Martin Luther King, Jr. Day inspired me to ask myself how would Dr. King view DEI. To answer this question, I researched the ideas of Dr. King and W.E.B Dubois (co-founder of the NAACP), and found that both of them supported the concept E.M.C. – Equality of Opportunity, Merit, and Colorblindness. The principles were further supplemented and enhanced by Dr. King’s statement: “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.” DEI principles irreconcilably conflict with Dr. King’s EMC principles.
Firstly, “inclusion” is surplusage because it is already subsumed in the meaning of diversity. Diversity is already ‘baked in’ to all of our antidiscrimination laws; and no attorney would recognize the term ‘equity’ as the DEI proponents use it.
Equity as defined in D.E.I. means equal outcomes without equal effort, achievement or merit. DEI is divisive, disruptive, and racist. Equity promoted by DEI has become the antithesis of E.M.C. and all of Dr. King’s principles. DEI calls for color recognition and accordingly segregation, not colorblindness. It divides people into victim and oppressor by race, rather than the content of their character.
DEI perfectly embodies the words of George Orwell in Animal Farm: “Some animals are more equal than others”. It rejects two hundred years of progress, which progress is unlike any other nation’s. We need to be drawn together, not torn apart. In the words of Dr. King: “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” We need to reject the destructive and negative arc of DEI and return to the values of Dr. King – Equal Opportunity, Merit, and Colorblindness.
To digress momentarily, the Roman Republic was destroyed not by an invading force, but from within. In order to stop the potential tyranny embodied in Julius Caesar’s desire to be dictator for life, thereby making all law arbitrary, a group of Senators arbitrarily and without regard to law assassinated Julius Caesar on the floor of the Senate. Civil war followed, and Rome became an empire ruled by despots.
The principles behind DEI are that to fight racism we must become racists. To abandon equality of opportunity in favor of meritless, effortless equal outcomes coupled with reverting to judging students and people by the color of their skin, mimics the flawed reasoning of the Roman Senators.
I believe that if we all applied critical thinking to DEI and EMC that we would all decide to re-embrace Dr. King in policy and in action, instead of DEI’s empty and perilous policies of meritless promotions and the divisive and invidious advancement of racism.
Secondly, apart from the fact that DEI is racist, divisive, and destructive, DEI also fails when examined from a philosophical or logical perspective. DEI divides our culture into two separate and irreconcilable philosophical paths - those who embrace feelings as the sole influencer of their actions, and those who embrace logic and critical thinking as the dominant force in their decision making.
In the words of a prominent TV producer (a proponent of feelings over reason and logic): “facts are not important, it is the story that matters”. On the other hand, Socrates (a proponent of reason and logic) stated: “I cannot teach you anything, I can only make you think.” Prior to DEI, the Socratic Method was the norm and was the preferred method of pedagogy in Law Schools (where the art of critical thinking once reigned supreme). These two philosophies could not be more different. The crux of the matter is that feelings are subjective while logic and reason are objective.
Feelings have no standards for gauging conduct, as they are ephemeral, mercurial, and chemically driven in the brain (adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins). Reason and logic as a matter of definition have objective standards, originate in a different part of the brain, and are immutable.
Objective standards mean that the world is on notice of what conduct is expected of each of us. Subjective standards, on the other hand, are a canard as they actually are not standards at all, for feelings cannot, by their nature, give advance notice of what conduct is expected of each of us. Guessing what emotions another might have in any situation is not a viable way to conduct social policy. Emotions are arbitrary and capricious, which, incidentally, is the ground for overruling an administrative agency's rulings. In law it means that no objective standard was applied by the judge.
Feelings, being short-lived and driven by primitive chemistry, are unpredictable, and therefore unreliable.
Reason on the other hand is long-lived (eternal), driven by logic, not by adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, et al, and is, therefore, not only predictable, but foreseeable.
In sum, ruling by feelings is about power, ruling by reason is about order, and the application of justice is about order which, on a case by case basis, has been tempered by compassion (a singular feeling), while remembering that compassion is a zero sum equation. DEI is therefore only about power.
Thirdly, submitting to another’s feelings means that one is compelled to do as those people wish. In the context of DEI, it is both corrosive and bullying. In other words, the correctness of one’s behavior depends on the emotional whims of another whose feelings are entirely unknown until ‘offended’. One is then left with the conclusion that one can do nothing without first asking permission of the person who is demanding fealty to their feelings.
Being ruled by another’s emotions and being punished for not knowing them, is akin to punishing a person for violating an ex post facto law. One has no notice of what conduct is prohibited. Ex post facto means establishing a rule or law and prosecuting a person for his acts which were committed before the law came into existence; fittingly, this is specifically prohibited by the US Constitution.
With objective standards, one has the freedom to act without worrying whether someone else’s known or unknown emotional aversion to one’s actions will end in a legal or social prosecution. Objective standards (with due notice of them and an opportunity to defend against claims that we may have violated them, i.e. due process) put us all on notice of both acceptable and prohibited conduct; and they alert each of us that our personal emotions must tolerate those actions of others which fit within those objective standards, regardless of whether we emotionally agree with them. Objective standards of conduct governed by logic and reason are therefore the only true “safe spaces”.
Finally, compelled speech and compelled thought, accompanied by social and legal punishments as a consequence of failure to comply, have become the single greatest subversion of the educational system. The loss of freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom to remain silent (See the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution) constitutes the key component of any autocracy.
DEI seeks to shut down these essential freedoms by compelling students and teachers to speak in only DEI approved language, while DEI administrators censor, punish, and ‘cancel’ anyone who chooses not to employ such language or who refuses to pledge to do so. We have drifted into primitive superstitions where we throw the virgin minds (and sometimes the bodies) of children into the volcano to appease the gods of ‘social justice’.
DEI ‘as the ruling paradigm’ cannot survive. Emotion may be a great engine of motivation, but it drives like a drunk on New Year’s Eve. Only reason and logic can take the wheel to drive us home safely.
In the words of Dr. King’s: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Like any other self-destructive addiction, DEI only stops when we just say ‘No’.
Progressives play word games with everything. The Diversity in DEI is taken to mean diversity of skin color, diversity of sexuality or preferences, and homogeneity of political thought. This helps explain the absence of any conservatives or moderates, anyone slightly to the political right.
With DEI, Equity has been substituted for the word Equality because Equity means equal outcomes, not equal opportunity. This slight of hand which is not obvious to someone not immersed in the DEI culture allows DEI promoters to verbally side step any accountability for violating the Civil Rights Law of 1964 which prohibits racism in hiring practices. And that is exactly what they do under the cover of anti-racism, which is DEI sanctioned racism.
Inclusivity in DEI, sounds great, but there is no individual inclusivity, it’s all group based. You are not an individual and are expected to fit the DEI criteria and beliefs for your group.
I teach college and I have a counter point: as long as this is a word salad of ill-defined terms, then we can exploit it to our advantage. For example. I crack down hard on cheating & academic dishonesty - and when I have to fill out my self-evaluation and get to the box about DEI(etc) I list the efforts I use to enforce equitable assessments (along with my support for student accommodations for disabilities). Once I was questioned about it and I dig up a paper about in inequity of cheating (i.e. privileged groups have access to more resources to cheat).
Additionally, I find academia's tendency to use Latin & Greek plurals pretentious and off-putting so I do not use them in class - especially GE classes! When a colleague call me out on that in front of the division, I told him that it was my effort to decolonize Higher Ed and free us from the vestiges of an antiquated aristocratic system.
We can ambiguity to our advantage by justifying what we do using similar rhetoric as they do. If my compatriots and I further water down the meaning of these empty words then eventually anyone can claim to be advocates of Equity and Inclusion. After all, as long as White Supremacist groups' doors are open to all they are inclusive.
Well done, Mr. Graboyes. Much needed article, and the thought behind it. We can't talk about anything productively if we don't have the language for it. Great contribution, and I am going to use it.
Anti-equitists of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your ______. …Trying to fill in the blank, but I like your vocabulary and think we are on the verge of better argumentation.
This is a perceptive focus on an issue that I, for one, have not considered. But may I suggest a another punch-title: PAS - poly-acronymic solipsism - pasism, pasisist, pasistic, pasitarian, pasicratic… the poly-morphic nature of beast and its identitarian siblings is implied and novelty assured.
You can see in the clip below how Moms for Liberty fumble when Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes asks “What ideology are children being taught?” He then accuses them of being evasive. But I can see why they didn’t want to get into a twisted ideological mess or say something that would lead to their being labeled or denigrated. Missed opportunity here!! Needing the right words… Your suggestion might have filled a gap here. I'm working on a language manipulation project to identify manipulative language and even more important to suggest how to counter it and I've added your article to my notes. Again, great contribution!!!! Let's make it happen.
Thanks much, Robert! I have started using your terminology, and I'm happy to give you the attribution.
I can see how, just as each of us is an admixture of conservative and progressive, each can be an admixture of the egalitarian and equitist. For example, I, largely an egalitarian, would consider myself an equitist when it comes to health care.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day inspired me to ask myself how would Dr. King view DEI. To answer this question, I researched the ideas of Dr. King and W.E.B Dubois (co-founder of the NAACP), and found that both of them supported the concept E.M.C. – Equality of Opportunity, Merit, and Colorblindness. The principles were further supplemented and enhanced by Dr. King’s statement: “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.” DEI principles irreconcilably conflict with Dr. King’s EMC principles.
Firstly, “inclusion” is surplusage because it is already subsumed in the meaning of diversity. Diversity is already ‘baked in’ to all of our antidiscrimination laws; and no attorney would recognize the term ‘equity’ as the DEI proponents use it.
Equity as defined in D.E.I. means equal outcomes without equal effort, achievement or merit. DEI is divisive, disruptive, and racist. Equity promoted by DEI has become the antithesis of E.M.C. and all of Dr. King’s principles. DEI calls for color recognition and accordingly segregation, not colorblindness. It divides people into victim and oppressor by race, rather than the content of their character.
DEI perfectly embodies the words of George Orwell in Animal Farm: “Some animals are more equal than others”. It rejects two hundred years of progress, which progress is unlike any other nation’s. We need to be drawn together, not torn apart. In the words of Dr. King: “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” We need to reject the destructive and negative arc of DEI and return to the values of Dr. King – Equal Opportunity, Merit, and Colorblindness.
To digress momentarily, the Roman Republic was destroyed not by an invading force, but from within. In order to stop the potential tyranny embodied in Julius Caesar’s desire to be dictator for life, thereby making all law arbitrary, a group of Senators arbitrarily and without regard to law assassinated Julius Caesar on the floor of the Senate. Civil war followed, and Rome became an empire ruled by despots.
The principles behind DEI are that to fight racism we must become racists. To abandon equality of opportunity in favor of meritless, effortless equal outcomes coupled with reverting to judging students and people by the color of their skin, mimics the flawed reasoning of the Roman Senators.
I believe that if we all applied critical thinking to DEI and EMC that we would all decide to re-embrace Dr. King in policy and in action, instead of DEI’s empty and perilous policies of meritless promotions and the divisive and invidious advancement of racism.
Secondly, apart from the fact that DEI is racist, divisive, and destructive, DEI also fails when examined from a philosophical or logical perspective. DEI divides our culture into two separate and irreconcilable philosophical paths - those who embrace feelings as the sole influencer of their actions, and those who embrace logic and critical thinking as the dominant force in their decision making.
In the words of a prominent TV producer (a proponent of feelings over reason and logic): “facts are not important, it is the story that matters”. On the other hand, Socrates (a proponent of reason and logic) stated: “I cannot teach you anything, I can only make you think.” Prior to DEI, the Socratic Method was the norm and was the preferred method of pedagogy in Law Schools (where the art of critical thinking once reigned supreme). These two philosophies could not be more different. The crux of the matter is that feelings are subjective while logic and reason are objective.
Feelings have no standards for gauging conduct, as they are ephemeral, mercurial, and chemically driven in the brain (adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins). Reason and logic as a matter of definition have objective standards, originate in a different part of the brain, and are immutable.
Objective standards mean that the world is on notice of what conduct is expected of each of us. Subjective standards, on the other hand, are a canard as they actually are not standards at all, for feelings cannot, by their nature, give advance notice of what conduct is expected of each of us. Guessing what emotions another might have in any situation is not a viable way to conduct social policy. Emotions are arbitrary and capricious, which, incidentally, is the ground for overruling an administrative agency's rulings. In law it means that no objective standard was applied by the judge.
Feelings, being short-lived and driven by primitive chemistry, are unpredictable, and therefore unreliable.
Reason on the other hand is long-lived (eternal), driven by logic, not by adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, et al, and is, therefore, not only predictable, but foreseeable.
In sum, ruling by feelings is about power, ruling by reason is about order, and the application of justice is about order which, on a case by case basis, has been tempered by compassion (a singular feeling), while remembering that compassion is a zero sum equation. DEI is therefore only about power.
Thirdly, submitting to another’s feelings means that one is compelled to do as those people wish. In the context of DEI, it is both corrosive and bullying. In other words, the correctness of one’s behavior depends on the emotional whims of another whose feelings are entirely unknown until ‘offended’. One is then left with the conclusion that one can do nothing without first asking permission of the person who is demanding fealty to their feelings.
Being ruled by another’s emotions and being punished for not knowing them, is akin to punishing a person for violating an ex post facto law. One has no notice of what conduct is prohibited. Ex post facto means establishing a rule or law and prosecuting a person for his acts which were committed before the law came into existence; fittingly, this is specifically prohibited by the US Constitution.
With objective standards, one has the freedom to act without worrying whether someone else’s known or unknown emotional aversion to one’s actions will end in a legal or social prosecution. Objective standards (with due notice of them and an opportunity to defend against claims that we may have violated them, i.e. due process) put us all on notice of both acceptable and prohibited conduct; and they alert each of us that our personal emotions must tolerate those actions of others which fit within those objective standards, regardless of whether we emotionally agree with them. Objective standards of conduct governed by logic and reason are therefore the only true “safe spaces”.
Finally, compelled speech and compelled thought, accompanied by social and legal punishments as a consequence of failure to comply, have become the single greatest subversion of the educational system. The loss of freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom to remain silent (See the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution) constitutes the key component of any autocracy.
DEI seeks to shut down these essential freedoms by compelling students and teachers to speak in only DEI approved language, while DEI administrators censor, punish, and ‘cancel’ anyone who chooses not to employ such language or who refuses to pledge to do so. We have drifted into primitive superstitions where we throw the virgin minds (and sometimes the bodies) of children into the volcano to appease the gods of ‘social justice’.
DEI ‘as the ruling paradigm’ cannot survive. Emotion may be a great engine of motivation, but it drives like a drunk on New Year’s Eve. Only reason and logic can take the wheel to drive us home safely.
In the words of Dr. King’s: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Like any other self-destructive addiction, DEI only stops when we just say ‘No’.
Christopher Denton
Progressives play word games with everything. The Diversity in DEI is taken to mean diversity of skin color, diversity of sexuality or preferences, and homogeneity of political thought. This helps explain the absence of any conservatives or moderates, anyone slightly to the political right.
With DEI, Equity has been substituted for the word Equality because Equity means equal outcomes, not equal opportunity. This slight of hand which is not obvious to someone not immersed in the DEI culture allows DEI promoters to verbally side step any accountability for violating the Civil Rights Law of 1964 which prohibits racism in hiring practices. And that is exactly what they do under the cover of anti-racism, which is DEI sanctioned racism.
Inclusivity in DEI, sounds great, but there is no individual inclusivity, it’s all group based. You are not an individual and are expected to fit the DEI criteria and beliefs for your group.
I teach college and I have a counter point: as long as this is a word salad of ill-defined terms, then we can exploit it to our advantage. For example. I crack down hard on cheating & academic dishonesty - and when I have to fill out my self-evaluation and get to the box about DEI(etc) I list the efforts I use to enforce equitable assessments (along with my support for student accommodations for disabilities). Once I was questioned about it and I dig up a paper about in inequity of cheating (i.e. privileged groups have access to more resources to cheat).
Additionally, I find academia's tendency to use Latin & Greek plurals pretentious and off-putting so I do not use them in class - especially GE classes! When a colleague call me out on that in front of the division, I told him that it was my effort to decolonize Higher Ed and free us from the vestiges of an antiquated aristocratic system.
We can ambiguity to our advantage by justifying what we do using similar rhetoric as they do. If my compatriots and I further water down the meaning of these empty words then eventually anyone can claim to be advocates of Equity and Inclusion. After all, as long as White Supremacist groups' doors are open to all they are inclusive.
Well done, Mr. Graboyes. Much needed article, and the thought behind it. We can't talk about anything productively if we don't have the language for it. Great contribution, and I am going to use it.
Marxism anti meritocratic norms anti American values and anti Semitism underscore all of these trends
Anti-equitists of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your ______. …Trying to fill in the blank, but I like your vocabulary and think we are on the verge of better argumentation.
I love this article. To name something is to have power over it.
I agree, subjective with no endpoint. But that is their purpose - no end point. Keep up the good work.
Chris
Since we are slicing up people’s characteristics so carefully, why not add “amount of effort prepared to invest” as another facet.
Equality: yes. Equity:no.
This is a perceptive focus on an issue that I, for one, have not considered. But may I suggest a another punch-title: PAS - poly-acronymic solipsism - pasism, pasisist, pasistic, pasitarian, pasicratic… the poly-morphic nature of beast and its identitarian siblings is implied and novelty assured.
I’d have said progressives and progressivism, but they don’t really say that they are for progress. So I guess your approach is better.
"Wokeism" is something right-wingers say. There is no movement calling itself "wokeism".
Hi again, Mr. Graboyes:
You can see in the clip below how Moms for Liberty fumble when Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes asks “What ideology are children being taught?” He then accuses them of being evasive. But I can see why they didn’t want to get into a twisted ideological mess or say something that would lead to their being labeled or denigrated. Missed opportunity here!! Needing the right words… Your suggestion might have filled a gap here. I'm working on a language manipulation project to identify manipulative language and even more important to suggest how to counter it and I've added your article to my notes. Again, great contribution!!!! Let's make it happen.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/60-minutes-confronts-moms-for-liberty-co-founders-on-book-bans
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP07/20220406/114597/HHRG-117-AP07-Wstate-EdenM-20220406.pdf
Here's more of the ever-shifting names- how SEL was infused with CRT. They just love love love the word switch tactic. It's like arguing with a child.
JenR has done her homework. Activism is not optional for Critical Theorists (true Believers, since there is no “theory” in Critical Theory).
Thanks much, Robert! I have started using your terminology, and I'm happy to give you the attribution.
I can see how, just as each of us is an admixture of conservative and progressive, each can be an admixture of the egalitarian and equitist. For example, I, largely an egalitarian, would consider myself an equitist when it comes to health care.