Should We End DEI?

Bari Weiss is not the first to call out the diversity, equity, inclusion racket. She is not even the first to point out that those who march to its drum tend to become anti-Semites. In truth, I have noted it in my own writing. 

No one who has been paying attention should be shocked to see the outpouring of Jew hatred on America’s campuses. If you believe that some people are systemically disadvantaged, you must also believe, if you are especially gullible, that those who overachieve must have cheated their way to success. Or else, that they are especially privileged.

In its effort to credit those who underachieve the DEI industry has been obliged to discredit those who overachieve. Traditionally, that has meant Jews. Today it also means Asians. Of course, DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion.

So Weiss is addressing Jewish Americans. She is suggesting that their commitment to justice and equality has become a weapon used to punish them and their children. How did it happen that they did not understand that they were feeding the beast?

She explains that the diversity industry replaced good and evil with the powerful and the powerless. There is no such thing as a fair competition. There are only rigged games that always seem to advantage certain groups at the expense of others.

For some groups failures became grievances. Other groups were disparaged for their achievements. It was an upside/down world.

Weiss wrote:

People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. 

One likes to imagine that the DEI industry is dying out. One knows that many of the corporations that embraced DEI after the murder of George Floyd have laid off their diversity officers.

And yet, its influence is still pervasive-- witness the protest marches favoring Hamas. 

Weiss explains:

Over the past two decades, I saw this inverting worldview swallow all of the crucial sense-making institutions of American life. It started with the universities. Then it moved on to cultural institutions—including some I knew well, like The New York Times—as well as every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. Then on to our medical schools and our law schools. It’s taken root at nearly every major corporation. It’s inside our high schools and even our elementary schools. The takeover is so comprehensive that it’s now almost hard to notice it—because it is everywhere.

Including in the Jewish community.

Jews have always been willing to compete. They have no problem following rules that produce fair competition and social cohesion. After all, those rules originated with Moses when he led his people out of multicultural Egypt.

Jews have always favored equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. And, they have done well under such a regime.

Therefore, when Jews embrace diversity quotas they are working against their own interest, and against their own achievements:

For Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation—and Jews are 2% of the American population—suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world.

Weiss suggests that there is something seriously wrong with pushing people into identity groups, become cults. She recommends treating people as individuals. 

Everyone will accept her opinion here, but I will dare to offer a qualification. Rather than see ourselves as individuals, which suggests disconnected monads, we do better to consider ourselves all to be Americans, citizens of a republic that offers the opportunity to work to achieve, and not to be granted credit or blame for our skin color or ethnicity:

But in reality, these words are now metaphors for an ideological movement bent on recategorizing every American not as an individual, but as an avatar of an identity group, his or her behavior prejudged accordingly, setting all of us up in a kind of zero-sum game.

She remarks that DEI is not about working to achieve; it is about arrogating power and handing out plaudits and wealth based on underachievement.

Behind it all, she suggests, is a hatred of America. If America does not distribute wealth and respect equally, then it must be seriously flawed. 

And the movement that is gathering all this power does not like America or liberalism. It does not believe that America is a good country—at least no better than China or Iran. It calls itself progressive, but it does not believe in progress; it is explicitly anti-growth. It claims to promote “equity,” but its answer to the challenge of teaching math or reading to disadvantaged children is to eliminate math and reading tests. It demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual.

If, perchance, you wish to clean out the rot that has infested American colleges and universities, the easiest way is to bring back meritocracy. 

It will not be easy to apply the old rules to the entering classes. But, it is certainly doable. 

The real problem is in the faculty, especially in those who teach the humanities and social sciences. Colleges and universities are being diminished by teachers who got their jobs for ideological conformity. Hiring decisions should be based on merit, not diversity quotas and ideological conformity. As for ridding these departments of the people who are now there, and whose students are most strident Hamas supporters… good luck!