A very interesting piece about a more modern situation. In the 1960s this young UK TV engineer truly was unconcerned about parties we held in conservative Yorkshire suburbs.
Mixing bemused locals, with gay couples, and a 2nd cousin's family - West Indian husband. (An utter charmer - and awful father/partner)
We cannot, and need not, be unaware of many characteristics - but Dr King seems, to me, simply correct... "but by the content of their character"
If a top runner, one may envy the Kalenjin Kenyans prowess, but some things are what they are.
Among my admired artists and thinkers, one group is "unfairly" represented, though presently some under a cloud. I celebrate the "fine" deplore the others; but understand the difference.
At 92, I hope for saving the flawed, but better liberal democratic values under attack. William.
My favorite line is, "But the first lesson of history is that no one learns any lessons from history." (Another great quip: "the organizational equivalent of saying that one can’t be racist because they have a black friend")
Your crystalline argument lives up to Steven Pinker's standard of good writing: that it makes your reader feel like a genius, who nods along emphatically, thinking, "Yes, that's exactly how I'd put it!" (Such as this point you made: "This is why there were numerous calls to replace Claudine Gay with another black woman. The honor was bestowed on Black Womanhood, the political category, not on the black woman herself. This illustrates one important sense in which modern tokenism is unlike its predecessor: far from being objected to as a sign of contempt and condescension, tokenism today is demanded by activists.")
I hope Part 2 is already written and scheduled for release, so I won't have to wait as impatiently as I am for the second Dune movie.
Do you remember the visual essay I made about your piece, "On Effective Activism and Intellectual Honesty"? We briefly chatted in the comments of my essay (linked below to remind you what I'm talking about), where I posed a few burning questions to you. You told me you needed time to think them over, and much to my delight, you even suggested the possibility of a cross-post. Might you still be up for that? (Another reason why I hope Part 2 is already written is that *might* mean you aren't too busy!) I would be happy to do a new pencil drawing for the cross-post.
When I published that visual essay, it was only my third Substack post. There are now eight more pieces out that you could peruse if you'd like to get a better idea of who I am before agreeing to anything, so that I'm less of an unknown quantity. Sorry to hijack your comment section, I just wasn't sure how to get ahold of you and am eager to follow up!
"Let's say a company has 900 white employees and 100 POC employees. Over the course of a year, they lose 10%, so 90 white employees and 10 POC, but they hire 100 white employees and 100 POC.
The company has grown from 900/100 to 910/190. So over the year, they've increased their workforce by a net 100 workers, and compared to last year's numbers, they have an additional 10 white employees and 90 POC, so according to this method of analysis, POC make up 90% of the net increase."
In other words, if you neglect that people are also quitting these companies, then a small change in racial hiring rates will look like an enormous (and erroneous) change.
Clearly some organizations have misused and misapplied DEI horribly. But I respectfully disagree with your conclusion that DEI is ipso facto terrible and needing to be gotten rid of. The people I know (I used to work in health care) who worked in DEI used the equity lens to notice when there are apparent disparities in health care, investigate whether the system as it exists contributes to this situation, often meaning there are ways it makes it harder for some people to get the care they need. They then look at how the current system is set up using statistics, and the actual experiences of health care workers and patients to identify where the barriers exist, and find ways to improve the system so those barriers are lifted or at least made less of a problem. All of this while living within the available resources. My job was finding the patients who were willing to volunteer their time to bring the patient perspective into this work. Sometimes that meant working extra hard to find people with relevant experience. If a problem is access to care for pregnant women who are Black or African American, the workgroup needs to have patients from that demographic. Interestingly, for some people it might be surprising to know that often the groups who were hardest to find were older men, of any cultural demographic, and people under age 50. Why is a whole other conversation, but if that is who was missing from a specific improvement opportunity, that is who I would work hard to find.
well said. I've often bristled by the hypocrisy of this new "egregore" in our society. It lacks rigor of thought and prioritizes quick fixes to actual societal reckoning. It feels like all of this and many of the "new thoughts" posited by the progressive left in the last 4-5 years constitute reparations well beyond anything the government could devise in law. But unfortunately, its beneficiaries happen to be largely a population of minorities who didn't really need the leg up in the first place.
Thanks for another wonderful essay! A point that you might address in Part 2, is the 1. rule of so-called diversity: It must be visible! To count, it has to have a visible component. A man in a wig and dress, darker than white skin, ethnic, non-heterosexual or religious signalling are all valid.
Non-visible diversity in the form of atheism, privately guarded sexual proclivity, political diversity, educational diversity and economical diversity—all the things you cannot see on a group picture—are not eligible as «diversity» in the DEI world: How can one be a «token» of something noone can see from 100 ft away!
Jews were fine with the antiwhite anger and whipping up the frenzy during BLM mania...until it turned on them and the nonwhite crowds they encouraged turned the ire onto Israel. Now, it's time to shut it down, and it's okay to say so because they determine the limits and terms of the discussion.
That's what's going on here, starting at Harvard and filtering down to other institutions, social media, etc. It's not just "DEI" or "woke." It's Zionist Jewish power.
Something that even most conservatives have yet to fully look in the eye is that this Claudine Gay blow up scandal is at bottom not even really about this supposed DEI on behalf of black people. Yes it's about a kind of 'racism' but of a really weird (and I think historically unprecedented) kind. A kind that's been festering in the intelligentsia for some decades now....a white-on-white racism. The academia DEI shenanigans is the tip of a gigantic iceberg of cultural-self-hate that could well sink Western liberalism by mid century.
How Diversity Narrows the Mind: For 50+ years all the university 'educated' future professionsal, managerial and administrative classes in the Western world have passed through a 'progressive' academia sheep-dip. The result is that anyone sane enough to still believe in personal responsibility is "continually assailed by invocations to feel guilty about the - largely baseless - alleged grievances of an ever-growing list of ‘victims of society’. This competitive victimhood narrative originated in academia but now oozes daily from the liberal media and has progressively been absorbed as orthodoxy in each and every one of our institutions, all the way from schools to armed forces." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
As you point out, disagreeing with the systemic racism theory invites accusations of biological essentialism/racism. DEI won’t be disbanded until there’s an alternative theory of racial disparities that’s pithy and non-inflammatory- so what should it be?
First!!!!
A very interesting piece about a more modern situation. In the 1960s this young UK TV engineer truly was unconcerned about parties we held in conservative Yorkshire suburbs.
Mixing bemused locals, with gay couples, and a 2nd cousin's family - West Indian husband. (An utter charmer - and awful father/partner)
We cannot, and need not, be unaware of many characteristics - but Dr King seems, to me, simply correct... "but by the content of their character"
If a top runner, one may envy the Kalenjin Kenyans prowess, but some things are what they are.
Among my admired artists and thinkers, one group is "unfairly" represented, though presently some under a cloud. I celebrate the "fine" deplore the others; but understand the difference.
At 92, I hope for saving the flawed, but better liberal democratic values under attack. William.
My favorite line is, "But the first lesson of history is that no one learns any lessons from history." (Another great quip: "the organizational equivalent of saying that one can’t be racist because they have a black friend")
Your crystalline argument lives up to Steven Pinker's standard of good writing: that it makes your reader feel like a genius, who nods along emphatically, thinking, "Yes, that's exactly how I'd put it!" (Such as this point you made: "This is why there were numerous calls to replace Claudine Gay with another black woman. The honor was bestowed on Black Womanhood, the political category, not on the black woman herself. This illustrates one important sense in which modern tokenism is unlike its predecessor: far from being objected to as a sign of contempt and condescension, tokenism today is demanded by activists.")
I hope Part 2 is already written and scheduled for release, so I won't have to wait as impatiently as I am for the second Dune movie.
Do you remember the visual essay I made about your piece, "On Effective Activism and Intellectual Honesty"? We briefly chatted in the comments of my essay (linked below to remind you what I'm talking about), where I posed a few burning questions to you. You told me you needed time to think them over, and much to my delight, you even suggested the possibility of a cross-post. Might you still be up for that? (Another reason why I hope Part 2 is already written is that *might* mean you aren't too busy!) I would be happy to do a new pencil drawing for the cross-post.
When I published that visual essay, it was only my third Substack post. There are now eight more pieces out that you could peruse if you'd like to get a better idea of who I am before agreeing to anything, so that I'm less of an unknown quantity. Sorry to hijack your comment section, I just wasn't sure how to get ahold of you and am eager to follow up!
https://open.substack.com/pub/megangafford/p/on-sarah-haiders-on-effective-activism?r=2vr1o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
It's definitely not the case that 94% of new hires at S&P 100 companies are non-white. Whoever wrote that Bloomberg article is just bad at math.
This comment by Clerseri on Reddit explains the situation pretty well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/16y4iex/comment/k36v2mw/
"Let's say a company has 900 white employees and 100 POC employees. Over the course of a year, they lose 10%, so 90 white employees and 10 POC, but they hire 100 white employees and 100 POC.
The company has grown from 900/100 to 910/190. So over the year, they've increased their workforce by a net 100 workers, and compared to last year's numbers, they have an additional 10 white employees and 90 POC, so according to this method of analysis, POC make up 90% of the net increase."
In other words, if you neglect that people are also quitting these companies, then a small change in racial hiring rates will look like an enormous (and erroneous) change.
Clearly some organizations have misused and misapplied DEI horribly. But I respectfully disagree with your conclusion that DEI is ipso facto terrible and needing to be gotten rid of. The people I know (I used to work in health care) who worked in DEI used the equity lens to notice when there are apparent disparities in health care, investigate whether the system as it exists contributes to this situation, often meaning there are ways it makes it harder for some people to get the care they need. They then look at how the current system is set up using statistics, and the actual experiences of health care workers and patients to identify where the barriers exist, and find ways to improve the system so those barriers are lifted or at least made less of a problem. All of this while living within the available resources. My job was finding the patients who were willing to volunteer their time to bring the patient perspective into this work. Sometimes that meant working extra hard to find people with relevant experience. If a problem is access to care for pregnant women who are Black or African American, the workgroup needs to have patients from that demographic. Interestingly, for some people it might be surprising to know that often the groups who were hardest to find were older men, of any cultural demographic, and people under age 50. Why is a whole other conversation, but if that is who was missing from a specific improvement opportunity, that is who I would work hard to find.
well said. I've often bristled by the hypocrisy of this new "egregore" in our society. It lacks rigor of thought and prioritizes quick fixes to actual societal reckoning. It feels like all of this and many of the "new thoughts" posited by the progressive left in the last 4-5 years constitute reparations well beyond anything the government could devise in law. But unfortunately, its beneficiaries happen to be largely a population of minorities who didn't really need the leg up in the first place.
Thanks for another wonderful essay! A point that you might address in Part 2, is the 1. rule of so-called diversity: It must be visible! To count, it has to have a visible component. A man in a wig and dress, darker than white skin, ethnic, non-heterosexual or religious signalling are all valid.
Non-visible diversity in the form of atheism, privately guarded sexual proclivity, political diversity, educational diversity and economical diversity—all the things you cannot see on a group picture—are not eligible as «diversity» in the DEI world: How can one be a «token» of something noone can see from 100 ft away!
And a minor detail: It’s «shoo-in», not shoe ;-)
Jews were fine with the antiwhite anger and whipping up the frenzy during BLM mania...until it turned on them and the nonwhite crowds they encouraged turned the ire onto Israel. Now, it's time to shut it down, and it's okay to say so because they determine the limits and terms of the discussion.
That's what's going on here, starting at Harvard and filtering down to other institutions, social media, etc. It's not just "DEI" or "woke." It's Zionist Jewish power.
Something that even most conservatives have yet to fully look in the eye is that this Claudine Gay blow up scandal is at bottom not even really about this supposed DEI on behalf of black people. Yes it's about a kind of 'racism' but of a really weird (and I think historically unprecedented) kind. A kind that's been festering in the intelligentsia for some decades now....a white-on-white racism. The academia DEI shenanigans is the tip of a gigantic iceberg of cultural-self-hate that could well sink Western liberalism by mid century.
How Diversity Narrows the Mind: For 50+ years all the university 'educated' future professionsal, managerial and administrative classes in the Western world have passed through a 'progressive' academia sheep-dip. The result is that anyone sane enough to still believe in personal responsibility is "continually assailed by invocations to feel guilty about the - largely baseless - alleged grievances of an ever-growing list of ‘victims of society’. This competitive victimhood narrative originated in academia but now oozes daily from the liberal media and has progressively been absorbed as orthodoxy in each and every one of our institutions, all the way from schools to armed forces." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
Thank you for addressing this idiocy in your characteristic and unapologetic no-holds-barred style. Can't wait to see part 2.
Minor correction: the word is shoo-in, not shoe-in. ("...the activists can enjoy these well-paying but non-taxing jobs for which they are shoe-ins..")
As you point out, disagreeing with the systemic racism theory invites accusations of biological essentialism/racism. DEI won’t be disbanded until there’s an alternative theory of racial disparities that’s pithy and non-inflammatory- so what should it be?