“Equality” Won’t Win Like This

I reveal here that I have finally read a likable DEI book, one that I found so because—beyond any doubt whatever—this book will infuriate the DEI faithful.

Make no mistake, I don’t like this book in the same way I might enjoy a Douglas Murray takedown of leftist shibboleths or a Thomas Sowell skewering of the economic-egghead fringe. Rather, for DEI proponents, it’s a realistic adjustment of expectations in a post-Floyd era, in which the ashes of DEI doctrine are being scraped from the floor even as you read this.

The book’s central message is that the diversity faithful must adjust their expectations. Authors Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow have at least one foot rooted in the reality we all experience. Their central message, in How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America, is that, for DEI to maintain any presence in corporate, government, or higher-ed circles, the diversity faithful must adjust their expectations to the new social, economic, and legal environment. Otherwise, they risk evisceration by the law and shunning by the public at large.

Yoshino and Glasgow, a pair of lawyers who run their own DEI center at New York University, have earned a kind of “cred” to speak on these issues, and their message is reasonably positive.

How Equality Wins insists that the DEI message must be repackaged for a new era that rejects the excesses of 2020:

From our perspective, “diversity” refers to making institutions more representative of the talent pool, “equity” means treating people fairly, and “inclusion” is about creating a culture welcoming to all.

We’ll leave aside for the moment the demerits of this insubstantial, aseptic, and vague definition of DEI to focus on how the authors want to reform the current DEI movement, which appears to be on the retreat, at least in our universities. Yoshino and Glasgow offer seven strategies to repackage and message DEI for a society that is so DEI-fatigued that the brand needs a major overhaul if it is to hit favorably. These fellows contribute their own palatable modification by rechristening DEI the “Equality Project.”

Here are those strategies. The first, Reveal the Stakes, urges DEI folks to delegitimize critics by exposing “the other side’s extremism, hypocrisy, and tortured logic so that persuadable Americans reject their agenda.” The second, Support Dissent, is a worthy strategy that people of goodwill everywhere might defend. The idea is to “embrace free speech, welcome debate, and avoid shaming people for mistakes.” It’s also the strategy for which the authors will be roasted by their supposed allies—more on this momentarily.

Strategy three, Welcome New Groups, urges the DEI movement to be more ecumenical, while number four urges the use of “leveling”-the-playing-field strategies rather than “lifting” strategies, which are vulnerable to legal challenge. Strategy five, Embrace the Universal, is another surprising move, in that it encourages opening participation to everyone. Strategy six urges DEI to “reclaim” and to weave a concept of “merit” into the mix, while strategy seven is simply an exhortation for DEI proponents to stay the course because, as the authors say, “the fight over DEI is a fight for the identity and soul of the nation.”

These strategies, in toto, constitute a call for rebranding DEI to convey a more acceptable posture to a broader audience. The authors see a mandate to “teach and counsel thousands of leaders across industries on how to craft lawful equality programs.” They call this the “project of equality rather than DEI” or, simply, “The Equality Project.” This is good marketing. I offer grudging respect for Yoshino and Glasgow, whose task is mighty: how to accommodate the new environment for the DEI project while pacifying the extremists in the DEI movement, who predominate and whose exploits I chronicle in my book DEI Exposed.

These strategies constitute a call for rebranding DEI to convey a more acceptable posture to a broader audience. The authors even offer good words for President Trump’s EEOC chairman Andrea Lucas. Lucas “endorses a wide array of ‘deep’ practices that avoid race- and sex-based preferences while nonetheless advancing the goal of equality.” That alone will earn them the opprobrium of their comrades. For, if we know nothing else about the orthodox political left, we know that it is unforgiving of transgressions and fond of excommunicating heretics. Which leads us to the book’s one insurmountable problem.

The authors position themselves as DEI insiders, but they are outliers in the DEI movement. The authors position themselves as DEI insiders, but they are outliers in the DEI movement. And their volume will not be welcomed by DEI advocates. Not at all.

While the authors cast themselves as DEI folk who even run their own DEI center, their book represents a distinctly minority view of DEI. It is an outlier in the genre. Those whom Yoshino and Glasgow call DEI “extremists,” who pay fealty to DEI orthodoxy, constitute the DEI mainstream—coarse, uncompromising, pseudo-academic, and racialist to the core.

This is nowhere better demonstrated than in how the authors handle the worst excess of the DEI enterprise—the “White Supremacy Culture” list. For the better part of a quarter-century, this enduring mythological tale of “diversity” has served as the centerpiece for racialism of every sort. It is DEI’s Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a completely contrived document designed to foment racialism, prejudice, and hate.

Perhaps wary of incurring the ire of the DEI hardcore, the authors spend only two short paragraphs on this most extravagant fraud of the DEI era. Yet it is the “White Supremacy Culture” list that constitutes the bankrupt orthodoxy of DEI, not the ostensibly goodwill efforts of Yoshino and Glasgow. Granted, they rightly call out the fraud, but they minimize it spectacularly in the telling:

One of the most infamous, and influential, papers associated with the field of DEI [is] a short document written by DEI facilitator Tema Okun called “White Supremacy Culture.” The paper lists “characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations,” including “perfectionism,” a “sense of urgency,” “worship of the written word,” and “objectivity,” among many others.

The power of this fraud is such that, even in their book calling it out, the authors themselves shrink in fear at the power of DEI orthodoxy. In the face of the greatest fraud of the DEI era, this is the meager way in which Yoshino and Glasgow respond:

We mentioned to the room [of civil-rights leaders] that while we’ve always disagreed with the arguments in this [Okun] paper, we’ve been historically reluctant to speak up when a colleague invokes it, as it could be taken as evidence that we’re insufficiently committed to eradicating white supremacy in all its forms.

Yoshino and Glasgow shrink from challenging what they know to be a fraud. They assert that the Okun list is an aberration, an outlier, the stuff of extremists. They likewise shrink from mentioning it, let alone debunking it, on their Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging website.

But, in fact, the Okun list is at the heart of DEI. It informs the “trainings” of more than 100 American universities—including Boston University, Duke’s medical school, Harvard’s graduate school of education, Rutgers, Columbia, and on and on. I have debunked the “White Supremacy Culture” list here and here, where you can see for yourself the universities that have embraced it. The fake “White Supremacy Culture” document also appears in the training literature of the National Education Association, the American Library Association, and the American Psychological Association. It’s much more than a gnat to be lazily swatted away in two paragraphs.

The book’s criticism is too perfunctory, too forced, and too soft to be anything other than a tip of the hat. Okun’s list is a central pillar of DEI architecture, so much so that a version of it appeared in 2020 (and was quickly removed when saner heads prevailed) on the website of the National Museum of African American History run by the Smithsonian. The version in question listed such traits of “whiteness” as “objective, rational linear thinking,” “hard work [as] the key to success,” “delayed gratification,” “the nuclear family,” and “politeness.”

DEI orthodoxy is a central obstacle to achieving the noble goals embraced by the authors. So I give a reluctant half-cheer to How Equality Wins for weakly giving the lie to this pervasive falsehood. But their criticism is too perfunctory, too forced, and too soft to be anything other than a tip of the hat.

In fact, their section on DEI orthodoxy reveals that Yoshino and Glasgow, well-meaning as they might be, are in a tiny minority of quasi-reasonable folks whose Sisyphean task is to push against an orthodoxy that dominates the DEI project nationwide and, to a large extent, worldwide.

That orthodoxy is a much bigger problem than How Equality Wins acknowledges. It is, in fact, a central obstacle to achieving the noble goals embraced by the authors. While Yoshino and Glasgow reject the race-essentialism that drives much of the movement, as well as the blatant anti-intellectualism of its most extreme proponents, they represent a distinct minority in the DEI ecosystem.

I hold no hope that their voices will be heard, much less heeded. The extremist “white supremacy culture” advocates and their fellow travelers are too uncompromising, too far along in their mobilization. Their DEI orthodoxy is too deeply embedded in the universities.

For their heresy, Yoshino and Glasgow will be pilloried by their ostensible allies. The question is whether they will stand up or wilt under the inevitable backlash.

Stanley K. Ridgley, Ph.D., IMBA, is clinical full professor at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business. He is a former military intelligence officer with a Ph.D. from Duke University and has taught in Russia, China, India, Spain, and Colombia. He is the author, most recently, of DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education.