It is not as if businesses today don’t have enough regulatory issues to contend with: from security regulations to the environment, labor, trust, anti-terrorism requirements, and taxation. Now they have to put up with an absolute academic construct that makes no sense whatsoever and positively without any redeeming value.
LIVE OR LET DIE
DIE or “diversity, inclusion, and equity” is a conceptual framework that ostensibly promotes the fair treatment and greater participation of supposedly underrepresented, even discriminated against, people in the workplace, academe, or even government.
Thus, “diversity” envisions embracing individuals of various backgrounds, whether it be by race, ethnicity, gender or sexual identity, and physical or mental disability (including that of neurodiversity). “Inclusivity” is closely related to diversity, taking into account everyone’s differing backgrounds and then applying policies that take into account those backgrounds. The objective is to identify a desired outcome, allowing each “spaces of participation,” regardless of background, identity, or disability. Finally, “equity” seeks to carry out the promises of inclusion. Not to be confused with “equality,” it is tersely described as a set of policies that purposely intends to result in equality of outcome rather than offer equality of opportunities.
All of which sounds good but that is the point: it’s so ideally attractive on paper that it makes anyone opposed to it seemingly bigoted. And don’t think the advocates of DIE are beyond labeling critics of that. Nevertheless, for all the high-minded words used to advance it, DIE is essentially incoherent and is but a repackaged mishmash of old philosophies that have been proven disastrous every single time they have been implemented.
ZERO SENSE FOR ZERO SUM
Let’s start with “diversity”: the criteria and parameters that enables one to qualify as an underrepresented race, class, religion, sex, and so on has never been clearly and logically made. How would someone with Spanish grandparents on the paternal side but with indigenous people’s as maternal grandparents be classified? What about a previously practicing homosexual who is now in a heterosexual marriage and with children? Inherently, the permutations are endless, which renders the making of a lucid policy quite impossible.
And who makes the call as to which person qualifies for what inclusive policy? If a religious institution, university, or a corporation acting on free exercise, academic freedom, or free speech rights decide that a certain set of characteristics would be necessary for such a person to be accepted for study or work, then who makes the call to override such rights? Congress? But Congress itself (the Senate and the House) is composed of 70% men and most of our legislators come from the higher economic and social class. How then do we impose DIE on this legislative body considering it is the people themselves that elected them there?
When you really think about it: if we accept the nature of human beings as individually independent, distinct, and equally possessed of inherent dignity (as our constitutional system already declares) then diversity is already logically present. Furthermore, let’s even agree for discussion purposes that there is a need for diversity — the very fact that we have a diverse community practically ensures the impossibility of equity. As Thomas Sowell insightfully says: “If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected — or assumed — when conditions are not nearly so comparable?”
A CONSISTENTLY BAD IDEA
What makes DIE ready for death is it’s a proven failure. Various commentaries or studies show that despite all the costs it imposes on schools, businesses, and communities, it simply does not work. It actually creates a more intolerant, divided society.
A sampling: DIE programs “may have a net negative effect on the outcomes managers claim to care about” (“What if diversity training is doing more harm than good?” New York Times, January 2023); that the “implicit association test” actually “falls far short of the quality-control standards normally expected of psychological instruments” (“Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job,” New York Magazine, 2017); in 2022, McKinsey warned its executives: “Don’t train your employees on DE&I. Build their capabilities,” a study found that “the causal effects of many widespread prejudice-reduction interventions, such as workplace diversity training and media campaigns, remain unknown” (“Prejudice Reduction: What Works? A Review and Assessment of Research and Practice,” Paluck and Green, Annual Review of Psychology, 2009); and, finally, the book Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth by Jonathan Butcher, Bombardier Books, 2022 (also “DEI Doesn’t Work — Taxpayers Shouldn’t Pay for It,” by Jonathan Butcher, www.heritage.org, January 2023), which comprehensively and cogently makes the case against DIE.
NO RED-TAGGING HERE
Ultimately, one need only to look at the intellectual (here loosely defined) progeny of DIE: Marxism, particularly that of Gramscian thought, and the critical theorists. As example, gender ideology is traceable from what almost was a throwaway line by Karl Marx in his book The German Ideology:
“There develops the division of labor, which was originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act, then that division of labor which develops spontaneously or ‘naturally’ by virtue of natural predisposition.”
In other words, inequality according to Marx is the result of a “division of labor in the sexual act.” This division of labor is implicitly built on the distinction between male and female. This effects later divisions in labor and thus inequality. Thus: “if the sexual act and the division between genders is the very root of all inequality, the only means by which this inequality can be negated is through the androgenization of human nature, wherein the sexual difference between man and woman is abolished. Feminist readers of Marx, like Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone, seized on this supposedly profound insight in Marx.” (“Marxism and the Gender Revolution,” Crisis Magazine, November 2021).
Incidentally, it is from the tortured dialectics of the foregoing that the Safe Spaces Act and the currently pending SOGIE bills were born.
The pillars of DIE — intersectionality (which has significantly permeated several social science faculties in the country), critical race theory, and gender ideology — previously rested on the idea of recruiting workers to spark a revolution. When that didn’t pan out, the workers apparently preferring to retain their emotional and cultural ties to family and church, the Marxists decided such ties must then be rid of.
They also settled on the idea of cultivating various minorities to do the job the workers couldn’t do: upend society as we know it. This thus resulted in a movement, decades in the making, of repackaged Marxists stopping at nothing to get its way: seeking the destruction of the family, marriage, religion, democratic institutions, rights, and even truth and reality itself.
AGAIN: LIVE OR LET DIE?
Because what the proponents of intersectionality, critical race theory, gender ideology, and DIE are after is not fair treatment for minorities or the oppressed. It is all about gaining power.
Thus, half-hearted measures against DIE are ultimately unavailing. Some kind-hearted people try to seek a middle ground but that is a fool’s errand: one side naturally seeks to preserve its existence, the other its destruction. What could possibly be the sensible compromise there? A half destruction?
Some prefer hiding their propensity to avoid offense under the umbrella excuse of “charity.” But to bestow “charity” exclusively on one group of people at the expense of the rights, livelihood, faith, beliefs, morals, and even the lives of everybody else hardly seems charitable at all. It is an act of sheer suicide while simultaneously dragging everyone along.
Which leads to this point that must emphatically be made: DIE is ultimately inutile for being pointless. Considering the cost — increased divisiveness and intolerance, damaged institutions, and a weakened society — it is completely unnecessary as anything remotely reasonable is already within the ambit of and protected by our country’s values, beliefs, and constitutional principles.
And hence why it is tragically ironic for universities, corporations, and even religious institutions to buy into this DIE insanity — they effectively, simply put, are signing their own death warrants.
Jemy Gatdula is a senior fellow of the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations and a Philippine Judicial Academy law lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence
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