Bill Sikes/AP Photo
The Vertex Pharmaceuticals headquarters building in Boston
The DEI movement is a mixed blessing for the long-term project of advancing civil rights and tolerance. On the one hand, it’s clear that traditional affirmative action is not the same as genuine welcome, inclusion, and power-sharing. And while demands for alertness to microaggressions and language policing can sometimes border on self-parody, the casual insensitivity among the privileged to the feelings and needs of non-whites, non-males, and non-straights is all too real.
But on the other hand, it seems as if some of the left is focusing on rarified realms of hypersensitivity when the house is burning down. While the DEI movement has been gaining ground among progressives, dozens of states are explicitly repressing the more fundamental right to vote. Police violence against Black people continues unabated. Censorship of books and class curricula is increasing. The Supreme Court has invalidated even basic affirmative action and is close to holding that discrimination against gays is itself a civil right.
Meanwhile, the more precious versions of DEI turn the progressive community against itself and give ammunition to the right to ridicule liberals and the Democratic Party for “wokeism.”
For Ibram X. Kendi, now at the center of a hot mess at Boston University, the core idea is that one is either a racist or an anti-racist. But surely there are gray areas. Don’t progressives have more urgent things to do than argue about that?
A lot of this argument goes on in the rarified precincts of the elite academy and serves as a distraction from more effective ways to advance equity. Stanford, one of the nation’s wealthiest universities in terms of endowment per student ($5,969 million) ranks number 133 in the percentage of Pell grant–eligible (i.e., low-income) students in its freshman class, well below far less affluent universities.
The same Stanford was recently flamed last December for publishing one of the sillier guides to politically acceptable language, called the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative. It gives hundreds of examples of words or phrases to avoid and suggests preferred euphemisms. Under the heading of “Ableist,” we are supposed to drop the word “addict” in favor of the circumlocution “person with a substance use disorder.” But the next edition will likely warn us against the value-laden word “disorder.”
It would do far more for true diversity, equity, and inclusion if Stanford accepted and subsidized more low-income kids. Among well-meaning white liberals, policing language can be a form of what Protestant theologians call cheap grace.
A lot of this argument goes on in the rarified precincts of the elite academy and serves as a distraction from more effective ways to advance equity.
Even worse, DEI can serve as a camouflage for corporations that are responsible for more fundamental forms of inequity. One sector of our society that knows all about cheap grace is corporate America.
For instance, Vertex Pharmaceuticals pledged $1.5 million to Kendi’s center. Before Kendi’s high-profile struggles forced a cancellation, a Vertex symposium at Boston University this week was to explore “how communities, advocates, scholars, and policymakers are working at the intersection of abolition and public health to create an antiracist future.”
Sounds great, but this is the same Vertex that has been widely criticized for the astronomical list price ($322,000 per year) for its Trikafta drug treatment for cystic fibrosis, a drug that nets Vertex $17 billion in annual sales, and is estimated to cost less than 2 percent of its list price to manufacture. The drug is not available in the (non-white) Global South at all.
Last December, two large grocery chains, Albertsons and Kroger, announced a $24.6 billion merger. As Maureen Tkacik and Claire Kelloway have written at the Prospect, the merger will likely create additional market power to raise prices at the expense of consumers. After the announcement, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) sent a detailed letter to the CEOs of the two companies on their commitments to diversity and inclusion, and demanding to know details on whether they were hiring diverse lawyers and investment bankers to do the deal.
Was Booker indignant about the anti-competitive merger itself? Well, no. His letter said nary a word about that.
The law firm Latham & Watkins sent out a press release boasting that “an all-women team” of litigators had beaten the Justice Department in a criminal price-fixing case involving broiler chickens. Go, sisters!
The Republican-controlled House Budget Committee, seeking to derail an SEC proposal on private equity, cautioned that the commission “should reconduct the economic analysis for the Private Fund Advisers proposal to ensure the analysis adequately considers the disparate impact on emerging minority and women-owned asset management firms, minority and women-owned businesses, and historically underinvested communities.” Somehow I think that’s more about delaying the proposal than aiding marginalized populations.
Wells Fargo, one of the most scurrilous large banks, with policies that have disproportionately harmed lower-income Americans and people of color, publishes an annual glossy report on … what else … diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And a front group called the National Diversity Coalition has served corporate goals by lobbying against tougher bank regulation, antitrust enforcement, animal rights legislation, and protections for Uber and Lyft drivers. The coalition claimed that minimum space requirements for breeding hogs would harm “Asian and Latino families who rely on pork as their primary source of protein” and that a proposed merger of T-Mobile and Sprint “holds tremendous potential to greatly benefit people of color.”
In 1775, Samuel Johnson famously declared that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Today, the last refuge of a scoundrel is the counterfeit invocation of DEI.
Yes, our society needs a lot more diversity and equity. But today’s real struggle is around the basic defense and advancement of civil rights, not token gestures or language refinements that play into the hands of corporate elites, allow whites to claim unearned virtue, and divide progressives.
