For all the discourse surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the past decade, surprisingly little has been said about what it was ever meant to accomplish.
Since DEI emerged last decade in HR departments across the nation, eventually becoming ubiquitous in the summer of 2020, proponents offered a spate of stated aims, from developing cultural competence to increasing representation to fostering inclusion for the “marginalized.” The more radical goals, such as promoting “equity,” were blended in with less controversial aims, such as enforcing anti-discrimination laws. “It’s all interconnected,” DEI activists insisted.
Those who demanded a better explanation for these intrusions were reprimanded and told to “check their privilege.”
So it has come with little surprise that DEI programs, which are now being scrapped across industry and different levels of government nationwide, have failed to bring any positive change in society.
A survey released in late 2022 by the University of Michigan, which has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on DEI initiatives since 2016, found that students and faculty reported a more hostile campus climate that featured less interaction between students of different races and less sense of “belonging” for everyone. All DEI at the University of Michigan seemed to accomplish was the creation of a massive and powerful bureaucracy through which students and faculty could register their grievances and pursue vengeance.
Fortunately, the university had the good sense to scale back its DEI efforts in recent months by ending the requirement of “diversity statements,” which amounted to little more than ideological loyalty oaths, as part of their hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. Harvard and MIT also recently ended the requirement.
Additionally, DEI failed to fulfill its stated aim of diversifying corporate America, which bought into the movement wholesale following the George Floyd riots. According to a Monday report in the Wall Street Journal that analyzed demographics at S&P 500 companies, the percentage of minority workers in executive or higher-paid positions has remained stagnant.
If DEI didn’t improve race relations or tangibly benefit the lives of minorities, what exactly did it accomplish? What, indeed, was the point of this strange episode in American history?
DEI is and always was the weapon of a political movement determined to exert control over its opposition through extreme social coercion. It was an abstruse and theoretical way of cowing people and institutions into obedience and enacting a political vision that pits America as the global villain. It was a clever method for fomenting constant division and conflict, without which DEI initiatives would become obsolete.
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Perhaps worst of all, the waste and turbulence of the DEI era was entirely predictable. The programs themselves were designed and implemented by consulting firms, HR officers, and political advocacy groups, none of whom had incentive to reduce racism or any other type of discrimination. Any honest behavioral therapist could have told you that absurd spectacles such as “privilege walks” would breed resentment, that valorizing victimhood would breed a generation of victim-seekers, and that categorizing people into “oppressors” and “oppressed” based on immutable identity characteristics would rob people of their moral agency.
To DEI, we can only say good riddance. Perhaps now we can finally resume the work of perfecting our union according to America’s guiding principles of equality and justice grounded in eternal truths, not racialist rubbish.
