Confused why DEI died so fast? Here's why.

There's a fundamental misunderstanding about framing the argument

Welcome new subscribers! I don’t know what pixie dust hit our site yesterday, but a mess of new people (as we say in the south) have joined up, and for that, I’m grateful. Always good to be heard. New people: stick with me here because I’m likely to offend you unless you read to the end. Someone’s going to be offended, either way.

It’s easy to build a case that Donald Trump is a racist. I mean, he just rolled back years of government equal opportunity mandates, including one dating back to 1965 when affirmative action was a new thing that requires federal contractors to comply. Trump’s father, Fred, was well known in the New York real estate business as one someone who actively blocked Blacks and other minorities from buying homes or renting in his developments.

Extending that thought, Trump won two presidential elections. It’s easy to connect point A to point B and conclude that America has a giant stripe of racism painted through it, and it only took a racist who dog-whistled the right tune to bring that to the surface. That would be the conclusion of people who came to the argument with their own bias, and had it confirmed. People who already believe that Mark Zuckerberg is a racist chauvinist pig, and most of the CEOs of our biggest tech and financial public companies have closets full of #MeToo stories find it easy to point and say “ha!” because DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) has gone with barely a whimper, swept from the halls of corporate America with a monogramed “DJT” broom.

It’s really too easy. But the easy answer is, in most cases dealing with large populations and complicated issues, not the real answer.

Meadow background: Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash. I added the tombstone myself.

Among the confirmation bias set, I see a fundamental misunderstanding framing the argument about DEI. Shirley Long, a columnist with the Boston Globe, wrote in an essay Monday, “Memo to President Trump: Women and people of color aren’t taking over America.” Let me ask: Who said they are?

There’s a baked-in conclusion that Trump and everyone who has a knife in the back of DEI has done their bloody deed because they don’t want women and people of color running America. Don’t misunderstand me: there are some people in America who believe that women, or minorities, should not be in positions of power, based solely on sex and race. We call those people chauvinists and racists. Those who believe such things do not embrace the tenets of the American ideal (e pluribus unum). Put plainly, they harbor bad ideals, and in many cases, they are objectively bad people. But to assume all people who want DEI dead fall into this category is itself a grievous error.

Going back to Long’s editorial, she quotes Herby Duverné, CEO of a Black-owned company in Boston.

“I have never gotten a contract solely on the fact I’m Black. I have a contract because I’m qualified,” Duverné said. “No one would give me a contract at the federal government level if I wasn’t qualified ... being a minority firm is really icing on the cake.”

This is a provably false statement. I know as a fact there are “8A” companies all over the place where the “owner” is the wife or friend of some white guy running the business. These firms collect no-bid sole-source contracts to do all kinds of things based on the fact that they are woman or minority owned. At the federal, state, and local level, governments have instituted all kinds of mandates on companies that are expected to win on lowest bid and qualifications, to include minority or woman-owned businesses. In some cases (from personal experience here, and no I’m not going to blow any whistles), these minority agreements are little more than writing a check to a Black or other minority owned business so that company has some skin in the game. Qualified has nothing to do with affirmative action.

The whole purpose of affirmative action is to level a statistical playing field. In cases where racists and misogynists work actively to prevent minority and woman-owned companies who are qualified from getting contracts so they can direct money to white men—their friends—affirmative action sought to give those firms other outlets to build their business. This didn’t necessarily stop racism; it just “leveled the field” at the cost of giving away sham contracts to unqualified firms on the basis of race.

The best way to eliminate racism is to obsessively sniff out acts of racism and punish those who commit them. But that’s hard, especially in the 1960s when certain attitudes were baked-in. In those days, affirmative action, integration, busing (which in Boston has been a difficult topic for 50 years), and civil actions—marches, education, lawsuits—made progress.

In the 2000s, many of the baked-in problems were history. But the activists still felt they had work to do. Many of the activists are white, educated, progressives. And they continued to tell other white Americans that despite all the decades of progress, and the fact that their own parents moved away from racist attitudes, and schools were integrated, and most Americans had no issues with people on the basis of color or sex, white Americans were irredeemably racist in our bones.

These are white, educated, progressive Americans, many of them in education, journalism, and the arts, who carry a giant truckload of confirmation bias wherever they go. They find racism everywhere, because they are looking only for racism. They never find racism in minority-run organizations, and in fact they define racism as a white-only thing.

They taught racism in the schools, that whites are uniquely racist. They highlighted history and drew lines from A to B, framing the problems in one-subject terms. They eliminated nuance. They eliminated grift as a source of corruption. They eliminated truth, and chose to always believe every claim when it was made by a minority or woman against a white male (especially a white heterosexual male).

“They” are white progressives. “They” want an ordered society, a level playing field, but only in a statistical way. “They” want to create a society where everyone believes what they believe, and carries the same confirmation bias they carry. “They” want the only lens to frame every problem to be the one of race, specifically white institutional racism in every domain of life.

After years of controlling teachers unions, higher education, and turning out like-minded individuals who run big companies, DEI has accomplished very little in our commercial sectors. NFL teams still have to titularly comply with the “Rooney Rule” but everyone knows it’s a sham. Black head coaches and quarterbacks are still difficult to find in the white, white world of professional football. (Basketball and baseball have had much more success.)

In Silicon Valley, despite many years of promises, companies like Meta, run by Zuckerberg, still fail to employ the target number of minorities in technical fields. Competition forces merit, and in those fields, we have a bigger problem than just hiring minorities. Years of double-standards in admissions at colleges don’t challenge Blacks and hispanics to actually do better to compete. They simply put those graduates at a disadvantage unless they can be hired on the basis of race. Silicon Valley can’t afford to do that, despite their promises. DEI has had the opposite effect of what it was intended to do: it makes minorities dependent on being hired based on race, not ability.

But the confirmation bias, and the “white guilt” carried by the white progressive class that holds to DEI still exists, and they are furious so many have so easily given up. In the Department of Defense, they’ve taken to “malicious compliance” to kill efforts at pulling DEI out and going back to a neutral, ability-based system. I normally don’t link RedState, but they’ve covered this story pretty well. Incoming SecDef Pete Hegseth had to order the USAF to include teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen because some progressives decided to stop that under broad (malicious) compliance with Trump’s executive orders, to make it look more racist.

I don’t blame these progressives. They believe it is racist. They carry a weight of guilt and bias they can’t shed because they’ve been taught this way their whole lives.

But many people think better, have more open minds, and understand issues have more nuance. Or they’ve experienced the race hustlers, corruption, and minority-based racism against white people and realize there are more complex explanations than just institutional racism going back to 1619.

DEI died not because Americans are incorrigible racists. It died so quietly because more Americans have always understood what they see with their eyes. There are better ways of leveling the playing field than simply declaring what the results should be and making them (statistically) so. There are better ways to eliminate racism than finding racists (only white racists) under every rock and stump. DEI was a giant rock of confirmation bias only for wealthy white progressives, which enabled race hustlers and others to go for the money and power.

That’s why DEI died so fast. It was based on a false premise buttressed by years of bias confirmation.

Now let’s move on before the progressives begin to promote actual white racists in order to prove their point. Where we find racism, punish it. But don’t continue the program that levels the field only statistically, and only in one direction.

Offended? Sorry, but you’re wrong.

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