool will be eliminated by the first hurdle(s), the pass scores for subsequent components can be more lenient. Research has demonstrated that this approach maximizes diversity…”

In 2012 and 2013, the NBCFAE continued pushing this process, with members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push diversity among ATCs.[…]

In 2014, the FAA rolled out the new biographical questionnaire in line with the Barrier Analysis recommendation, designed so that 90% or more of applicants would "fail." The questionnaire was not monitored, and people could take it at home. Questions asked prospective air traffic controllers how many sports they played in high school, how long they'd been unemployed recently, whether they were more eager or considerate, and seventy-some other questions.[…]

A report on FAA hiring issues found that 70% of CTI administrators agreed that the changes in the process had led to a negative effect on the air traffic control infrastructure. One respondent stated their "numbers [had] been devastated," and the majority agreed that it would severely impact the health of their own programs.

Yikes.

Turning to public schools, honors classes are being eliminated for everyone because of the awkward perception that too few Black students qualify for them:

A group of parents stepped to the lectern Tuesday night at a school board meeting in this middle-class, Los Angeles-area city to push back against a racial-equity initiative. The high school, they argued, should reinstate honors English classes that were eliminated because they didn’t enroll enough Black and Latino students.

Another article about this trend in California:

High schools throughout California are removing honors classes at the upperclassmen level—and some at the junior level—in the name of equity between students of different races, specifically for Black and Hispanic students.

The WSJ described how some math and science grandees are pushing back, in an open letter:

The scientists delicately describe the politicized erosion of standards as “well-intentioned approaches to reform mathematics education.” They zero in on the California Department of Education’s proposed new math framework, which encourages math teachers to take a “justice-oriented perspective.” The signatories say the course roadmap will reduce the “availability of advanced mathematical courses to middle schoolers and beginning high schoolers” and discourage students from taking calculus.

This is supposed to advance “equity.” But in addition to damaging America’s global competitiveness, the letter says, the decline of rigorous math in public schools “may lead to a de facto privatization” of top-tier instruction and “harm students with fewer resources.”

The growing list of 471 signatories includes four winners of the Fields Medal in math; two winners of the Turing Award in computing; a Nobel laureate in physics and another in chemistry; 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences; and faculty at Stanford, Berkeley, CalTech, MIT and every top U.S. university for hard science.

No doubt many if not most in this group are politically left of center. But they warn against the elevation of “trendy but shallow courses over foundational skills” like algebra and calculus. Those disciplines “are centuries old and sometimes more,” the letter says, but “arguably even more critical for today’s grand challenges than in the Sputnik era.”

What the actual frak is a “justice oriented perspective” on math or hard science?!?

In the same vein but perhaps even worse, the state of Oregon is voiding high school graduation requirements because they disproportionately bar students of color from getting diplomas:

Oregon high school students won’t have to prove basic mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate from high school until at least 2029, the state Board of Education decided unanimously on Thursday…leaders at the Oregon Department of Education and members of the state school board said requiring all students to pass one of several standardized tests or create an in-depth assignment their teacher judged as meeting state standards was a harmful hurdle for historically marginalized students…

So much of this ends up being, it seems to me, about optics. It’s cringey to see middle school advanced math courses full of white and Asian kids, with all the Black students in lower-tier courses. I get that, but it’s cowardly to decide, as the Cambridge Massachusetts school system did, that the answer is to eliminate advanced courses, which then just funnels the more advanced kids into private courses and tutoring that doesn’t provide that embarrassing look inside the school building. The Boston Globe reported on the resulting fallout:

[Parents] have publicly voiced frustration with a years-old decision made by Cambridge to remove advanced math classes in grades six to eight. The district’s aim was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers. But some families and educators argue the decision has had the opposite effect, limiting advanced math to students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons, like the popular after-school program Russian Math, or find other options for their kids, like Udengaard is doing.

In Cambridge, district leaders — between 2017 and 2019 — gradually ended a policy of tracking middle schoolers into either “accelerated” or “grade-level” math, a change meant to improve outcomes for all. District leaders were alarmed by stark disparities in who was taking advanced math: Students in those classes were overwhelmingly white and Asian, while the grade level math classes were full of Black and Latino students. Achievement gaps were stubbornly wide — and still are.

Critics say limiting advanced math has been counterproductive. “Not providing access means that the only people who will have access are the people who have outside means,” said Ross Benson, a math teacher who has taught advanced classes at Cambridge Rindge and Latin for 17 years, in an interview.

The Seattle Times reported on how that city is responding to the same issue of optics in a different way, one which looks to me to be completely unworkable:

But now, in an effort to make the program more equitable and to better serve all students, the district is phasing out highly capable cohort schools. In their place, SPS is offering a whole-classroom model where all students are in the same classroom and the teacher individualizes learning plans for each student. Teachers won’t necessarily have additional staff in the classroom; the district is working to provide teachers with curriculum and instruction on how to make it work.

[S]ome teachers say the new model won’t work because they don’t have the time and resources to create individualized learning plans for every student in a classroom of 20 to 30 students.

The district counters that the old model of cohort schools for highly capable students is highly inequitable. For decades, highly capable programs across the country, like SPS’, served a small number of Black, Latino, Indigenous, Alaskan and Pacific Islander and low-income students and taught more white and Asian students.[…]

Plucker, the Johns Hopkins professor, agrees that it unfairly burdens teachers. “That is almost asking the impossible of people, that is just so hard,” Plucker said.

Plucker said a lot of districts are moving toward this model, but he says no district has succeeded yet, and he thinks it could hold many students back.

Seattle seems to be a hotbed for the worst excesses of DEI:

The environment Diemert describes is almost too toxic and oppressive to be believed; in his account, Seattle's RSJI program sounds like a conservative's nightmare about a progressive workplace—something that would be brutally parodied on South Park or Portlandia. But his complaint is well-supported by hard evidence: actual copies of documents from the bizarre antiracism training that the city uses. Indeed, these documents can still be found on the city's RSJI website.

The training is based on the extremely controversial and much-criticized work of Tema Okun, a consultant who identifies perfectionism, timeliness, a sense of urgency, and writing things down as aspects of "white supremacy culture." (Okun is a white woman.) Okun has had a significant influence on the diversity and equity industry, and these ideas frequently come up in training materials for educational seminars.[…]

According to Diemert, a supervisor berated him for refusing to step down and yield his job to a person of color. He says he was asked, "What could a straight white male possibly offer our department?" And he says he was frequently made to participate in RSJI training, which involved insulting games and activities designed to address his alleged complicity in white supremacy.

"On multiple occasions in the trainings, I was forced to do things like play privilege bingo or stand up in front of everyone and rank myself within a racist continuum," he says.

Declining to participate was hardly an option: This was labeled "white silence," a significant transgression. Opposing the agenda was even worse, of course.

"If I disagreed or offered another opinion, I was told I had cognitive dissonance, and my defensiveness was evidence of being a racist white supremacist," he says.

RSJI's explicit mission statement was to inject race-based considerations into government work. One document summarizing the initiative's priorities listed colorblindness, not as a positive thing, but as a hindrance to be overcome. Another described colorblindness as "centering whiteness."[…]

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and layoffs became necessary, supervisors openly discussed strategies for starting with white employees, and using RSJI as a pretext.

Training sessions felt more like struggle sessions. At one workshop, "Undoing Institutional Racism," white people were described as devils and cannibals with racism in their DNA, according to Diemert. Another session, "Internalized Racial Superiority," was targeted specifically at white and white-identifying employees.[…]

"Diversity, equity, and inclusion" is the mantra of a kind of training module ostensibly focused on eliminating racism in the schools, businesses, and government. Related concerns about "critical race theory"—a not-always-well-defined concept that is often lumped in with the work done by consultants like Okun—have become central to the Republican Party's campaigns against alleged political indoctrination in K-12 education, government contracts, and corporate America.

Some liberals claim that these concerns are exaggerated, and they correctly point out that GOP efforts to purge critical race theory are often as mixed-up as the concept itself. Even the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, renowned for his invectives against wokeness, has advised against trying to ban the teaching of concepts from critical race theory in schools.

But it should be uncontroversial to state that the government should not practice racial discrimination, especially in the name of promoting antiracism.

Returning to neighboring Oregon, that state’s largest school system has a discipline policy that explicitly calls for disciplining straight white male students more harshly than those who rank higher in the “Oppression Olympics”:

Portland Public Schools (PPS) introduced its "Student Support, Discipline & Safety" policy in November. Under the policy, behavioral support plans must consider a student's "trauma," "race" and "gender identity/presentation," as well as whether "social emotional learning" and "restorative justice" are appropriate for them.

The policy further requires each PPS school to maintain a "School Climate Team," tasked with participating in "ongoing training in implicit bias, antiracism and culturally responsive practices." Additionally, it mandates that a teacher not be transferred to another location if doing so would "decrease the building’s percentage of minority teachers to less than the student minority percentage in the building" or decrease its percentage of transgender and nonbinary staff to less than 30%.

This post is about DEI, not trans issues, but requiring trans staff to be >30% of a school’s teachers?!? WTF, is there any estimate of such people’s prevalence in the wider population that is anywhere near that high?

These two Pacific Northwest states have also stopped requiring law school graduates to pass the bar exam for the same basic reason:

The bar exam will no longer be required to become a lawyer in Washington, the state Supreme Court ruled in a pair of orders Friday.

The court approved alternative ways to show competency and earn a law license after appointing a task force to examine the issue in 2020.

The Bar Licensure Task Force found that the traditional exam “disproportionally and unnecessarily blocks” marginalized groups from becoming practicing attorneys and is “at best minimally effective” for ensuring competency, according to a news release from the Washington Administrative Office of the Courts.

Washington is the second state to not require the bar exam, following Oregon, which implemented the change at the start of this year.

The ABA, meanwhile, has turned its attention to removing barriers earlier in the process of becoming a lawyer:

An American Bar Association panel voted Friday to drop a requirement that law school applicants take the LSAT or another standardized admissions test, amid debate about whether the tests help or hurt diversity in admissions.

The accrediting council, made up of lawyers, professors and administrators, voted 15-1 at its meeting to eliminate the requirement of a “valid and reliable admission test” for hopeful law students.[…]

The policy change will take effect beginning for students applying in fall 2025.

The LSAT, or Law School Admission Test, tests analytical reasoning, logic and reading comprehension, and is considered a predictor of success in law school.[…]

“In the grand scheme of things, folks of color perform less well on the LSAT than not, and for that reason, I think we are headed in the right direction,” Leo Martinez, an ABA council member and dean emeritus at University of California, Hastings College of the Law, said at the meeting. “I am sympathetic that it gives people like me a chance.”

Here’s a taste of how radical these DEI officials, who have in many cases benefited handsomely from this trend, often tend to be:

Kayla Aliese Carter, who designs College Park, Maryland’s racial equity plans, set an image as her X account header that reads “I can’t wait for society to collapse so MY ideology can rise from the ashes!”

“I hate when White children stare at me,” the official posted in 2021. “Its literally terrifying so I just stare back until they stop.”

A DEI consultant hired by the Toronto school system to give a lecture to its school administrators dragged Canada as “a bastion of ‘white supremacy and colonialism,’ in which the horrors unleashed by capitalism and sexism regularly lay waste to the lives of non-white and female Canadians.” This got some pushback from a school principal named Richard Bilkzsto, who opined that her screed does “an incredible disservice to our learners.” Here’s what happened next:

Ojo-Thompson is described to have reacted with vitriol: ‘We are here to talk about anti-Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people?’ Bilkszto replied that racism is very real, and that there’s plenty of room for improvement—but that the facts still show Canada is a fairer place. Another KOJO training facilitator [KOJO Institute is the name of Ojo-Thompson’s company] jumped in, telling Bilkszto that ‘if you want to be an apologist for the U.S. or Canada, this is really not the forum for that.’ Ojo-Thompson concluded the exchange by telling the class that ‘your job in this work as white people is to believe’—not to question—claims of racism.[…]

Ojo-Thompson didn’t confine herself to rebuking Bilkszto in that moment. She also allegedly attacked Bilkszto in a subsequent lecture as exemplifying the forces of white supremacist “resistance.” In Ojo-Thompson’s view, her original treatment of Bilkszto had presented everyone with a valuable template for how they should respond when “accosted by white supremacy.”

For his part, Bilkszto responded by suing the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) for harassment. He also sought a TDSB investigation of Ojo-Thompson’s actions, which the school board refused to conduct. But Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) took the incident more seriously, determining that Bilkszto was owed seven weeks of lost pay due to the mental stress he’d endured.

The WSIB judgment, later obtained by the National Post, concluded that Ojo-Thompson’s behaviour “was abusive, egregious and vexatious, and rises to the level of workplace harassment and bullying,” and that she’d intended to “cause reputational damage and to ‘make an example’” of Bilkszto.[…]

A political progressive who’d devoted more than two decades of his life to the TDSB, Bilkszto never fully recovered from being falsely smeared as a supporter of white supremacy in front of his peers.

This month, Bilkszto, aged 60, committed suicide. [A]ccording to his family, his suicide related to the false accusations of racism he’d endured in April 2021.

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf nails what a grifter’s racket so much of DEI is:

[T]he DEI-consulting industry is social-justice progressivism’s analogue to trickle-down economics: Unrigorous trainings are held, mostly for college graduates with full-time jobs and health insurance, as if by changing us, the marginalized will somehow benefit. But in fact, the poor, or the marginalized, or people of color, or descendants of slaves, would benefit far more from a fraction of the DEI industry’s profits.

It would be too sweeping to say that no DEI consultant should ever get hired. Underneath that jargony umbrella is a subset of valuable professionals who have expertise in things like improving hiring procedures, boosting retention, resolving conflict, facilitating hard conversations after a lawsuit, processing a traumatic event, or assessing and fixing an actually discriminatory workplace. In a given circumstance, a company might need one or more of those skills. Ideally, larger organizations develop human-resources teams with all of those skills.

But the reflexive hiring of DEI consultants with dubious expertise and hazy methods is like setting money on fire in a nation where too many people are struggling just to get by.

*But even a Black professor has to be careful to toe the DEI line, lest even he find himself “trapped in anti-racist hell”:

Four weeks later, I again sat in front of the gathered students. Now, their faces were cold, their eyes down. Since the first week, I had not spotted one smile. Their number was reduced by two: The previous week, they had voted two classmates out of the house. And I was next.

Each student read from a prepared statement about how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills.

This might be just another lament about “woke” campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was “Race and the Limits of Law in America.” Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. How did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students?