Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are Good- But "DEI" is Mostly Poison, Part 2

Two Things Can Be True

Two Things Can Be True, at least from my perspective:

• Improving our diversity, equity, and inclusion are excellent goals

• What is currently labeled “DEI” is mostly bad

This is part 2 of my thoughts on DEI. In my first column, I endorsed the goals of the individual words of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, but posited that what currently is labeled DEI has at least 5 attributes that bring poison to our society. Let's pick up with #3.

Where DEI Gets It Wrong

Poison #3 - Devaluing Quality

A long time friend who is a good bit to the left of me (though usually pretty center) busted me on social media recently. I was commenting on the DEI overtones around disgraced and now resigned Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle. I was thinking she was probably not the most qualified and had a DEI factor at hiring, but he said “99.99% of hires are not the most qualified.” He is of course technically right. But he is wrong in the big picture about the effects of the current round of DEI.

In my business career I directly or indirectly was involved in hiring at least a hundred people. There are all kinds of intangibles in hiring.  And I will admit without any hesitation that hiring may involve cronyism, randomness, and yes, even some flavor of racism at times. But quality is still the elephant in the room if you want to succeed. My industry was technology, which is historically ruthless on weeding out low quality workers. I’d argue today with the bloated oligopoly of Google, Meta, Amazon, etc that we have reversed that trend, but that is a column for another day.

But DEI has now pushed quality way to the back of the bus, which will have real consequences. After a massive DEI push UCLA medical school recently decayed in quality and now has remarkably poorer outcomes and students who can't function well in rotations, as outlined in great detail here. The American Medical Association made the first big screening exam for residency pass/fail instead of graded because not enough minorities received prime residency slots. This backfired. I have heard many friends say their new boss is a DEI related hire who doesn’t have a background for their role and was not close to being as qualified as many other applicants.

Last year United Airlines celebrated on social media an all LGBTQ flight crew. Many ordinary people were not amused. Why was this any kind of criteria for selecting people to pilot their plane? UA and the FAA have also announced quasi quotas for diversity in pilots and air traffic controllers.

Do you want the best qualified doctor, pilot, and air traffic controllers, or diversity quotas? DEI has become so powerful and suppressed so much debate that the quality bar has been moved way too far downward in so many areas of society. This is not healthy.

Education has become a fiasco on this subject. How about this headline… Oregon again says students don’t need to prove mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate, citing harm to students of color. All over the country standards are being lowered in the name of DEI or its related concepts.

In the pre-internet era, I remember reading a story in Newsweek or Time or US News (old folks remember those!) about a study comparing minority help programs between my alma mater Georgia Tech and an Ivy League school. At Tech, they were keeping the standards high but providing extra support for the minorities. At the Ivy League school, they lowered standards. The study showed much better post-graduation success for the Tech minority kids.  George W Bush was not known as a powerful speaker, but he actually had a few really good quotes. One was around the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” The current DEI zeitgeist sadly seems to say that low expectations are needed to accomplish their goals.

It’s not rocket science - we can promote better D, E, and I goals without body slamming quality to the ground and hurting everyone.

Poison #4  Loss of Public Confidence

This is a simple one. When the public sees the US Military, Secret Service, their business, their airline, and their schools proclaim that DEI is essentially the #1 focus, they wonder if they are taking their eye off the ball. We are overdoing it.

By all objective measures, the Secret Service failed badly in the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump.  There are of course a myriad of reasons, but Director Cheatle in her term talked a lot about DEI goals .  When you say something like “I want 30% women”, that makes the average person think “hmmm..”.  Then when they spectacularly embarrass themselves in a mission failure,  you wonder what the leadership was really spending their time on - accomplishing that mission or pursuing diversity to earn DEI points in public relations.

When DEI is so over the top, it is also unfair to the “beneficiaries” of the hiring practices. The people wonder if they “Didn’t Earn It”. Many times they did, but there is now a tainted perception of the DEI hire. The presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris suffers from this because Biden announced his VP pick was going to be different race/gender.  Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was also someone who was pre-announced as a minority woman hire.  Thus when she appears to not understand the entire point of the 1st Amendment in oral arguments, it can lead people to worry that she “Didn’t Earn In”. 

As someone who spent a decade in elected office, I learned that one maxim of politics is 100% true. “Perception is reality”.  It may be that many or most of the DEI hires are fine, but the way this program is functioning is causing a massive perception failure.

I’ll end this section with a paradox.  The same people who enthusiastically support DEI get very mad if you label someone a DEI hire. That is the crux of the contradiction that is the current implementation of DEI.

Poison #5 - Abandoning The Dream of Martin Luther King

As mentioned earlier, I grew up in the Deep South. Any rational person should see the obvious fact that our “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” metrics on sexism or racism are so much better now than 30-50 years ago. But now, with all that progress, the DEI industry is prescribing more radical and far reaching “solutions” for these problems than ever. 

Interestingly enough, the DEI mentality does not apply to un-favored groups and seems 100% focused on gender, skin color and sexual preferences. We have dramatically seen that with the campus treatment of Jewish students - their diversity is not welcome or protected there.  In big tech, it is almost impossible to be openly politically conservative. The HBO show Silicon Valley satired how hard it was a the single church attending member to be accepted into his tech firm. In our “elite” universities, having a diversity of political opinions is not wanted. Only certain diversity is eligible for favored for inclusion.

MLK famously dreamed of a world “where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” We made a lot of progress on this in my lifetime. Certainly we have more to do. But the current DEI dogma is pounding us over the head that gender,  skin color, and sexual orientation are the only things that matter, and the only things that need to be diverse. It is a step backwards. How do I get to the dream of judging a person by their character under the DEI principles?  That is a serious question.

I honestly believe the good Dr King would not support the present line of thinking coming from the Left on this subject. I truly wish he was still alive to tell us.

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OK let’s wrap this up. First I must confess. In these columns I have blurred DEI criticism at times with what can be more accurately defined as “social justice” or “critical race theory”. I tried hard not to, but they unfortunately are all kind of ideologically smushed together. They share common assumptions, tenets, and definitely share proponents.

Doing better than today’s DEI

Let us redouble efforts to help disadvantaged folks in our society, but refuse to buy what the DEI industry is selling. I have worked in the charter school space for 15+ years. There are amazingly successful charters who take inner city boy and girl  minorities and do a great job … by keeping expectations high, not by making excuses or quotas or saying they are doomed because they aren’t born of white privilege. Let's continue to boost programs like I helped with in my political service where we tried to get more females in Computer Science and STEM fields.  You can’t magically conjure up qualified people with all the Diversity boxes checked unless the education system has produced them.

Entangling efforts to diversify the workforce with white guilt and other divisive ideas does not help. Get rid of all of that.  Forcing people to say things in training or oaths is terrible. Just stop.

Meritocracy is not perfect or even something to be desired in a pure state, but DEI threatens to jettison it to the huge detriment of the quality of our society. It is moving us away from character and focusing on characteristics we cannot change or work on in our personal growth. Make sure quality is kept #1. 

Let us publicly debate strongly the details of these programs. Current DEI proponents on the Left - you do not get to shut off debate or to instantly call me racist/sexist/hompophobic just becuase I do not support your particular implementation.

In closing, I anticipate some will say “Dudgeon you are exaggerating. The DEI department at my school/business/etc does not do any of that.” If so... great, I have no beef with you. But don’t ignore the innumerable examples to the contrary littered throughout the country.

Luckily, the current DEI wave appears to have crested. Many states are rolling it back, and corporate America seems to be doing so also. It can’t come soon enough.