DEI Death Knell?
On November 25, Walmart, the largest private employer in the United States, announced that it will curb some of its DEI efforts. It is ending “racial equity” training programs for staff and is reviewing all funding of Pride and other events and monitoring its online marketplace to remove sexual or transgender products marketed to children.
Walmart joins Harley-Davidson, Tractor Supply Company, John Deere, and other companies in revising or pulling back their DEI programs, support for Pride marches and LGBTQ events, and other requisite corporate propaganda to impact social policies.
So-called critical race theory is the pseudo-philosophy at the core of the DEI onslaught of the last few years, and of what John McWhorter calls “woke racism.”
A brief synopsis of what John McWhorter calls woke racism...
McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, who also teaches American studies and music, wrote a book in 2021 called Woke Racism. According to his formulation, first wave antiracism battled slavery and legalized segregation. Second wave antiracism, in the 70s and 80s, battled racist attitudes and taught America that being racist is a moral flaw.
However, third wave antiracism asserts that racism is baked into the structure of society. “Whites’ complicity in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.” “Third wave antiracism exploits modern Americans’ fear of being thought racist to promulgate not just racism, but an obsessive, self-involved, totalitarian, and utterly unnecessary kind of cultural reprogramming.” He calls the adherents of this religion the Elect, and their creed “extremist, unempirical, and tribalist.” He lampoons Robin DiAngelo's conception of “white fragility,” with its idea that if whites venture any statement on the topic other than that they harbor white privilege, it only proves that they are racists, too fragile to admit it. What's the circularity of this argument? “You're a racist, and if you say you aren't, this just proves that you are” is “the logic of the sandbox.”
The 1619 Project in the New York Times, which asserts the foundational and central element of slavery in the settling of America, “despite the conclusive determination that it is founded on a mistaken interpretation of the historical record, has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, out of the tacit assumption that when it comes to race, indignation outranks accuracy.”
Andrew Sullivan, upon leaving his post at New York magazine in 2020, said of them: “They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming coworkers by existing in the same virtual space.” McWhorter compares this to a virus implanted in people that makes them commit acts otherwise alien to their nature, like the worm larvae that burrow into a grasshopper's brain. The worms, aquatic when they mature, transform the grasshopper's brain such that it jumps into the water and dies, allowing the worms to emerge into the water, where they thrive. “The Elect... Are ultimately more like people coming over the hill with pitchforks than the prudently informed redeemers they see themselves as. Elect catechism teaches us that we are ahead of the curve to be psychologically broken. The notion that real blackness means framing casual racism as close to physical abuse is a modern one. It feels right only to people who, deep down, do not feel right at all.”
McWhorter asserts that woke racism hurts blacks in the following ways...
Denying reality doesn't change it. Black boys do commit violence, twice as much as others, typically against other black boys.
University admissions standards are lowered, thereby setting blacks up to fail, because of a lack of a fit for the task at hand – the ability to perform the work assigned because one has been prepared for it. Mismatched law students often fail the bar exam for the same reason. Black students are often exempted from the intellectual competition others must go through.
Black pundits like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones are not taken to task for their egregious lapses of truth and civility. This treats them as children, not holding them responsible for their actions because of their race. This is both denigrating and gratuitous. Jones received a Pulitzer Prize for a book that included blatantly false information about the Revolutionary War.
“To be Elect is to insist that America hushes up slavery. This is a falsehood. It endlessly distracts minds that would be better put to work addressing real problems.”
He observes that “utopianism is its own reward... it is the game of performers, not those who actually get things done for real people.” in short, “Elect philosophy is... performative and racist. There is nothing about experiencing racism, as hideous as it is, that makes it cancel out what we otherwise assume as common sense about human nature.” “To allow claims for black people that no one would accept from their own children is racist. The idea that for black people it passes as authenticity to not make sense is racist. The elect are our Pharisees. In fostering antiracist ideas that actually harm black people, they are obsessed with the letter of the law rather than its spirit, and their prosecution of sinners contrasts with Jesus’s embrace of them.”
McWhorter has two primary ideas on how to counter this fanatical claptrap. Resist them, stand up to them, and be willing to be called racist in the public square. Second, view it as a religion. “What we call educational institutions doubles as cathedral complexes for our intelligentsia's religious commitments.”
A recent study by NCRI (Network Contagion Research Institute) drew conclusions that led to this title: Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias. It has uncovered what seems predictable: racial resentment has increased rather than lessened because of DEI training among what the Pew Research Center discovered in 2023 includes most American workers.
I plan to discuss this in more detail in the relatively near future. My current working conclusions are the following:
The apparent attenuation of DEI, which is a predictably bad idea that seems to have backfired and generated more divisiveness and suspicion, is heartily welcomed.
“Antiracism” is, in both theory and practice, racist against blacks, whites, and everyone else.
Preferential policies hurt both individuals and groups.
With DEI and antiracism, the plain meaning of words is being hijacked to mean sometimes even the diametrically opposite notion, a la 1984 and Animal Farm.
The workplace is not a place of worship. Therefore, why should one’s work environment be a place in which what Robin Vos calls Division, Exclusion, and Indoctrination is forcibly imprinted on the brains and memories of the employees?