Don't Cry for D.E.I. America: We can do so much better to build a sustainable future

Let's not dig trenches to defend the failed past: "We are not going back" to that

The lemming rush of corporate HR departments to embrace so-called "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" in 2020, together with the way our corporate elites have dropped DEI like a hot potato in 2025, should tell us a few things. DEI is phony. Its not the real thing. Its a corporate tool -- and generally, what HR embraces, people of any race, creed, color or national origin, who work for a living, should take with a very large grain of salt. We should not waste time, energy, resources, or social capital, digging trenches to defend the failed past. That's not the best response to Donald Trump's whitewashed Ton Ton Macoutes and their creative use of imaginary numbers. We should be looking for the foundations to build a much better future once the Trump hurricane has passed over.

Frederick Douglass did not talk about "diversity, equity and inclusion." He had more pressing real world problems to deal with, and he called them out in plain language. Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Du Bois, Louis Forbes Burnham, Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, Martin Luther King didn't employ this kind of abstract corporate language either. The phrase "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion," capitalized as a label, is only about fifteen years old. It is not taking anything to the "next level." It is a blind alley, born in a peculiar sort of 21st century privilege. Its not exactly what preoccupies single mothers working three part time jobs in the inner city either.

Diversity is not so much a goal as a fact of life. The world is a very diverse place. Deal with it. As a matter of fact "black people" are a very diverse set, as are "white people" and "Asian people" -- a catch-all term for a variety of different cultures, collapsed into a narrow Eurocentric paradigm. Oh and "Hispanic" or "Latino" people have only one thing in common -- they speak the language of one of the most brutal conquering colonial powers, the Kingdom of Spain. Otherwise they are literally all over the map. Argentinians can hardly understand Cubans or Mexicans, and I have personally heard a Puerto Rican visiting California refer to "these Mexican niggers." That's not a universal attitude of Puerto Ricans by any means -- Puerto Ricans are actually a very diverse range of people too. Cubans include an Afro-Chinese-Spanish population, among other combinations.

Embracing Diversity in all its diverse dimensions

So if we are really going to embrace diversity in all its diverse dimensions, we are going to have to drop the DEI obsession. Some "black" people are unmotivated thugs who never learned to read, and spend their life preying on anyone they can exploit. (Mostly they prey on people the same complexion -- because most thugs prey on those who are nearest at hand.) Others are smart, motivated people with high aspirations, boundless energy and determination, who build a fantastic skill set, create new businesses from nothing, devote their life to community service. And then there are those who work hard at an hourly job, marry, raise their children, and hold the fabric of a community together. Plus several dozen other patterns and life stories. People who have been classified as "white," or who continue to choose to think of themselves by the archaic paradign of "white," are also a very diverse range of people. (Some "white" people are the demoralized, chronically unemployed, drug-addicted people J.D. Vance wrote about in Hillbilly Elegy.) Anyone who speaks otherwise is a racist.

Racism is the notion that you can tell something about a person by applying the presumed common characteristics of a so-called race to an individual life. Its fallacious. Always. There is no such thing as "reverse racism." Race is an artificial social construct, from beginning to end. We will not end racism by wallowing in it. We will only end racism by throwing it away. One of the most corrosive and pernicious effects of the corporate obsession with DEI is wasting significant sums of money paying self-appointed consultants with a poverty pimp mentality for superfluous seminars, sternly lecturing employees to contemplate the color of their navel every day. But HR departments loved it, because HR departments are all about control. Divide and conquer is a standard management technique. Requiring employees to endure pointless humiliation to make them more docile in general, is one more way to exert control. Apparently, Joe Biden loved it too, and Kamala Harris would have continued to promote it in government. Whatever else one may say about Donald Trump, we are well rid of that peculiar brand of parasites.

But, take note, corporate management is always ready to blow with the wind. They wrung what corporate leadership wanted out of this obsession, and now they are ready to drop it and move on. This has historical parallels. After liberal business interests had wrung all the profit they could out of the slave trade, they became sanctimonious promoters of abolition. Then, they promoted taking administrative control of African territory via colonial projects, on the ground that African kingdoms kept slaves, which of course they did. (Conservatives are people who cling to what yesterday's liberals built.) A lot of one-time abolitionists in the northern states of the USA laid the foundations for Jim Crow. They didn't want slave labor competing with free labor, but they did not want freed people to become econmically independent small farmers and business owners. (No 40 acres and a mule for you -- property is sacred). They wanted freed people to become a pool of cheap labor for new capital investment in the southern states, subject to tight labor discipline. (But not property.)

Equity as control of capital that controls our lives

Equity is a word few people stop to define before shouting it to the skies. A rather limited paperback copy of the American Century Dictionary gives the following: value of property less debt; value of the shares issued by a company; fairness, justice. The last two are relatively recent, and rather vague. When it comes to DEI, the word equity, to those who are simply trying to "do the right thing," does connote a share in the wealth and capital of the nation. People long for a real stake, something more than living paycheck-to-paycheck. Fewer people are satisfied to rely on programs trying to fill the gap between limited wages and actual costs of living. If we simply mean fairness and justice, then perhaps we should just use those words. If we mean having investment as well as a fleeting income that is spent as fast as it is earned -- the slogan hasn't delivered anything of the kind. We need a new conversation about how to accomplish that.

Inclusion is a fine word, but its not so universal as the way it has been tossed about in political harangues would suggest. To use an extreme example, most of us do not want to "include" convicted child molesters living in our neighborhood. If I lived in a polygamous culture, I would not want my marriage to "include" one heterosexual woman, one lesbian, one gay male, and one trans woman. Not in my marriage. Next door neighbors who keep a nice rose garden, fine. So we are not talking about 'everyone should be included everywhere in everything' without question. If we mean for political slogans to become practical programs, that are enduring and sustainable, we must take a hard look at what we really seek.

The "inclusion" label has also homogenized a variety of different questions that have different causes, historical foundations, and potential solutions. Joe Biden never came off as such a clueless idiot as when he pronounced that "transgender is the civil rights movement of our time." NOTHING is "the civil rights movement of our time." The historical roots, motivations, methods, and critique of racial paradigms are very different from the questions and considerations around trans-sexuality. Both are quite different from the history of cultural attitudes toward same-sex attraction. Peddling the illusion that all of these and half a dozen more paradigms, causes, population demographics, have a common methodological solution is creating avoidable mental chaos. There is no reason to have separate restrooms labeled "white" and "colored." There is significant and commonly understood cause to have separate restrooms for "men" and "women" and to insist that these distinctions are real, and matter. These are distinct topics for separate conversations, and the mutual obligations involved are quite different.

Affirmative Action is decades older than the DEI formula

For many fiercely arguing for or against DEI (whatever that is), the most prominent feature is various forms of affirmative action. The existence of affirmative action programs long predates the DEI sloganeering. There is a debate to be had about affirmative action -- surely we cannot build a healthy national and global culture off of checking peoples' "identity" forever. At some point, we drop the whole preoccupation as irrelevant -- or we accept racism as a permanent and inevitable component of human culture. How soon? How much? After all, there was a time when the more "enlightened" American universities thought they were doing their part to admit two, or six, "colored" students, but certainly no more than that. Perhaps we have a little more to do to fix that legacy.

There are millions of qualified Americans of African descent in almost every field. There are also millions of unqualified Americans of African descent for any given field. (The same is true of course of any other artificial designation of "race.") But the percentages of those who succeed, who are admitted, who are hired, are different by racial category. Why? There are, no doubt, well qualified people with a dark complexion who are sidelined or passed over by decision makers on account of race. It is not implausible in the current atmosphere that UNqualified people, or more likely borderline barely qualified people, are advanced because some enlightened administrator wants to improve their statistical reports. (This is the liberal version of the Elon Musk report on "What did you accomplish last week?") All of this happening at the same time, and a lot of dust getting kicked up in every direction, makes it hard to get anything right.

To start with, take race out of the equation. If our politics are about showing solidarity based on racial identification, rather than on the facts of each situation, we are going to get it wrong. We are also going to provide plausible ammunition for those who intend to manipulate us all for their own ends. If racial bias is holding back a well qualified applicant for university admission, employment, promotion, or public office, probe the facts, with grimly dispassionate persistence. Make the administrator who is in fact discriminating on the basis of race squirm as they try to answer neutral questions about a candidate's documented qualifications. Accept no generalities. Insist on specific, empirical, explanations. Press the point. If we think about how that could play out, it might even be a lot of fun. Its a way to make the real racists squirm, discrediting their argument at every turn. If the applicant is in fact not qualified, we have another set of questions to deal with.

Decades of inter-generational transmission of capital

There are easily identifiable reasons why there would be smaller percentages among Americans of African descent qualifying for law schools, medical schools, or a variety of jobs. Its not because "those people aren't qualified." Many have succeeded spectacularly. Its became there remain imposed discrepancies in financial resources, cultural development, quality of education, access to resources. There has been a significant discrepancy in the inter-generational transmission of capital for at least ten generations. We won't fix that by calling for equity in raw numbers. If we are serious about ending these discrepancies, we are faced with a much more difficult task.

How are we going to do that? I'll write about that in more detail soon. It requires a separate column in itself. And that will only be a beginning.