All across the nation, in colleges and corporations, the specialized programs for the official victim class are coming to an end or, at least, being defunded. Lots of these programs are ending simply because the money has been cut off. Others are being deleted as a kind of performative protest against the Trump administration.
It can feel odd even for those people who are not part of them. Why is the office of women’s business closing? Why are the various segments of African American this and Latino that going away? How come the special program courting LGBT students and employees is being deleted from existence?
For all those who see this as insulting, I would urge a broader outlook. These segments and offices and programs came about thanks to policies promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This moniker came about as a rechristening of the old slogan “affirmative action,” which fell into public disrepute after many decades of controversy.
These programs are the cruelest and most disabling things ever to happen to these communities and the individuals in them. They permanently mark any employee or student or worker as a product of special privilege, even when this is not remotely true.
You can ask any woman or black person in a position of leadership in any sector of life. They might deal with a certain amount of discrimination. But no discrimination is as cruel as a quiet perception, widely held, that they only have their admission, position, salary, award, or whatever it is thanks to some system of box-checking.
DEI tokenizes the people it claims to help and thereby marks them for their entire careers. Anyone who qualifies as a minority feels it constantly, all day every day. People have come to assume that anyone who rises through the ranks who would qualify for a DEI program has certainly taken advantage of it, even when this is not the case.
As I say, this is a very cruel way to manage institutions and individuals in them. Merit should be the only standard, regardless of race, sex, or religion. Any other system risks deprecating people’s actual achievements.
DEI is condescending. It presumes that a committee outside the realm of actual human experience knows for sure which groups based on race or sex need promotion and which ones should be held back by no fault of their own. It is institutionalized racism and sexism masquerading as the solution.
It hurts those it claims to help. But not everyone in the protected groups is hurt, at least financially. When universities or corporations go seeking out people based on racial or sexual identity to satisfy some statutory requirement, they usually go to those in the protected group who are themselves quite privileged. It’s remarkable to look at the résumés of those who have won this lottery: fancy parents, private schools, top colleges, full scholarships, and so on. These people have used DEI to make bank, and everyone knows it.
Even for these elites, it is not truly good for the institutions or the individuals who are more aware than anyone that none of this is real. It is artificial and contradictory to justice, fairness, and standards of merit. They are stand-ins, tokens, and faces, and they owe their success to being the right person in the right place at the right time. Nor are people in these positions held to normal standards of achievement.
I’ve had many friends in these positions and they truly do suffer. Others do not treat them with respect, and they even lack some measure of self-respect. In other words, even for the winners in this game, it is ultimately not good. Sure, they have job security and a high income, but that inner sense of having made it on their own is always elusive.
Perhaps this was allowed to go on as long as nothing really big was at stake, but the turning point seems to have come with serious jobs that require actual expertise and genuine fitness: doctors, judges, architects, pilots, and so on. Mistakes cost lives and ruin lives. DEI went so far as to swarm even these fields. That seemed finally to flip the narrative, and people have said, “No more.”
Everyone should rejoice at the end of DEI. Human conflict, suspicion, and doubt can gradually be replaced by trust, confidence, and true community. People can learn to get along without the perception that someone has unfairly benefited. Self-respect can return. And we can go about our lives with a renewed sense that the people in various positions are there because of their achievements and not someone’s forced scheme.
Women and minorities in particular should rejoice, especially those just starting out in their careers. They will enter a competitive marketplace and earn their way through it without constantly being under suspicion. They can own their achievements as theirs without worrying that many people around them seriously doubt that their success is real.
Anyone with a son, daughter, or grandchild of any sex or race should be overjoyed that they will enter a professional workforce without the serious handicap that DEI represents. It is a freeing from shackles.
One wonders how in the world these policies came to be. The usual story involves good intentions gone wrong. Maybe that is true, but we must also admit that it is unfathomable that any reasonable person could really believe that marking minorities with fake credentials to fill quotas was a good idea.
What is another theory? It comes down to the politics of guilt. The more guilt the politicians, intellectuals, and bureaucrats can spread, the easier it is to cultivate a population amenable to being controlled. It becomes a kind of racket. We used to call it a “race hustle,” but this spread to every category one can imagine. At some point, the very notion of earning your way up became the exception and not the rule, thus wrecking a careful system of social cooperation that extends from voluntary choices.
There is another feature of all this about which people rarely speak. For white males, the system was punishing. It also gave them an excuse for not succeeding. They could very easily scapegoat others, and not always without reason. Let’s just say it: This only increases antagonism between groups and promotes obsessions with identity and the politics thereof.
It’s glorious that this is ending. It will take many years and even a generation or two before we can recover from all the damage these condescending and cruel policies imposed on all walks of life. Let the recovery begin.
