What Conversations About DEI Are Missing

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What is a belief or position you hold that you feel to be misunderstood or misrepresented by many people who disagree with you?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

As America’s media outlets and social-media users discuss ongoing controversies about diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, there is significant potential for people to talk past one another. DEI is so variable in what it means, or could mean, that misunderstandings abound.

Should one support DEI or those attacking it?

To my mind, the question is flawed. I could honestly answer that I am enthusiastically pro-diversity. I could also honestly answer that I am a critic of many left-identitarian DEI initiatives. But if I gave either answer, many people would draw erroneous conclusions about my beliefs. More specificity would better inform.

For example, if I had my way:

• America would encourage the most talented people in every country on Earth to immigrate here.
• All selective colleges would eliminate legacy preferences in admissions, a practice that disadvantages people from racial and ethnic groups that were discriminated against in the past.
• Indigenous and Spanish influence on the history of the Americas and American culture would loom larger in K–12 curriculums.
• Ivy League institutions would invest a portion of their endowments in efforts to improve failing public schools, helping students of all sorts and benefiting marginalized groups disproportionately.
• Police departments would recruit and hire from every major demographic group in the polity being policed.
• Businesses would take affirmative steps to create nondiscriminatory hiring practices and to build recruiting networks that extend into racially and ethnically diverse communities.
• Florida’s system of higher education would stop violating academic freedom and, I would argue, the First Amendment by trying to prohibit faculty members from making left-identitarian arguments.

And also, if I had my way:

• Admissions officers who systematically assigned lower personality scores to a racial group, as happened to Asian American applicants to Harvard, would be regarded as racist and fired.
• Sweeping racialized stereotypes, such as characterizing “individualism” and “worship of the written word” as traits of white-supremacy culture, would have no place in workplace training.
• Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s free-speech critique of critical race theory, Barbara and Karen Fields’s theory of “racecraft,” Albert Murray’s book The Omni-Americans, Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Self-Portrait in Black and White, and Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals would be assigned alongside Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates and in place of Robin DiAngelo.
• Institutions of higher education would not stigmatize law professors for representing unpopular clients.
• California’s public systems of higher education would stop violating academic freedom and, I have argued, the First Amendment by evaluating faculty based on their embrace of left-identitarian ideology.

“Are you pro-DEI or anti-DEI?” obscures more than it informs: No answer adds more clarity than disaggregating the different things DEI might mean and then addressing them.

If you’re trying to raise money from “woke” or “anti-woke” partisans, or trying to deflect thoughtful criticism of academia by defaming all critics as “anti-diversity,” conflating all DEI initiatives is useful. But most of us are ill-served by it. Most of us have complicated, nuanced positions.

Going forward, public controversies about “DEI” and journalistic coverage of them should proceed with more particularity, so everyone’s actual positions are understood, and so individual initiatives are debated and judged on their merits rather than whatever vibes surround them. (For those of you who like going deep in the weeds, I recommend this essay on the “motte and bailey” fallacy, which looms large in current conversations pertaining to diversity. In my estimation, Reihan Salam was contending with that fallacy in this televised debate.)

Is Declining Fertility a Failure of Capitalism?

That’s Brink Lindsey’s argument at The Permanent Problem:

For most of us, achieving fulfillment in life depends more than anything else on the quality of our personal relationships, yet the incentives and pressures of contemporary economic life push us in innumerable ways, great and small, to prioritize market work and market consumption … We have allowed the vital personal bonds that give our lives structure and purpose and meaning to fray and unravel. And there is no personal connection more vital to human flourishing than procreation … Across wildly varying cultures and histories, the progress of capitalist prosperity—bringing with it urbanization and rising education levels and expanding opportunities for women—works ineluctably to turn people away from parenthood … Quite simply, unless the relentless drop in fertility can be arrested and reversed, there is no future—not for Homo sapiens.

The Old World Order

In Aeon, Ayşe Zarakol, an international-relations professor at the University of Cambridge, argues that “by looking at Asian world orders that came before European hegemony, we can learn a great deal.”

For example:

In the 13th century, Genghis Khan reintroduced to Eurasia a type of all-powerful sacred kingship we associate more with antiquity but one that had disappeared from much of this space after the advent of monotheistic religions and transcendental belief systems that checked the earthly power of political rulers by pointing to an all-powerful moral code that applied to all humans. As such religions gained more power from late antiquity onwards, the power of kingship was greatly diminished throughout Eurasia. Kings could no longer make laws as they had to share their authority with the written religious canon and its interpreters. Genghis Khan and the Mongols broke this pattern of constrained kingship (others had attempted to do so before as well, but never so successfully). The adjective Chinggisid is more apt than Mongol to describe the worlds thus created because these orders were orders of great houses (dynasties) rather than nations …

The claim to have such awesome authority could be justified only by a mandate for universal sovereignty over the world, as corroborated and manifested by world conquest and world empire. And because Genghis Khan succeeded in creating a nearly universal empire, he also diffused this particular understanding of sovereignty across Eurasia.

Trump, Democracy, and the Ballot

In The Atlantic, Adam Serwer argues––contra writers such as Damon Linker, previously featured in this newsletter––that efforts to keep Donald Trump off the ballot in 2024 are not antidemocratic:

Democracy is not simply voting; it includes limits on how and under what circumstances political power can be disputed and wielded so that democracy itself can survive from generation to generation. For this reason, democratic constitutions have counter-majoritarian limits; in fact, democracies cannot function without durable rules that set guidelines for contesting political power. That is the entire purpose of a written constitution, to place certain rights and principles outside the back-and-forth of normal political competition.

Americans generally accept that these rules cannot be altered except through the formal process for doing so—constitutional amendment—and so, until that happens, democratic competition takes place within the lines that have been previously agreed upon. It is not somehow more democratic to pretend those rules don’t exist if they fall out of fashion with one side. The prospect of allowing Trump on the ballot is not itself so dire, but doing so demands disregarding the rule of law on Trump’s behalf simply because of who he is.

Provocation of the Week

In The Washington Post, Shadi Hamid reflects on his Muslim upbringing and the secular forces that shaped the person he became, arguing that, for better or worse, his choices came with trade-offs:

Modern liberalism is alluring, even if it might not always be good for us. As political scientist Patrick Deneen notes in “Why Liberalism Failed,” by dismantling traditional structures, liberalism encourages “privatism.” The individual becomes society’s most important unit, and the state’s role is somehow both reduced and expanded to the task of removing limitations on the individual’s ability to pursue their personal desires. This ability—fairly novel in human history—can prove overwhelming … As the hold of religion weakens, it becomes harder to understand whether our choices have been the “right” ones. Our standards and judgments no longer refer to traditions; they become self-referential. This sense of endless choice injects into our lives an undercurrent of nearly perpetual panic, of never knowing whether we’re living as we should. Yet we become so used to our freedom to choose that we insist on retaining it regardless of the consequences.

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