Understanding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

[Music] i'm james lindsay you're listening to the new discourses podcast and today i'm going to try to do a little bit of a deeper dive to help you understand some pretty essential concepts to everything that's happening around us very rapidly in the world in particular i want to talk about kind of the big three i want to talk about diversity equity and inclusion the dei trainings that we're seeing everywhere these concepts behind these trainings i want to help you understand that the so-called woke movement or more formally critical social justice as as a set of theories does not view these concepts the way that the rest of us do and that allows them to make a lot of advances uh into our workplaces to to put an ideology that we don't want uh under the the banner or the guise of beneficent things like diversity and inclusion we'll be a little more careful with equity um we're already seeing an expansion of these concepts obviously they were mainlined very rapidly this summer but we're seeing a an expansion so if you've run into these don't be alarmed sometimes we're seeing rather than d e i which is the usual thing we're seeing people put out something they're calling idea they add an a so now it's inclusion diversity equity and a is for accountability um and sometimes we're seeing it with two eyes instead of one and the extra is for indigeneity sometimes we're seeing the idea with an s stuck on the end so now we have both accountability and stewardship being added in so you can kind of see how this is morphing into the language of corporate thought at the same time as a organizational thought at the same time as it's also with with the inclusion the explicit inclusion of indigeneity trying to leverage a particular uh view of the world or particular critical theory which would be the branch of post-colonial studies that focuses on indigenous peoples issues uh into into the picture these are kind of typical things that we would expect to see as this develops one is that the corporate world will start to manipulate it and develop it in its own way they'd search attack on further concepts like accountability which will basically be used to hold people accountable which is to say that there will be punishment attached to getting it wrong and stewardship will will be used in a means to uh as a means to to get people to be promoted as good stewards of the the diversity uh equity and inclusion programs so these three ideas are very very important it's very important to understand them from the perspective of theory it's very relevant right now because the president has just issued an order saying that we need to take critical race theory out of uh federal government uh trainings in particular uh this may there are people working very hard and i think it's a it's a good thing to do to push this same mentality into our schools where critical race theory is very prominent now it's it's actually central to a great deal of the curriculum across all of our schooling from pre-k through k through 12 up into the university levels all the way up to postgraduate but sometimes in the literature you see referred to as p through 20 referring to um preschool it's the p all the way up through postgraduate at the doctoral level that would be like grade 20 in some sense and the truth is that when we hear diversity equity and inclusion we have to be a little bit careful but generally speaking it's not possible to talk about these without talking about critical race theory so when the president says that that he wants to take this out of the federal government and they say oh maybe it's just diversity equity and inclusion training those things are going to be looked at very closely because while it is possible to talk about diversity and inclusion and maybe to a lesser degree equity without talking about critical race theory at least where the racial component of that analysis is involved it's virtually impossible and it more importantly more or less isn't done so critical race theory is often going to be hiding behind that it's also going to be hiding behind other terms such as uh anti-racism training is going to almost always include this and dabble in and out with this diversity inclusion equity racial sensitivity training is almost certainly going to be fueled by critical race theory we have also uh this implicit bias or unconscious bias training and those while they're not quite the same are probably going to include these same kind of ideas so these things kind of come in a suite together but today we're going to focus on understanding the terms diversity inclusion and equity and to show you that when critical race theory is used to talk about these issues which it virtually always is in the current situation that they have a very peculiar meaning so i want to help you understand that that's usually the goal on new discourses is to help you understand the concept so that you can then go out into your walks of life your your affinities your organizations your institutions and start to use that understanding that i'm trying to help you obtain to make the positive changes that you need to in order to fight this ideology and keep it from poisoning your your organization or affinity group so i want to help you understand these ideas on their terms before i dive in i want to also make a very important statement that generally speaking the over what because what i'm about to say sounds very conspiratorial almost and and sinister but i want to give you the understanding that in general most of the people doing this are actually just true believers they actually believe the theory they believe the theory is true they believe the theory is in fact the only correct way to interpret the world they often say it's the lens through which we have to understand the world and because they're true believers all of the things that sound very sinister turn out to be in the land of impact not necessarily their intent and it's going to be very important for us to keep kind of going back to that to understand because if you come out at this issue believing that the people that are pushing it believing the people that are involved in it are acting in a very sinister way you're going to alienate a lot of people and in fact you're actually only going to be accounting for a small percentage probably you know somewhere between three to five percent if i had to put a guess at it that's not like researched numbers of the people who are pushing this understand the consequences of it they see it much more in terms of kind of a faith that if we push diversity inclusion and equity as the theory understands those ideas then good things will happen and how that is to happen is is not necessarily clear the goal is just to keep pushing the the belief system with the belief that if everybody gets on board with the belief system things are just going to work out so your average person even your average diversity trainer or consultant coming in to to teach these kinds of things in your workplace or wherever else doesn't necessarily have sinister intent they just have completely imbibed a terrible ideology that has bad impacts when it goes out into the world okay so now we can kind of try to dive in so let's take the three words one at a time and try to understand them the way that the critical social justice ideology understands them which will include because it's pertinent to mention this specifically one of those analytical lenses within uh critical social justice and ideology more broadly is critical race theory so let's understand these terms and we will often talk today in terms of of race because it's so clearly on everybody's mind and with critical race theory being so relevant it makes the most sense to talk about it it would extend also to issues of sex and gender sexuality ability status national origin religious status and all the different so-called exasperated etc of identity factors that intersectional thought and critical social justice is concerned with but we'll primarily be mentioning issues of race so that we don't have to bog down the discussion and constantly go back to these different things so we'll mostly focus on the relevance of critical race theory so diversity in general we have a very um good idea about about diversity we understand that diversity is valuable we understand that diversity is in fact important we can look for example to the catholic church which is not historically speaking it's not so it's not as bad now but historically speaking it is not an organization renowned for its open-mindedness open-mindedness you know that led to the inquisition or whatever it's not quite known for its open-mindedness um but they even understood the importance of considering different viewpoints and so they employed in their work the the devil's advocate position at vacatus diaboli and the point of that was to voice the unpopular opinion voice the thing that no one that agrees with everything that's happening is willing to say so that alternative viewpoints can be uh considered and diversity of viewpoint is actually utterly crucial to advancing ideas it's utterly crucial to um getting right answers about hard questions in the world you if we all agreed on on everything we had no diversity of thought no diversity viewpoint everybody agreed on everything like a perfect hive mind we put ourselves in a precarious position if we happen to be right about everything maybe it works out fine but if we don't happen to be right we have more or less abandoned any hope of figuring out that we're wrong and because reality is a thing that you run into when your beliefs are false if we have no diversity of thought and we can't figure out that we're doing something wrong then we have a major problem on our hands the second that we're off base which is most of the time going to be every time so diversity is very important the question isn't whether or not anybody actually disagrees with this i think everybody generally understands everybody understands how how organizations work everybody understands how knowledge production works understands that a diversity of perspectives is important the way the critical race theory the critical social justice ideology which we would also call being woke thinks about diversity however is that diversity of viewpoint exists meaningfully only in having diversity of identity you have to be different identities and you have to be them in the way that the critical social justice ideology understands that which is to say that you have to be a critical theorist of that identity who is according to the way critical theory thinks about things the only people who are expressing what it means to be that identity authentically everybody else suffers some kind of either false consciousness meaning they they are misled and don't know that they're misled they've been socialized into believing the wrong things about their identity and they therefore don't think the right things and they uphold the power structures that have have brainwashed them into these ideas or they they do know better and they're cynically self-interested and that's where we get phrases like uncle tom for example the the insinuation there is that a black person who's upholding the so-called dominant perspective or the dominant society or resisting change of status quo knows what he's doing but he's acting in cynical self-interest you see this sometimes in the literature under the the phrasing seeking white approval you also hear the word race traitor we have parallel concepts and the other theories um seeking mail approval has been a feminist thing for a while seeking patriarchal reward uh again which was kind of sucking up to men to get them to to treat you well to get the patriarchy to to reward you gender traitor is another concept that we hear uh for people who are incorrectly politically their gender identity um according to the way theory sees the world uh you even have seeking neo-liberal reward which so far as i can tell mostly means money but it also can i guess mean social capital um so the way that these critical social justice theories see the idea of diversity is that the viewpoint diversity that's necessary to make progress in the world is only located and i genuinely mean only located in having the different critical perspectives of different identities so when they say diversity that we need more diversity in this organization what they mean more specifically is that we need more people who think according to the critical social justice or woke way of thinking who occupied different identity positions so we might need a black woman who thinks in terms of black feminism as it's understood through intersectionality intersectional feminism we might need a latino man who's homosexual who has that suite of identity factors we might need a morbidly obese bisexual woman who has that set of perspectives we need all of these different identity perspectives where the only correct way to think about identity is through the critical theory that sees the oppressor versus oppressed power dynamic and so that's also the more relevant thing we aren't looking for diversity like we might see at um a interdisciplinary research facility like the santa fe institute where they bring in different professionals so maybe you have a question a pressing question about something in geology and you assemble a team that has a geologist or two and maybe a physicist and maybe a psychologist and the goal is to try to get people who think about problems in different ways smart people to look at a problem in a particular discipline from different angles than somebody just within that discipline might normally encounter and to try to solve the problem we're not looking at things this way the view within within the the critical social justice ideology or mindset is that only the power dynamics in society are interesting so we can even draw all the way back to our our postmodern theorist friend of michelle foucault uh one thing with the woke is it's not quite a hundred percent a law but a close law is all roads lead back to foucault somehow and usually it's some misinterpretation of huco's work they got cherry-picked by activists in the 80s and 90s and since that has morphed into this really weird perversion of foucaultian thought that nevertheless is very clearly identifiable as fukodian thought and foucault held the belief that the more interesting thing to investigate when you're talking about a claim to truth is how power is involved in authenticating it as as a truth so power poli political processes social processes gave certain people but not others the the power to decide that this thing is a truth to teach this thing as a truth we call those people teachers maybe the first people were called researchers or scientists or experts so we have experts and researchers who determine the truths that then go to the teachers who proclaim the truths that go to the government who rely upon the truth and and set policy based on the truth and foucault is very interested in these political processes as a matter of fact even down to the level of individual versus individual political processes so you and i interacting we're talking there's a political process for as far as fuco understood it there that there are there are systems or systems of norms of expectations of uh there there are hidden power dynamics between us that all are the more interesting thing than the the truth claim itself so when we have the the perspective of diversity from the critical social justice perspective what they want is a diversity of views in some sense about systemic power dynamics in whatever arena they're talking about that's it that's it it's not a diversity of use for how to solve say the problem at the heart of the workplace or the problem in front of us or to to get to um better solutions on any question except how do we get even more diversity how do we dismantle the so-called oppression oppressive power dynamics in society how do we get rid of those it's the only question of interest so when they're asking for diversity from a perspective of critical social justice theories the goal is how do we bring more people in who have more identity factors who are competent at turning everything into a discussion of power dynamics so when you start to think about this you have to consider very carefully is this something i want to bring into my organization do i want to give into a call for diversity where the call for diversity is that we're going to bring in people who have different appearances or you could even say different identities if you want to acknowledge that identity is important in that way i would rather not myself i think it's one of the least important factors of identity or should be one of the least important factors of identity rather than basically at the top of the list do we want to bring in people who have those different identity factors and then roughly the same political orientation with respect to them with the objective of making as many issues as possible be about the power dynamics related to identity in other words when they say they want diversity what they mean is they want to bring in a larger number of people who want to make identity politics one of the top priorities where the identity politics have one right way to be understood which is given by critical theories of identity and ideally to get rid of people who don't want to think that way who want to bring in genuine diversity of thought that would in particular disagree with the a forwarding of identity politics into everything and be that the critical theory of identity is the best way to deal with whatever problems happen to be to hand so you bring this into your organization you bring diversity into your organization you think you're trying to do the right thing you think oh you know a greater number of backgrounds are going to lead to different questions and we can you know there are easy examples of this we can talk about in a moment but what you're really bringing in is and to the degree that this is informed by critical social justice which is usually right now nearly completely what you're really bringing in is a mandate to bring in more critical theorists who are going to try to make as much as they can be about identity politics that are only allowed to be thought about discussed and made actionable in one particular way it's not quite the product you think you're buying when you sign up for other expensive diversity training they come in and start to train your employees or your other members of your organization or your affinity to think in terms of diversity it's it's a very different kind of product now of course we do want we do want to have some diversity of perspective i don't know that identity is the right thing but uh the the easiest example maybe is to think of the funny church signs uh there was one in my town a few years ago i remember seeing and i almost went off the road i was laughing so hard when i i had to back up and turn around i mean and look at it again i couldn't believe that it existed and it said we love hurting people and of course they men we love we love people who are hurting but they phrased it we love hurting people on their sign which is as a slightly different meaning in the usual interpretation it was really funny you also see these things that you know any 15 year old boy could tell them not to put on their church sign very frequently like you know um drugs are easy to get on jesus can help you get off or something like that you know they just didn't think through that there's an innuendo in in what they've written up and so you do want to have the kind of diversity that can catch that when we hear that from the critical social justice people what they're usually saying is that we need people from different backgrounds who can ask different kinds of questions or or understand the different problems that different identity groups might have in terms of encountering that thing or interpreting that thing here's a couple of good examples i saw on twitter the other day somebody's saying this is why we need diversity in design meaning not not like graphic design not like home design but like in product design and it showed an example of a automatic soap dispenser that you'd see in a public bathroom that spit out the soap really well when a white hand went under it refused to spit out the soap when a uh looked like dark south indian uh south asian but it could have been uh it could have been a black person's hand but a dark skinned hand went under and it did not spit out soap and so then the dark skin hand got a paper towel which is you know close to white stuck it under it spit out the soap onto the towel and put his hand back under it did not spit out the soap and they said this is why diversity is important of course it would be important for them to uh at least have diversity at the level of product testing to make sure that it actually works for the entire variety of skin tones so i don't think that was a great example but there is a point there that you do want to make sure that your thing works for everybody um and there are apparently physical differences in people where that can matter so fine does that require diversity hiring diversity sensitivity no but it probably does uh require thinking in terms of the fact that there are more people than whoever happens to be in the room and of course you can easily imagine that the thing could be calibrated to go the opposite direction and that the opposite problem so we don't have to drag racism into it the way the critical theorists want to you do want to think though in terms of a broad spectrum and that's an important point a second example where where you might want to have diversity i was i was recently speaking with um several people about the george floyd incident in fact several black people about the george floyd incident we were talking about the emotional reaction that many black people have we're talking about the the chappelle routine in fact and they said something that was i think very important for people to to realize so i want to kind of amplify that they said that one of the reasons that many people and i hate the phrase the black community because it makes it monolithic but many many black people were very um very upset watching the incident with george floyd in minneapolis and part of the reason is not that they see somebody who looks like them being you know treated roughly by the police and then dying as a result of it but because they have these stories that are not far off in memory so maybe and in fact the people i was speaking with kind of echoed this none of them have experienced anything of that type themselves but it's the stories their fathers told about how they experience life it's the stories their grandfathers told about how they experienced life and so something in that that recent memory of jim crow something in that recent memory of how how that really was the status quo 50 years ago is still close enough to where the stories that people tell the framing that people will grow up with set off a powerful reaction and so having having this is very much like the church sign thing right having somebody present who can understand your messaging understand your approach and say look this is going to set off tripwires for people with particular backgrounds for these reasons that's actually valuable okay that's actually valuable you'll notice that that didn't require any critical theory to do that and in fact critical theory would have would have complicated and impeded that issue so i'm not even willing to say that there's zero value to um basic identity diversity in hiring but what there is is a serious concern that this smallish reality i won't even say it's small it's small-ish it's somewhere between small and medium-sized in terms of how important it is in terms of reality that thing becomes a doorway through which something very different is very easy to bring in and that very different thing is that diversity is a trojan horse for we need to bring in people who have the genuine authentic view of what it means to be an aggrieved person with whatever identity and when you talk about something like critical race theory the goal is to teach people to see the grievances everywhere that they can find them first assumption of critical race theory is that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society it is not an aberration in our society and it is up to the critical theorists to be able to teach people to see that racism so it's teaching people to find reasons for racial grievance this is true of all the critical theories of identity this is a very different thing so when you start looking at these diversity programs it's very important to start asking the kinds of questions that would start winnowing out is this going to be based in critical theory or is this based in you know something more rigorous and more serious and it's it's not an easy process to pull those apart there they can look very very similar the critical race theory is very very good at um manipulating language manipulating its intent to make it look like it's the more reasonable and valuable thing whereas in fact it is a political agenda and the project is to bring politics into your uh institution so that's enough on diversity for the moment you want to just understand that diversity for critical theorists means a bunch of people who have the same politics which is radical critical identity theory that puts identity first and centers identity politics and tries to find the identity political issue in as many things as possible that constitutes diversity for those people that you want to have as many critical theorists with different um they call them positionalities so different positions with respect to the systems of power that they theorize in the world that's not the same thing as having viewpoint diversity even when that viewpoint is rooted in genuine uh differences of identity but especially when that view viewpoint diversity is based on different political orientations or different levels of expertise or types of expertise you want to start trying to find ways to disambiguate and make sure that you can remove the critical theory aspects and bring in as much of the other type as you can now inclusion is a little more difficult i'm going to approach these you know diversity inclusion equity is the order i'm going in because they are increasingly fraught as we go so diversity is the least fraught of the three inclusion in practice as the critical social justice people understand it means severely restricted speech it can also mean segregated spaces no bones about it no mincing words that's in practice what it means of course inclusion means trying to make that make make a more welcoming space try to make a space where people in fact don't feel excluded inclusion and exclusion are the opposites and the way that critical social justice approaches this is by turning up the sensitivity so when you hear racial sensitivity training watch out turning the sensitivity level up to i don't know a million you know on a scale of one to ten uh so inclusion and inclusive space according to the critical social justice mindset is one in which no protected class will encounter anything that they find find offensive they'll find that they'll they'll encounter nothing that marginalizes their perspective as far as uh they they see that idea they will encounter nothing that makes them feel excluded in any way whatsoever and this doesn't even have to be in reality it can only be in theory it can be in as assessed by somebody else who's kind of white knighting or stepping in and speaking on behalf i usually refer to that as finding a fence by proxy you can imagine that where somebody says you know oh well i don't see a problem with this but and this happened actually to my colleague helen helen pluckers with her her some of her master's work she had written something about othello and something about the fact that the scandal around the relationship there was on religion not on race and the comment back was well what if what if if an african-american read this they would be offended by it and so this is taking offense by proxy nobody present was was an african-american and uh it's really weird to think that african-americans would automatically be offended by by saying that racism wasn't the dominant motive of um prejudice in in shakespearean london but anyway uh this kind of thing is all part of the inclusion package is that nothing that could potentially offend a member of a protected class as theory defines them or an oppressed class as theory usually calls them or make them feel excluded or marginalized no such thing is permitted in an inclusive space which means by default speech codes we can't use computer terminology like master slave we can't talk about blacklists we can't talk about master bedrooms anymore because it's possible that somebody somewhere might find a way through again critical race theory finding the racism hidden in things even when it's not there somebody might find that offensive or find it uncomfortable and uh reject it so you see this whole thing blew up around nicholas christakis very famously at yale he got yelled at and one of his positions was that he was the master of however they work in their dormitory their student life at yale they have their fancy ivy league things that us plebs don't know anything about but good for them so he was the master and that became this huge problem we see the same thing coming up with the nba where you know it's 80 something percent i think uh black players and then so the fact that the team owners were called owners so that there's some implication that they could be considered owners of black people which is absurd of course this is caught up in the idea of inclusion that's why we see these weird policings of speech because well somebody who thinks too hard about it and decides to get a chip on their shoulder about words can then throw a fit so we have to scrub the language and get rid of it uh to make the space inclusive this is also why we see segregation coming back into fashion because the theory maintains that basically all spaces in a society like united states or canadian society are by default white spaces they are white dominant they are filled with white people racial minorities for example have to encounter white people everywhere they go they have to deal with white norms they have to deal with white expectations they have to deal with white white white everywhere the white gays they call it the white male gaze if we're talking about a feminist black feminist getting involved in this so everything's white spaces and you can see this again with the other theories we don't want to dip too deeply into it but everybody's you know we have heteronormativity so almost everybody is straight so gay people are going to feel like all the spaces are straight spaces and then most people are what they call cisgender which means identifying your gender and as being is the same as your sex uh and overwhelmingly almost everybody is this and so most places are cisgender spaces so people who are not cisgender like gender non-conforming or trans or non-binary people may feel like all the spaces are cis spaces they might say and so what this creates is a desire to have spaces where those default power dynamics aren't present and the way that you make a space satisfy the idea that there won't be too many white people there won't be too much of there won't be the white gays there won't be the default expectation of whiteness in the space is by carving out a space where white people aren't allowed to go racial minorities get their own space that this this is segregation this is that's what that's the word for that and the the irony is of course that they call it desegregating because they say that whiteness being the default throughout society creates an automatic segregation where where racial minorities aren't able to be themselves fully and so by creating a literally segregated space they're desegregating um and this is the mentality uh this is i mean i don't know that there's something more directly orwellian um in the theory than than desegregation is segregation unless it's maybe that decolonizing is actually colonizing the the curriculum but this is the idea of inclusion so when we start bringing inclusion inclusion or inclusivity agendas into our workplaces our organizations our mentality what you're really having to bring in is the these very bizarre ideas about about who can be where and when so segregated spaces and what can be said where and when there's not a lot to recover from this there's not a lot like with diversity there was a lot of nuance a lot a lot of good discussion to be had around the idea of when is there actually something here with inclusion there's much less because they proceed so overwhelmingly from the erroneous assumption of critical race theory that if we were going to put it on a scale because it's not totally false but it's probably less than two or three percent true uh if we were going to put on a scale from from from zero to 100 it's maybe a two or a three true it's very not true they perceive this from this assumption that racism is present in every single space spaces are by by default white unless they are explicitly made not white because they proceed from this assumption and from the assumption that that language hides racism representation hides racism and if you learn to see it with a critical eye or critical consciousness then you'll realize it because they proceed from that assumption there's very little to recover it's very easy to say oh well of course we want to be genuinely sensitive around racial issues the same thing as we talked about with diversity through the very end of the diversity segment i did a moment ago but at the same time this is a very very strict interpretation of it and the inclusion that which is recoverable from inclusion is obvious it's not mysterious it's nowhere far away from almost anybody's thought that that's running anything in a year like 2020 or even since 2000 probably 15 for sure maybe earlier there was more need for it but now the obvious side of this is that we don't want to inflame offense that we don't want to be offensive needlessly is is more or less the given and it again becomes a wide open gate to truck in a trojan horse that is a deliberate suppression of unwanted speech a deliberate attempt to enforce segregation into our spaces it can even be a vehicle for enforced or compelled speech where we saw for example over the summer many people having um outcries that people hadn't gone on their social media account and and properly given credit to black lives matter properly supported black lives matter um i even lost friends they're saying you're well i believe in what you're doing but you're not actually being positive enough about the important point under black lives matter and so there's this compulsion to speak also and if you don't then the people who feel like they need to hear that to be considered safe are not uh feeling safe because they've been so attuned to feeling aggrieved about everything so inclusion can can can encompass speech codes that are very strict to their point in both directions another example i gave a talk recently about critical race theory i didn't have very long it's a complicated topic so i give my speech 20 minutes or so and afterwards i get done people are very happy some people were some people probably weren't and then not long after i heard from somebody and i said can i give you a little feedback on your your talk i really liked it i'm like yeah of course uh like we can make it a little bit better you really should have started off with five minutes or so of talking about the legacy of racism in this country so that people don't think you're just a crazy denialist and um the only response i could really give is i don't do performative sensitivity but this is again this people don't feel like they're actually included in the conversation unless you acknowledge their things i had a problem with this years ago when when obama was president living as a liberal who supported him in the south is that if i wanted to say something in support of something obama did or even that i was a fan of obama and what he was doing as president um i was forced to say something negative first maybe two or three negative things or else i would just get yelled at and it was it's the same kind of mentality as they oh you have to like placate people's feelings uh and there's a little tiny truth here that's that's opening the door to a very big thing that's kind of a problem so we want to be much more careful with inclusion than we are with diversity so what should you do you need to look really closely if inclusion includes speech codes and especially if it includes uh compelled speech or especially especially if it includes deliberate moves for segregation you really need to think twice you really need to hold off you really need to stop and think because in the moment we're still in the midst of a moral panic that's letting all this fly but sooner or later sooner or later unless things go really badly that's going to come back around segregation is still not okay i know california is trying to change the law to make discrimination legal again at least their constitution but well in some capacity i don't want to overstate that but at the same time um you really are going to have to think twice you really want to think twice before you bring in these inclusion parameters that segregate spaces or start doing enforcing especially compelled speech but even where you have the issue of uh very strict speech codes you're going to want to be careful because um this isn't what you want this is the it's not the precisely the same thing but not being able to speak up when something needs to be spoken up about uh is what we all know now led to the chernobyl disaster being so bad it wasn't necessarily that the russians had terrible equipment or had no idea about nuclear power or they didn't have safety protocols it's that the people who saw things going wrong knew that they were going to get it if they said anything so anywhere you start having this severe restriction on speech you really want to be careful you'll see this under guises of racial sensitivity you'll see this so those things have to be looked at very closely you'll see this where people want to come in you always want to if you're on a company you need to be put both sets of eyes whenever you can you can spare them both eyes on on anybody who's setting the community guidelines for you so the person who volunteers to set your community guidelines and you really keep an eye on that because that's where this kind of stuff is coming in now equity is kind of the big one i don't know that i have a ton that i have to say about it but i i need people to understand this stuff speaking with um my now friend casey peterson who who did the whistleblowing at sandia uh national lab uh the other day and he said hey i got this weird feeling like of diversity equity and inclusion equity seems to be kind of the big one it's like it seems to be the one that's really the center is that right and i was like yeah that's actually a big deal um equity is the big deal so we're going to take a step back before we talk about equity too much i'll define it and then i want to want to kind of connect it to critical race theory because there is a way to do equity legitimately that does not rely on say critical race theory these other critical uh identity theories but you pretty much never see it now they've almost become synonymous and um i'll start by telling you the equity is an abbreviation for a longer term which is social equity it comes out of a concept called social equity theory you can go look it up at arose and i believe it arose originally in the 1960s it may have been earlier but it certainly gained a lot of prominence in the 1960s it got talked about much more going into the 1980s and into the 1990s and equity is defined the simple way to understand it is that it means equality of outcomes it means forcing equality of outcomes and almost and the reason that it means that is because the the framing that you see in the academic literature around social equity is where equality by comparison equality does not mean the same thing as equity where equality means that citizens a and b are equal equity means adjusting shares so that citizens a and b are made equal that's the difference making people equal by adjusting shares in other words creating equality of outcome slight deviation from the fact that equity doesn't quite mean equality of outcome is that uh historical injustices are also going to be calculated into this the critical theories of race for example are not just ethnic studies they're ethno-historical concepts and so the fact that say a racial minority was disenfranchised in the past is something that can be made up for so when they say the equity you know if we had perfect equity then we would have whatever the proportion of white people are they would see that in every discipline whatever the latinos whatever uh black whatever asian whatever you know we would see parity across so if there's 57 percent whatever race race a then we'd have 57 percent or very nearly 57 representation in in roughly all professions all fields all everything um perfect parity so that would be forced equality of outcomes but if those numbers favor the groups that have been historically marginalized according to the way theory sees things which doesn't include certain historical marginalizations like all of the trials and tribulations of the jewish people for example um or pretty much anything to do with asians then that's okay that's okay if say black people would represent say 13 i think is roughly the percentage of black people in the u.s population um well if they ended up having 20 to 25 share that would be okay because it's making up for historical injustices i don't mean to say anything ill of actually kind of one of my heroes frankly a lot of people won't like to hear that but you know she just died ruth bader ginsburg and she one time was asked in an interview how many women would have to sit on the supreme court which of course for my foreign listeners non-american listeners there are nine how many women would have to sit on the supreme court for to further to be equality and she laughed and said nine meaning that we have to make up for the fact that most of the court for most of history has been men of course real equality doesn't mean that real equality means it doesn't matter if the person being appointed is male or female and so new appointees should fall somewhere in the range of um parity with the level of applicants not even 50 50 the level of applicants how many people are pursuing that career law to to go on to become justices that's what you would see as equi as equality equity would be forcing the issue until you end up with equal numbers worked out over time so equity includes this idea of not just equality of outcomes but also reparations that's worked into the idea of equity so adjusting shares so that citizens a and b are made equal over the integral of time in some sense as the the functional meaning of the word equity now what i want you to understand is that equity and systemic racism are two sides of the same coin we can i'll do a whole other podcast about this soon about systemic racism and what it is and what it means but the simple reality is that the way you know systemic racism is happening somewhere somehow is that equity is not there that's it that's it so so systemic racism is a racism of the gaps meaning we have gaps in our understanding for why there are differences in outcome systemic racism must be it so when we talk for example about what i just said with the supreme court that equality would be that we have no we we we don't care whether we're appointing a male or a female judge in any regard whatsoever and so we should see parity with the approximately with the level of applicants and then if we say oh well only 30 percent of the applicants are female i don't know what the real number is and just for the sake of argument a systemic sexism argument would say uh-huh well the reason that it's it's 30 70 and applicants of female to male is because misogyny and sexism are systemically diffused throughout the entire society and we may not be able to spot it but everything that people learn from the minute they're born teaches them to think in certain ways that in the end produces an outcome of 30 70 women to men therefore the system itself is still sexist and misogynist and keeping women out of positions like the federal judiciary that's the way that they think about systemic bigotry or systemic disenfranchisement or discrimination they don't know where it is nobody knows where it is and that's the point the systemic part is what nobody knows where it is all the other ones have names is it in the law then it's called institutional racism did somebody do it it's called individual racism did it have something to do with with uh calling somebody out about their culture about some feature of their culture the way they speak for example the way they tend to dress for example then it's called cultural racism they have all of these very specific terms for different types of exclusion systemic is what's it's the mixture of all of those together vaguely plus everything else and so the point of systemic racism is that nobody knows what is causing it it's just the system where the system is understood in a very expansive way to mean everything that led to the outcomes that we have and those outcomes are then going to be assessed are they giving us parity plus maybe some access to reparations and if the answer is no then there was systemic injustice or systemic oppression involved and we have to combat it even though we don't know where it is we don't know how how it meant we don't know what caused it we're not even going to try to find out what caused it so when equity is not systemic injustice is that's the most simple thing to understand so what is equity equity is the attempt to force that equality of outcome taking into account historical disparities and injustices as well so that when you look at the numbers you look at the spread in front of you you say ah the system must be working correctly the system must have enough mechanisms in it now at every possible every conceivable level so that the outcomes are equal that's what equity means equity doesn't mean equality equity doesn't even mean more fairness equity means adjusting the system until the outcome looks the way you want it to and the outcome looking the way you want it to is in fact uh kind of perfect demographic parody plus allowances for uh reparations for historical injustices it's not quite the same thing so the take home from this practically speaking is that if you hear equity you can virtually guarantee that the critical theories of identity are going to be behind it because the critical theories of identity are the ones that believe that systemic oppression and bigotry are the most significant causal factors for differences in outcome in our society that's really important to understand that the equity is a very very different thing than equality and it's even a different thing than forced equality because in principle it sounds it's a bit better than that but in practice because nobody knows what the causes are and nobody's taking them seriously because they have this name bigotry racism sexism misogyny transphobia whatever they're just going to have to force things and so we see a lack of equity in our sats or our lsats or various other standardized tests for for professional and graduate schools and college admissions and so that must be there's systemic racism somewhere and in fact that systemic racism must be in the test because it's in everything so we're going to get rid of the test because it was systemically racist because it's also creating unequal outcomes this is the this is the level of sophistication of this mentality and the other thing we now must do is browbeat the culture into doing more and more and more favors for the classes that these are as protected and fewer and fewer and in fact even possibly active discrimination against classes that are seen as privileged this is poison this is poison um there is a responsible way there are responsible ways to do equity we could talk about but this is this as it is is poison as the critical theories put it forth it's poison um here's an example of responsible equity that basically everybody agrees with we recognize that for example disabled people in whatever capacity have various challenges that make it difficult for them to have equal access to society i mean legitimate physical impediments that can make it more difficult being blind makes things more difficult in a world where almost everybody can see and so um we we think it's reasonable to have accommodations we have for blind people when you push the button on the elevator you push the button to cross the street it makes a noise when you have the sidewalk it has the thing you can walk on you can feel the ridges to follow the sidewalk um we have you know allowances for for guide dogs and things like that you can pick your your favorite disability we have accommodations we have we we take pains we spend the money we do the effort to create reasonable accommodation for disability to minimize the effective impact of the structural difference there this i think could actually apply and people would be pretty uh ready to at least have a conversation about it if not accept it where it can be found it's less difficult to think of situations where the physical realities around men and women create differences and maybe there are reasons for therefore providing some measure of equitable policy that reaches into that space i'm not saying that it corrects for all of it it certainly shouldn't correct for it naively but that it stretches into that space and people are pretty willing to do that how do we know that we're willing to do that we have a bajillion programs for women and this women and that women in science women in this scholarships for this we have a bajillion programs because people are fairly and people celebrate them because people are fairly willing to accommodate where they see a legitimate uh a legitimate obstacle that legitimate obstacle can be discrimination that legitimate obstacle to some degree might even be the wealth disparity that we see between different races there might be some reasonable spaces to have those discussions about equity but we have to be very careful because what people should and what people will accept is very limited in these capacities so um equity itself isn't isn't a horrible idea but it's a very limited concept and it has to be also very time limited it also has to be be achieved in with care many of the problems that are assigned under a program of equity or systemic racism are actually problems of poverty for example and to treat them as a problem of racism is going to solve some of the issues sure i suppose but it's going to create other issues it's a ham-fisted way to go out the problem and the funny thing is equity would be built into a poverty program across the board anyway if say some percentage of of white people suffer poverty in a particular region and five times that many black people do proportionally then if you do a poverty program it has five times as much benefit for black people as white people so the equity is already built in this is before the the military started to go woke in the past few years especially recently this was how they actually did affirmative action as far as i've been told from my friends who are in the military in the 90s and saw it was that they they created what open-ended programs that were available to everybody who that were designed to do two things one was to get everybody over the bar for an objective standard that didn't change for anybody based on your identity and secondly to they had the goal they knew that this was going to be disproportionately affecting certain groups versus other groups because of these statistics on the on the entering end and that's fine because it's offered everybody equally and the equity is worked into the system if you try to just cook the books the other way maybe you solve the problem and maybe you solved the problem a little faster probably not because if you're not understanding the problem correctly you're not going to solve it but to be really generous maybe you do and maybe yourself a little faster but now you've got a problem on your hands because you have created what the conservatives would rightly identify as an entitlement and people aren't really happy about losing their entitlements and so now you've got a problem on your hand it's much better to try to approach these things in a way that again doesn't rely on the critical theories of identity and does rely on these kind of universal liberal treat everybody as individuals look at what the actual sources of the problems are and be as realistic and detailed and nuanced as we can around those things so to kind of to wrap up what can you do we now have a better understanding of the way that the critical social justice theory woke theory if you will understands the ideas of diversity equity and inclusion we've talked a little bit about and this by the way is my peter bergochen my colleague peter if you know who he is my peter pagosian drinking game if you listen to peter he says all the time that we have institutions that have that have taken these on they weaponize institutional mechanisms to punish people around the diversity inclusion and equity offices so if you hear peter say weaponize institutional mechanisms you have to drink or if you don't drink because you're a t total or a baptist you can flip your your coin on your bingo card your peterborough ocean bingo card but this is true they weaponize institutional mechanisms to enforce the critical ideology through these ideas of diversity equity and inclusion and so what you want to do if you are in a position where you have to deal with these if you are in fact in a position where you're implementing them you want to take a step back and ask yourself are we bringing in a program that allows for the for maybe the hr department or we're creating cities even the even congress has an office of diversity that the state of washington has an equity task force that was installed by the governor and approved by the legislature are we creating institutional mechanisms that can be weaponized to push an ideology and if so let's rethink this if you're on the receiving end of this though you know if you're going to the training you have to reach out as courageously as you can and as sensibly as you can and say look there's a lot here there's a lot to value in diversity we don't want to be needly exclusive let's be careful around inclusion because of these reasons but we don't want to be exclusive exclusive certainly and yeah i do care about the fact that there are differences in outcomes that seem to be unfair and i want to understand those so we can look for reasonable levels of equity but really we should be focusing on on equality and how can we do that you want to reach out a very respectful and kind way to to express that you have this understanding of these issues that you see that there are real issues contained within the ideas and then that this critical approach this critical social justice approach is a horrible way to deal with it and that you hope that we can you know whether it's your company whether it's our society whatever it is that we can slow down and try to get rigorous rather than than falling on a sword in the rush to do something because something has to be done and the only something that's available are these diversity trainings that are run by ideologues who write papers like that their explicit mission is to train students like viruses to enter organizations and turn them to their political purpose that's a real paper women's studies as a virus you can look it up they compare themselves favorably to viruses like hiv and ebola they compare themselves favorably to viruses that lead to genetic changes that lead to cancer because cancer represents transformational change so when we're talking about these critical uh social justice ideology approaches to diversity inclusion and equity you probably want to remember that this is designed and taught and pushed by people whose vision of themselves is to infect your organization like a virus which will then create more copies of them as its primary mechanism rather than doing the normal work of the cell which is whatever your organization does and that if it gives your organization cancer that's better because that means they've achieved transformational change and turned it into something totally different when you start looking at these diversity equity and inclusion programs try to go into it understanding the issues try to understand how somebody who thinks entirely in terms of identity politics baked through with power dynamics would think about that try to understand the terms that they're using how they couch things in ideas like sensitivity awareness cultural awareness cultural humility and take a close look take your time look up the words and set a norm that we're not going to implement anything in our organizations until we've given it the due and proper consideration that it deserves which is at least enough to understand all the words in it and what the likely impacts will be within the organization so hopefully i've achieved the goal of helping you understand diversity equity and inclusion on a deeper level there's of course more that can be said there's more on new discourses if you want to go to the website newdiscourses.com i've written an essay there in fact it kind of goes into similar detail called diversity delusion you can find it on new discourses and read more so um hopefully you understand better that that's my objective and hopefully you'll be able to make better decisions going forward about these issues with that understanding as always that's my goal that's the goal of new discourses i appreciate you listening [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: New Discourses

Views: 70,018

Keywords: New Discourses, james lindsay, podcast, diversity, equity, equality, inclusion

Id: Z8XsP5hqK3Y

Length: 61min 35sec (3695 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020

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