A Welcome Crack In The DEI Narrative

    The debate about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has, thankfully, shifted. It is no longer principally about the problem of demonizing straight white people. It is now about how much DEI demeans minorities.

    This is the tale that Tyler Austin Harper tells in his cover story for The Atlantic, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor.” The striking thing about Harper’s essay is that nothing headline-worthy happens under the DEI regime at Bates College, where Harper had reached his dream of becoming a tenure-track professor. There are no high-profile public shaming incidents or shout-downs of speakers, as happened at institutions from Middlebury College in the East to Stanford University in the West. It is simply the ordinary dimensions of the DEI structures that Professor Harper found intolerably degrading: The excellent candidates who should have gotten jobs but didn’t because they were not considered ideologically pure enough by the activists in charge of the committees; the inane directives from senior administrators, such as doing a curriculum-wide audit for oppressive content, which made Harper feel like an “antiracist truffle pig”; and the use of skin color as a job qualification.

    It is not that Harper thought race was irrelevant. He was broadly supportive of affirmative action and happy to be a mentor for minority students. But when ordinary situations are presented as incorrigibly racist (one of the DEI administrators on campus shared her persistent fear that the “crackers” in their idyllic college town were just waiting for their opportunity to kill the black people), it meant that the only role minorities could play was fragile victim, when what Harper wanted to be known for was his excellence as a scholar and teacher.

    Frustration about being assigned the role of victim is precisely the story that David Treuer tells about his experience at Princeton in the 1980s. It was an era in which the spirit that would one day harden into the DEI regime was just starting to take root on many campuses. Treuer describes growing up on a Native American reservation in Minnesota that he felt had limited his horizons, which it probably had. When he stepped out of his mom’s Dodge Caravan for his first day at Princeton University, it felt to him like he had arrived “onto America’s shores.” Finally, a place of possibility, where his talents would be recognized and developed.

    Unfortunately, when people found out that he was an Ojibwe Indian they treated him like “a wounded bird — gorgeous and vulnerable and not long for this world.” People would express their sorrow at his upbringing on the reservation, even when he had shared that his childhood was quite ordinary and not especially bad. Unable to pin him as a victim, many of his classmates just ignored him. He felt as if he had “evaporated.” And so Treuer would make up lies about how much he suffered, simply so that his classmates and professors would pay attention to him. But being viewed as a victim meant that he wasn’t recognized for his gifts. The title of his essay is “I Went to Princeton in Search of Greatness and Came Back Mediocre.” Here is the real tragedy, dear reader: Going to an elite university and leaving with your gifts undeveloped because the people there preferred that you be a helpless victim rather than a talented human. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that progressives/liberals WANT minorities to be victims so they can look down on them, feel better about themselves, and have to “take care” of the poor minority. 

    On the other hand, Roland Fryer did not have this problem at the University of Chicago. He describes his experience in the Economics Department as a constant mental workout. His papers would routinely be destroyed by fellow academics. Fryer was grateful for this: it meant he was being taken seriously, it was how his work improved.

    “Be careful of the liberals,” one of Roland Fryer’s mentors told him when he left Chicago. This was not a dig at people who advocated for a higher marginal tax rate. This was a warning against people who would accept second best from Fryer because they thought that was all that black people could produce. Here is how he puts it: “… that the people around me would want so badly for me to succeed, and for themselves not to be mistaken for bigots, that they would flinch from the uncomfortable things required to make me better.” At Chicago, nobody thought Fryer’s black skin was a reason to go easy on him during academic presentations. He was an economist amongst economists: they dignified him by treating him as a peer.

    It was a lack of precisely this kind of dignity that led Tyler Austin Harper to leave his dream job as a tenured professor. As he notes, “I have seen, firsthand, the way a certain kind of white progressive treats Black men who have overcome obstacles. They cannot conceal a certain blend of pity and glee when they learn, for example, that my biological father left before I was old enough to walk, or that I was raised for a time by a single mother. It is a look that says, How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further.”

    Harper puts his finger on a core insight about DEI: It provides white progressives with a safe script for how to navigate the complicated world of American race relations. No white person in a liberal institution risks censure by focusing too much on racism. Unfortunately, nothing about a script centered around pity gives people the kind of dignity that David Treuer was looking for at Princeton, or encourages the kind of rigor that helped Roland Fryer become a tenured professor at Harvard at the age of 30. What for progressive white people might be a script that keeps them from being canceled turns out to be a form of entrapment for minorities. By encouraging stories of victimhood, you are undermining the agency and effort required for people to excel. If you want to be a pilot, you have to put in the work to learn how to fly a plane, not simply call out all of the slights you are experiencing in flight school. 

    To be fair, Fryer does not want to leave the impression that there was nothing positive about DEI. At one point in his article, Fryer shares that one of his professors joked that not only did he not believe in affirmative action, he actually held Fryer’s race against him. Personally, I don’t think that joke is funny. Neither does Harper. He relates that he has had too many racist insults directed his way because of his skin color to laugh at comments like that. I get that. 

    On the other hand, one of the great contributions of DEI is to highlight that such comments should be unacceptable in professional situations, especially if they are made with the intent to slight. It also created space for people to talk about how a lifetime dealing with such comments impacted them. Most importantly of all, for Fryer, the DEI regime did us the great service of putting systemic racism at the center of our public discourse. It is simply foolish to think that slavery, segregation, and racist education and housing policies have nothing to do with the current state of inequality in our nation. Learning about systemic racism is an essential part of an honest education. Now, intelligent people can have honest debates as to whether past racism is still an anvil that current race relations are hammered upon. I think those conversations can be held in a civil and intelligent manner. But...and there is always a BUT...

    But the great tragedy of DEI is that it opened up so much space for talk about racism that it crowded out any room for the kinds of activities that help people excel. Indeed, it did just the opposite. By building programs on concepts like white supremacy culture (which explicitly states that good writing, punctuality and following protocols of excellence are “white supremacist” values) it created the impression that lowering standards for minorities (rather than raising expectations and supporting people to succeed) was morally superior and intellectually sophisticated. In fact, the DEI regime’s singular focus on racism and other forms of discrimination created perverse incentives: Specifically, the more minorities failed, the more evidence there was for the ideology that the system was set up for minorities to fail.

    Here’s the bottom line: Those of us who view our identities as a source of pride rather than a status of victimization, and who love the feast of diversity, should not have to settle for the thin gruel of DEI.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com