DEI may have gone too far, but so has Trump

US President Donald Trump’s Day 1 executive order on race calls to mind the old saw about babies and bathwater.

By Stephen L Carter

US President Donald Trump’s Day one executive order on race calls to mind the old saw about babies and bathwater. Right-leaning activists have for years been chronicling what they consider abuses committed in the name of diversity, and some of the stories are true and troubling. But undoing the worst abuses while helping the nation heal the still-open scar of race requires more careful consideration and surgical precision than what Trump’s blunderbuss of an order provides.

Monday’s order, as Bloomberg readers know, by its terms, not only ends diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal government but seeks to curtail them in the private sector as well and, for good measure, to end what tatters of affirmative action remain in college admissions.

Well, we’re in an era of retrenchment, and elections have consequences. Still, the scope is astonishing. I’ve been writing about race for four decades and I’ve never hesitated to point out what’s gone wrong with our creditable efforts to promote diversity. But to use those errors as a justification for abolishing all forms of racial consciousness is profoundly misguided.

Did I say errors? Let’s consider just one category. In this world of dizzying difference, where we must find ways to work and live and thrive together, it’s sensible for employers to train employees in techniques for getting along — techniques, one hopes, that have been tested in the data and found promising. But to force employees into “training” where they wind up fearing for their careers if they refuse to chant the correct answers? That’s not only undemocratic, it’s ridiculous.1

So, yes, DEI has had its excesses and perhaps its institutionalisation has even led to more of them. But let’s again remember the old saying about babies and bathwater. The ideal of diversity is, at its heart, an ideal not about discrimination but about democracy itself. In fact, the strongest case for workforce diversity is linked to the case for in-person voting.

No kidding.

Diversity matters because democracy matters. Democracy isn’t just about counting the votes (although that’s a part of it). It’s about mutual respect among citizens of entirely different backgrounds and values. One way to reinforce that respect is to have us, as much as possible, thrown in among groups that include large numbers of people unlike ourselves. That’s why, for example, elections are more democratic if we have to show up in person. The community gets together to vote and wait in those lines, and the election is a shared event, something we do in concert with strangers.

If we can get people back to the office, the workplace can be like that, too. In the blue-collar world, where it’s harder to be remote, it already is. A retailer with employees of all colors behind the counters is, in that sense, more democratic than a bank whose workers resist bosses' demands that they return. The longer they work from home, the less time they spend with people other than those they choose. Diversity suffers.

The way we get to that marvelously democratic workplace is by doing our best to see that all kinds of people are there. No, we shouldn’t have quotas or even goals that approximate quotas. But a thumb on the scales here and there, to tilt hiring and admissions in a democratic direction — just a touch, never a shove — is how we help ensure that those who attend schools and offices encounter classmates and colleagues quite different from themselves.

That’s the pro-democracy case. It’s a case that is too rarely made, but it’s one that most people might well endorse.

I understand the appeal of “merit” alone, even though it’s always been tough to work out the term’s meaning. However, the merit-only argument has an important subtext: Whatever qualification is established for the job or the space in the entering class should, in theory, be within the reach of everyone. Certainly, no one should be excluded because of a demographic feature they cannot alter.

Not only do I get the argument. To a large extent, I agree with it.

Nevertheless, for the reasons I’ve mentioned, I continue to believe we’re better off with a thumb on the scales. A small touch. Light. Breaking ties but also building democracy. Perhaps we don’t need vast DEI bureaucracies to get this important job done, but let’s not pretend the job isn’t important.

That’s why my biggest concern about Trump’s decree is that it’s all about what to ban and revoke, all the way back to the granddaddy of them all, Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, issued in 1965. The order required federal contractors to take “affirmative action” — a term left undefined — to avoid illegal discrimination in hiring, promotion, and so forth. By drawing no distinctions, the president illustrates a problem with slogans: at heart, “abolish DEI” is as over-dramatic and ill-advised as “defund the police.”

Don’t think there’s a problem for the thumb on the scales to solve? We’ve got endless data telling us that difficulties endure. Let’s pick one paper at random: a 2017 study suggesting that off-duty Black and Hispanic police officers are far more likely than off-duty White officers to be shot by ... well, their fellow officers. It is hard to think of a better way to avoid this needless tragedy than by tilting the ground just a little to ensure that all officers spend lots of work time with those unlike themselves.

Maybe you disagree. Perhaps you think we’ve reached the point where, at least in government programs, it’s time to try a little color-blindness. I don’t think we’re there just yet, but I don’t consider the argument either evil or ridiculous.

What about everything that isn’t government? Here, the libertarian in me wonders whether the moment is right for a bit of ... liberty. No less a conservative sage than William F. Buckley used to say that although the government should never be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, some form of affirmative action in the private sector could be defended as a matter of noblesse oblige — as long as those noble private actors were willing to bear all the associated costs. He included as private actors, not only companies but also colleges.

This advice might have more bite today than when Buckley wrote about it. For a long time, racially conscious programs were usually costless for the entities that adopted them. Now they’re under fire. Even before Trump’s order, many companies were dropping DEI. Others were holding fast to their views on the matter. Had the president not ordered the Labor and Education departments to clamp down, we might have seen one of the most useful results that a true appreciation for liberty can produce: a multitude of approaches tailored to the needs (and the markets!) of particular institutions.

Another word for which is diversity.