Diversity, Equality and Inclusion are the watchwords and collectively the name of programs dedicated to fighting for allowing members of minority communities, such as Blacks, women and LGBTQ+, to be respected and get a fair shake in universities, workplaces and other organizations. I think they are somewhat overbearing in that they savor the thought police out to badger and threaten people into changing their ideas. Trump and his supporters are outraged at these programs and want to eliminate them particularly in the military, however worthwhi;le it was for those programs to have eased the integration of Blacks and women into the military and that malignant attitudes can arise again, as when gerrymandering and unequal voting conditions in the South arose again when the preclearance of voting rights in the 1964 Voting Rights Act was suspended ten years ago. Moreover, I think that talk of white supremacy or inherent white bias seems to me a bad way to conceptualize the current racial and gender assignments. Better to use the idea of prejudice, which means feeling disparagingly about minority groups, and the idea of discrimination, which means laws and regulations that bar or set quotas for minority members, to remain the most accurate way to describe minority conditions. They are objective and measurable. A study in New Jersey in the Fifties showed that people said they wouldn't mind Blacks buying a house in their neighborhood but that their neighbors wouldn’t like it.
But the issue remains whether DEI programs are pernicious or not. Do they invoke Critical Race Theory or Project 1619 which say that racism is in the heart of America? Or is it more salutary, by emphasizing how everybody should work to be aware of their shortcomings as human beings, just as Jesus suggested? It turned out that it was very difficult to get an answer to that question. Organizations devoted to spreading DEI were notoriously vague and anodyne about what specific points of view they were expressing. Brochures promoting DEI curricula say that participants should engage in “tough conversations”. What does that mean? That there is “white supremacy” in the United States? That the United States is deep down anti-Semitic? Such brochures also say they encourage mentorship, which seems a laudable aim until you realize it might mean only Black mentors for Black students. Is that a good idea? Or only Jewish or Asian mentors for people of their races? That seems exclusion rather than inclusion and does not foster getting along with other kinds of people. Couldn’t it be that the specifics are too controversial to be named?
I ran across such an event of intimidation thirty years ago when a lawyer for the university administration came to address the assembled faculty members on female harassment. He said people should use their common sense to address whether an interaction was beyond the bounds. Clearly, he gave this talk so as to cover the university should it be sued. I raised my hand and asked whether kissing the wife of a faculty member at the end of a dinner party was acceptable. Let’s be concrete. He said I should be discrete, which was hardly commonsensical. The leading Feminist in the faculty emphasized my point by saying there are more serious things to deal with, such as female work discrimination and sexual assault. But vagueness prevailed, is the coin of the realm, as when Sen. Gillibrand speaking to a Democratic National Convention said that a woman can tell the difference between a pat on the ass and a sexual assault, and a few years later got Al Franken to resign from the Senate because of a picture of him faking a grope of an actress playing her part. Imprecision is dangerous.