Very few enterprises are as objectively racist as the “anti-racist” racket dominating academia, journalism, and large corporations today.
In the name of anti-racism, the purveyors of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” education positively obsess about race. While claiming the mantle of integrationists such as Martin Luther King Jr., the DEI gang pushes resegregation. And, worst of all, rather than battling against harmful stereotypes of blacks and other ethnic minorities, they embrace and even employ those stereotypes to make hurtful, racist assumptions about those very minority groups.
The latter habit, the most overtly racist one, seems to be an inherent part of DEI training. This is one reason so many people have come to view it as toxic and destructive.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, education-reform advocates Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi together report on nearly 100 hours of videos they watched from DEI workshops sponsored by the National Association of Independent Schools. The NAIS sets standards for the accreditation of private schools across the country. The Journal column should serve as a jaw-dropping corrective for anyone who still thinks today’s DEI efforts are harmless “Kumbaya” sessions.
“DEI experts urge schools to classify people by identities such as race, convince them that they are being harmed by their environment, and turn them into fervent advocates for institutional change,” report Gutmann and Rossi. “DEI practitioners use segregated affinity groups and practices such as healing circles to inculcate feelings of trauma.” The NAIS workshops go to such absurd lengths that if schools fail to “explore the intersection” between science-and-technology teaching and “social justice,” that failure is portrayed as an act of “curriculum violence.” Whatever that means.
Yet, none of that is as horrible as what the writers summarize here: “Perfectionism, punctuality, urgency, niceness, worship of the written word, progress, objectivity, rigor, individualism, capitalism, and [small ‘l’] liberalism are some of the characteristics of white-supremacy culture in need of elimination.”
Read that again. It is astonishing. In any sane world, almost every one of those attributes is a virtue. Yes, punctuality, niceness, and objectivity are prized character attributes. Yet, the NAIS ideologues are saying that it is unnatural and thus harmful for blacks or other minorities to be punctual, nice, objective, and adept with the written word.
In the 1950s and 1960s, one of the main complaints against white racists was they assumed blacks were incapable of a work ethic (“punctuality” and “rigor”), common decency (“niceness”), and progress. Now the charlatans who claim to be “anti-racist” are saying yes, such virtues are so alien to blacks that they (the virtues) must be eradicated.
The assumption that skin color governs character is at the very center of racism. Who knew that the grifters involved in these “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” campaigns sounded so much like Jim Crow racism?
Slides that Gutmann shared with me attack the “meritocracy myth,” repeatedly denounce capitalism, cite something called the Nemesis Radical Feminist Collective as being an expert on why “objectivity” is objectionable, and warn against the “white people way,” which apparently is racial code for being on time and showing manners.
And it’s not just the particular DEI trainers hired by the NAIS: As I wrote about in 2020, the Smithsonian Institution’s DEI efforts were pushing the same claptrap that “self-reliance” and “objective, rational linear thinking” are “aspects and assumptions of whiteness” that organizations should banish.
Enough is enough. The whole DEI “anti-racism” edifice must be toppled. This poison plant must be torn out, root and branch. The way to fight racism is to find commonality irrespective of race, treat everyone with kindness and respect, and otherwise stop obsessing about mere skin color. The human race is the human race. That’s all that should matter.
