National Review
The Intellectual Collapse of DEI
By Rich Lowry
November 27, 2024 10:34 AM
DEI has been one of the most morally perverse and damaging fads in recent American history.
DEI is a bad idea whose time came with a vengeance several years ago, but now its continued ascendancy is in doubt.
Perhaps the most important event this year outside of the presidential election is the intellectual collapse of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is poisonous hokum that is finally being exposed as such.
DEI has been one of the most morally perverse and damaging fads in recent American history.
We’ve been spending an estimated $8 billion a year telling Americans in training sessions, workshops, and educational material that they are, depending on their race or gender, victims or oppressors, and that the country is shot through with white supremacy. The DEI mindset is dominant in human-resources departments and on college campuses.
Common sense says that this racialist hectoring — often administered by people who brook no dissent — must be unhealthy, and, sure enough, evidence is beginning to pile up.
Research has suggested that DEI can create negative feelings or make people afraid to speak their minds. Now comes a compelling new study from an outfit called the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab. It found that DEI amplified “perceptions of prejudicial hostility where none was present, and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice.”
In other words, if its goal is to create illiberal racial paranoiacs, DEI is succeeding brilliantly.
In one experiment, the study’s architects gave one group of students an anodyne essay about U.S. corn production to read while another got an essay drawn from the work of DEI superstars Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Then, the students were asked to evaluate a simple, racially neutral scenario involving a college applicant getting rejected by an East Coast university.
The students who had read the DEI material were more likely to believe that the hypothetical admissions officer in the scenario was more discriminatory, more unfair, and more harmful, as well as guilty of more micro-aggressions — again, even though nothing in the scenario suggested as much.
The Kendi-DiAngelo students were also more likely to want to require DEI training for the admissions officer, to suspend the officer for a semester, and to demand a public apology. Why let an absence of facts stand in the way of punitive measures?
Meanwhile, a report in the New York Times Magazine found that the University of Michigan’s decade-long, roughly $250 million experiment in making DEI part of the warp and woof of the school’s life has been a failure.
“In a survey released in late 2022,” the Times notes, “students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics.”
Ordinary campus disputes have become five-alarm DEI crises, administrators complain about all the new DEI-created paperwork, and students and faculty are afraid to say anything that might offend anyone.
It’d be one thing if it were only the University of Michigan that had sunk itself in this mire, but this dynamic has been duplicated throughout corporate America and our education system. There are signs, though, that the wave has crested. Walmart just announced that it will stop using the term “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and end various DEI-related initiatives. Other companies have been pulling back, as well. The trend will presumably only accelerate with a new Trump administration hostile to DEI.
The end of DEI would be a net addition to our collective life. It would avoid, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, a gratuitous source of conflict and mutual suspicion. It would roll back the undue power given to fatuous martinets. It would stop the spread, under the guise of inclusion, of lies about American society.
The old saw is that socialism hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t been tried. Well, DEI has been tried, and the dismal results are now becoming known.
National Review
Trust the Science: DEI Is Dangerous
By The Editors
November 29, 2024 6:30 AM
We were told over and over again by leading institutions, high-profile figures, and the mainstream media that DEI fosters an “inclusive environment” and advances “equity” by eliminating biases and counteracting discrimination. A booming industry emerged: About $8 billion is spent each year on diversity trainings in the United States, and more than half of Americans report that their workplace has DEI trainings or meetings. Of course, DEI is not merely limited to programming at organizations, businesses, and universities. Now, it is entrenched in our laws. President Biden has issued executive orders to promote social justice, beginning on his very first day in the Oval Office.
While DEI was celebrated, its opponents realized that it is a dangerous ideology. Some supposedly “equitable” policies have been clear examples of illegal discrimination, while the efforts to be “inclusive” have had disastrous consequences, particularly for single-sex spaces. Yet some of DEI’s terrible effects have more subtly eroded our social fabric: Most, if not all, DEI-themed trainings promote a victimhood mentality by organizing society into a hierarchy of “oppressor” and “oppressed” on the basis of immutable traits, then demonize anyone who is supposedly sitting comfortably atop the totem pole. Regrettably, anyone who expressed even mild objections to DEI could be branded as a reprehensible bigot who needed immediate reeducation, thereby creating a demand for even more progressive-indoctrination sessions.
Now, a compelling new study confirms that DEI fosters racial and group animosity, not tolerance.
The study released on Monday by Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab has devastating but unsurprising results: Across the three experiments, the researchers found that participants exposed to DEI materials were more likely to perceive prejudice where none existed and were more willing to punish the perceived perpetrators. Even worse, the participants who read DEI materials focused on caste were more likely to agree with Hitler quotes that substituted “Jew” with “Brahmin,” the top of the hierarchy group in the Indian caste system. The study found that “participants exposed to the DEI content were markedly more likely to endorse Hitler’s demonization statements, agreeing that Brahmins are ‘parasites’ (+35.4%), ‘viruses’ (+33.8%), and ‘the devil personified’ (+27.1%).”
Since DEI programming is so widespread, the study’s findings are obviously newsworthy. Yet our own Abigail Anthony reported that both the New York Times and Bloomberg had prepared articles on the study, then axed the stories just before publication.
Why? When asked for an explanation by the study’s authors, the editor of the Bloomberg “Equality” subsection simply cited editorial discretion. At the New York Times, the reporter admitted that he did not have “any concerns about the methodology,” and that someone on the publication’s “data-driven reporting team” had “no problems” with the study. Yet the journalist insisted that the study should undergo peer review before getting coverage, even though he had previously reported on NCRI’s reports that hadn’t been peer-reviewed. That journalist also stipulated, “I told my editor I thought if we were going to write a story casting serious doubts on the efficacy of the work of two of the country’s most prominent DEI scholars, the case against them has to be as strong as possible.”
As it happens, the study is strong, and the truth about DEI is getting out, no matter how uncomfortable it makes its reflexive supporters.
National Review
DEI’s Die-Hards Still Don’t Get It
By Charles C. W. Cooke
January 23, 2025 3:24 PM
They are the ones who endorse racial discrimination. That’s their thing.
‘When does he bring back segregated water fountains?” So asked John Harwood, formerly of the New York Times, NBC, CNN, and elsewhere, when informed that President Trump had decided to shut down the federal government’s sprawling archipelago of DEI initiatives. Through the screen, one could almost feel the self-satisfaction. Tweet sent. Box ticked. Virtuous credentials reacquired for the week.
That sort of reaction to criticisms of DEI or affirmative action is typical within a certain corner of elite culture. Nevertheless, it is extremely silly — akin in its triteness and naïvety to that of those who believe the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea must be a democratic people’s republic because those words are included in its name. Certainly, in a vacuum, “diversity” is a nice enough word. So, too, “equality” and “inclusion.” But, as in Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Peace deals with war and the Ministry of Truth with lies, what matters more than the labels is what those who wield them ultimately wish to do with the power they seek. And what those people have done, lo these many years, is establish a network of vicious, illiberal, harshly ideological institutions, whose sole purpose has been to bastardize the quotidian language of the American republic and to impress the warped results into the service of a narrow, intolerant, and censorious form of political progressivism. In practice, diversity, equity, and inclusion has not been diverse, equitable, or inclusive, but uniform, prejudiced, and clannish. Worse still, thanks to its unquenchable obsession with immutable characteristics, it has taken America further away from — not closer to — the core ideas adumbrated in the Declaration of Independence. It is, I will grant, unlikely that any of the architects of DEI desire to restore “segregated water fountains.” And yet, as a matter of unlovely habit, they have proved far more likely to defend segregating people by race than have their classically liberal critics. For their apologists to accuse those who wish to dismantle DEI and affirmative action of being obsessed with dividing people into groups is like accusing Carrie Nation of being a lush: It is about as wrong as one can possibly get before one falls off the edge of the map. Segregation? Sorry, buddy, but that’s the other guys’ jam.
Many topics within our politics are complicated. This one is not. One can either have a legally color-blind society in which we are regarded as equal by the government, or one can have DEI, affirmative action, privilege hierarchies, and the rest. And, in America, it is the former course that is guaranteed. The Declaration insists that “all men are created equal.” The 14th Amendment mandates “the equal protection of the laws.” The Civil Right Act prohibits “discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.” Railing against the failure to uphold his ideals in 1896, Justice Harlan noted trenchantly that, “in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens,” that “there is no caste here,” and that “our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” More than a century later, Justice John Roberts explained simply that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” One either believes this, or one does not — and, if one does, one can allow no “but” to qualify the affirmation. There is no such thing as good racial discrimination, or salutary legal segregation, or the friendly imposition of caste. If one desires to treat people equally, one must treat people equally and leave it at that.
Donald Trump’s executive order self-evidently pursues that end. By its own terms, it seeks to end the use of “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences”; to “terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements”; and to “enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws.” In this respect, it is the natural heir to the extremely popular Supreme Court decision, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which in 2023 finally outlawed the consideration of race in college admissions. If Trump’s order is respected, it will lead to less consideration of race in the law, create fewer classes of citizens in the government’s imagination, and reduce the scope for discrimination of all kinds. To look at this development and be reminded of the degradations of the Jim Crow era is so bizarre as to warrant a straitjacket. You’re on the other side of the divide, John — the one that stands against the egalitarian model. Own it.
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