DEI overreached, but not nearly as much as its critics

Some patient refereeing of a histrionic debate. Until the end, where I get less patient.

One irritating feature of our polarized political moment is that both sides frequently exaggerate in service of points that have kernels of truth to them. Careful people must constantly half-agree: “Sure, X is bad, but not for the reasons you say,” etc.

A second irksome feature is that one side exaggerates way more preposterously than the other. This pressures reasonable people to fall in line with the side whose exaggerations are less severe, or who has the moral high ground overall, instead of quibbling over the details. Trying to slip in some nuance exposes us to accusations of sympathy for the devil.

I feel this way about DEI. Our national conversation about race (etc.) has mostly broken down, and what remains is hampered by terms that are uselessly overbroad—often because they’ve been willfully muddied by dishonest people. “Woke” and “critical race theory” followed “political correctness” in this regard, and DEI is just the latest example.

This post highlights missteps on both sides while clarifying which errors are more severe. Part II will attempt a reasonable compromise and then apply this middle ground to the policy choices of recent weeks.

I. The Left’s Overreach

Here is an image you’ve probably seen before:

This image went viral on social media during Trump’s first term.¹ While DEI trainings vary, this image may be their quintessential component. When I staffed a Democratic Senator in 2023, they hired a DEI facilitator to run a session with our team. “Who can tell me the difference between equality and equity?”, she asked. Before she could even change the slide to show this cartoon, a half-dozen staffers raced to share it in our Zoom chat. The irony of the “training” was that the trainees were already miles ahead of her.

The image was popular on the left because it flatters their assumptions about how the world works and what justice looks like. It associates “equity” with equal outcomes, and portrays this as a fairer and more inclusive thing than mere equality of treatment.

But I roll my eyes every time I see it. I’m struck by how many questions the image begs, which makes it a contrived model for the real world. When conservatives argue that DEI is just brainwashing people with leftist values, images like this make me see their point.

Here are some assumptions this image bakes in:

1. The differences between the people in this group result solely from genetic luck or circumstance. Nobody can control their height, so there’s no acknowledgment of merit or work ethic playing a role in who is better situated (nor, inversely, of disadvantages imposed by other people).

2. The people in this group all have the same goal or desire, to watch the same game. There is no diversity of interests, preferences, or endeavors from one individual to the next, and certainly no task for which shorter people may actually be better equipped.

3. The nature of the goal is binary, not quantitative. You either see, or cannot see, with no gradation of view quality. Success is capped, not incremental. Thus, the tall man is not harmed or bothered by losing his block, because there’s no benefit to his being even taller in this example.

4. Because of assumption 3, the endeavor is not competitive or zero-sum. There is plenty of space for everyone to peer over the fence without impeding the other’s view. There are plenty of blocks/resources to provide everyone as much height as they want. The concept of scarcity is wished away.

5. There’s also no concept of ownership over the relevant resources, nor any theory for their creation. It’s unclear how the boxes got there and whose boxes they are. We the viewers feel entitled to redistribute them without encroaching on anyone else’s prerogative, and there’s no reason to think doing so might result in fewer boxes existing down the line.

All these assumptions amount to a poor reflection of reality in most of the contexts where equity issues are controversial—including all contexts in which affirmative action is considered. Each assumption is necessary for it to seem clear that equity is fairer than equality, or that redistribution is morally optimal. The image is fine as an argument for a particular worldview, but it’s not “education.” Disagreeing with it is not ignorance or prejudice.

Not everyone uncomfortable with this image can put their finger on why, much less articulate a list of its slanted assumptions. But they were not born yesterday. Many of them sense that they’re not being impartially trained on anti-racism so much as browbeaten into reciting a contested opinion on how society should be structured. They’re not sure they share that opinion, and they resent the implication that the instructor’s opinion is more enlightened than theirs. Sometimes they voice that resentment, other times they swallow it; but either way, they often carry it with them. Some leave the training more hostile to equity than they were when they entered.

Not every DEI training uses this image. I’m sure some are better than others. But either way, it doesn’t work. We know that by now. Even if it were good to impart all the values DEI espouses, the training does not impart them. "The consensus now emerging among academics is that many anti-discrimination policies have no effect” explains The Economist. “What is worse, they often backfire." John McWhorter gives a damning summary of the research:

There is copious evidence—“hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s,” write sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev—to suggest that the corporate anti-bias training central to its mission simply doesn't work. It does not meaningfully change employees’ thinking, and tends to be recalled instead as mere hoops they had to jump through. “You spend some money, you get people excited, and then a year later, you’re at the same place,” says DEI strategist Lily Zheng, the author of DEI Deconstructed.

At the University of Michigan, the main result of a campus-wide DEI infusion has—according to a deeply-reported New York Times Magazine piece—been frustration, discomfort, and alienation. “The most common attitude I encountered about DEI during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain,” Nicholas Confessore wrote in The Times to summarize his months of reporting at Michigan.

Ten years ago, we might have had a grown-up discussion about this evidence and then corrected course. Unfortunately, today’s political climate makes that really hard to do.

II. The MAGA hysteria

One problem is that the loudest critics of DEI in our national politics today levy criticisms that are astonishingly, dumbfoundingly stupider than what I’ve just written. Reasonable people are mortified to even associate with those arguments directionally, with the effect that DEI looks brilliant by comparison.

Specifically, prominent conservatives have taken to conflating DEI with any effort to address any form of social inequality. They also mischaracterize existing DEI programs as lowering the standard of performance required for hiring or promotion, despite that not being what the policies say, and despite DEI advocates’ insistence that that’s not what they want.² Instead of providing evidence to substantiate these claims, the critics glide seamlessly into blaming these allegedly lower standards for literally anything that goes wrong in an organization! Which is how we got Trump and his VP, who I’m told is very smart, blaming DEI for a plane crash because…just trust us… (See parenthetical below)

This is not an isolated incident. In recent years, prominent Republican politicians and commentators have blamed DEI for each of the following:

1. The U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan (and even, why it didn’t win in Afghanistan)

2. The failures of Boeing passenger jets

3. The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge

4. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank

5. The East Palestine train derailment

6. A drone strike on U.S. military servicemembers in Jordan

7. The Secret Service’s failure to prevent an assassination attempt on Donald Trump

8. The Crowdstrike IT Crash

9. The Los Angeles Wildfires

Fox News never fails to elevate these talking points. That’s why my Senate office got massive weekly mail campaigns from gullible viewers outraged about nonexistent DEI scandals.³ There is no tragedy too somber for MAGA leaders to debase themselves weaponizing.

It is theoretically plausible that some forms of DEI could lower standards. But to call that reality is a bold claim requiring substantial evidence. For one thing, it directly contradicts the stated goals of DEI programs. Supporters say DEI helps find and hire qualified, talented people who had been shut out due to prejudice or systemic bias—not to hire less qualified people for aesthetic balance. Its advocates see DEI as a meritocracy enhancer, leveling the playing field to allow the best and brightest to rise to the top.

Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong. To simply assert that DEI lowers standards begs the question every bit as much as the cartoon above. DEI advocates could just as easily say that removing DEI lowers standards, and they could cite just as much anecdotal evidence to support that.⁴ The debate goes nowhere without data.

If you want to argue that DEI supporters are lying—that official policies were a fig leaf, and in practice, it did result in hiring unqualified people—you need to come hard with the facts to be taken seriously. Not the “my cousin’s friend works in the FAA and he told me they have annoyingly many anti-bias trainings” stuff the right typically relies on, but “here are documents proving they lowered the standards of certification, or denied qualified white people despite having a shortage,” etc. The right desperately wants that evidence, but somehow, we never see it. (Note: A commenter provided evidence that convinces me there may have been more to this specific FAA example than I was previously aware of. See this comment for an explanation of why I don’t think that evidence changes the truth of my overall thesis.)

And if you want to go further, and argue that not only did unqualified people get hired, but that the resulting damage to the organization’s performance was so severe that it caused the failure of the war in Afghanistan…I’m not even sure what you’d need. You’d need a truly gargantuan amount of evidence that simply does not exist outside the right’s imagination.⁵ For the plane crash, you’d need something like “here’s the frequency of accidents before and after this policy change, and a regression controlling for other conceivable factors. Also, here’s evidence that the particular air traffic controller who was working that night was unqualified but given special treatment,” and so on.

If you don’t have any of that before you start making confident assertions, smart people might start to suspect that you’re just leveraging the latest tragedy to whip up racial resentment from stupid people, before the victims’ bodies are even recovered from the river. They might also think that makes you a bit of an asshole.

And you know what definitely doesn’t constitute evidence that DEI lowers standards, despite the mutterings of anonymous X accounts? The existence of women and racial minorities in positions of power. To cite that as evidence is to make prejudiced assumptions about those people’s qualifications.

And I must add: if you don’t want smart people to think you’re prejudiced, it doesn’t help to launch boycotts against Disney, Target, Anheuser-Busch, and Chick-fil-A for crimes like having a pride event or putting a trans person in an ad. If you do that, smart people might start to suspect that the reason you’re so convinced DEI lowers standards is that your entire worldview is consumed by inchoate rage at people who value equality and tolerance, so you insist on seeing every corner of life through that miserable, insecure filter.

The right likes to say that the left has a “woke mind virus” that clouds their vision on equity issues. Maybe some of them do. But in my left-leaning circles, most of us never bought everything the radicals were selling. The reasons we bit our tongue, these past years, were more that we didn’t want to be associated with the weakest and ugliest arguments on the planet. If we did have a virus, the absurdity of the right is what infected us.

Pt. 1 Recap:

While some universities and liberal groups went further, most DEI took the form of mandatory training intended to combat subconscious bias. There’s little evidence this training works, substantial evidence that it does not, and many examples of it promoting biased leftist ideologies.

But there’s also little evidence that DEI resulted in less qualified people being hired or promoted at scale. In fact, most DEI policies explicitly reaffirmed a commitment to merit-based hiring and promotion and oriented their efforts toward establishing a level playing field.

The people supporting DEI from 2018-2023 or so were typically well-meaning champions of social justice who got a bit carried away while trying to solve real problems. The people scapegoating DEI to explain all manner of complex policy failures were typically morons, bigots, or opportunistic liars exploiting bigots and morons. I’ll be a little nicer to them in part II.

1. In the typical fashion of that era, there was also a lot of racing to out-justice other activists with commentary about how actually, this image was oppressive: “White Supremacy at work,” said Sippin the EquiTea. I criticize the term later, but in these edge cases I’ll admit it: these people had a mind virus.

2. Ex: the Biden Executive Order that Trump revoked with such fanfare last month aimed only to “advance equity for all” by “embedding fairness in decision-making processes.” It defined equity as “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals” and talked about removing “barriers to full and equal participation” and addressing workplace harassment. Nowhere does it encourage lowering standards to achieve those goals.

3. I have to say, writing dozens of response letters patiently explaining how the actual causes of the latest tragedy were unrelated to DEI was significantly more exasperating, and distracting from my duties, than the one hour per year of friendly DEI training we had to sit through.

4. For example, stories of unqualified white dudes getting hired by their Dad, or because they knew the right people, or the company was an old boys’ club from their alma mater, etc.

5. I spent a year researching why we lost that war, and I assure you DEI was not a top 500 reason.