Students forced into racially segregated struggle sessions to grapple with the history of white supremacy and their roles as either oppressors or the oppressed.

Teachers ordered to color in pie charts with all their alleged privileges, including being white, cisgender male, Christian, heterosexual, and U.S.-born.

Merit-based admissions programs getting axed because they don’t produce the right racial mix.

Universities, with ballooning diversity, equity, and inclusion staffs, forcing job applicants to sign diversity statements declaring their support for the schools’ left-wing DEI agendas.

Major corporations, including Pfizer and Amazon, being accused of discriminating against whites and Asian Americans as part of the companies’ efforts to embed DEI into their workplaces.

For many Americans, the recent parade of news reports of students and workers being subjected to humiliating exercises and demeaning discrimination in the name of anti-racism and DEI has been alarming, a throwback to an ugly kind of race-essentialist thinking. Rather than judging people by the content of their character, this new approach seemed intent on judging people based on their position on a hierarchy of oppression.

The Right has long been skeptical of diversity training efforts, typically seeing them as little more than weaponized tools in an illiberal power-grab. That skepticism has only grown since George Floyd’s killing in 2020 led to an explosion in new DEI programs and helped DEI to grow into a multibillion-dollar industry. Combined with little evidence that most diversity trainings are actually successful at improving intergroup relations, and that they may instead exacerbate divisions, conservative skepticism is often understandable.

Conservatives have called DEI a left-wing lie, as well as a cancer, an infestation, and a sickness spreading through American institutions, leading to racial resentment and cultural impoverishment.

But should talk of diversity and inclusion be completely off the table in conservative circles? Is DEI so tainted and un-American that it should be purged from the national conversation?

Or is there a way to promote diversity and inclusion in American institutions — and to have difficult conversations about things like the still visible legacy of slavery and discrimination in America, ongoing racism, and persistent divides over sex and gender — in a way that improves relationships without sending half the population into a defensive crouch?

Irshad Manji believes there is.

Manji, a gay Uganda-born educator of Egyptian and Indian descent who was raised in Canada and kicked out of her Islamic school at 14 for questioning dogma, is one of a small number of educators trying to change the way people think about DEI.

For the better part of two decades, she’s been developing her Moral Courage approach to diversity that looks beyond immutable characteristics. Instead, she aims to help people to learn to speak truth to the power of their “fear-peddling primitive brain,” so they can develop intellectual humility, curiosity about others, and cognitive empathy — empathy based on attempting to see where others are coming from, rather than simply feeling their pain and taking their side out of a sense of guilt.

She has trademarked her method “Diversity Without Division,” and she believes she can get buy-in from across the ideological spectrum, not only from progressives who are inclined to believe that the country continues to be plagued by various “isms,” but even from conservatives who are skeptical of mainstream DEI programs. In fact, she said, she already has.

“The team and I do that all the time,” she said in an interview with National Review.

Manji launched the Moral Courage Project in 2008 at New York University, with the goal of celebrating leaders who speak truth to power. She has continued to develop and refine the program over the last 15 years to include developing leaders who will challenge intellectual conformity and self-censorship. She now runs a Moral Courage Project nonprofit, which trains people to be mentors in their workplaces, along with her Moral Courage College, a for-profit company that teaches unifying communication skills to people in businesses and schools.

Manji doesn’t teach people what to think, but rather how to lower their emotional defenses so various sides of an issue can be heard. And she doesn’t just urge people to be accepting of disagreement and slow to take offense, she teaches people how to develop those skills.

“It’s an inclusion strategy for anybody who finds the woke/anti-woke binary reductive and, by now, bloody boring,” she said. And she believes it’s needed now more than ever.

“When the George Floyd murder took place, and of course Black Lives Matter took on a life of its own, and DEI was all the rage — emphasize rage — I decided that much of America, and maybe even much of the world at this point, will soon awaken to the need for a different approach to getting things done,” she said.

‘I Want to Hear More’

Manji is a champion for diversity in all its forms, including, notably, the diversity of viewpoint that is often rejected by mainstream DEI programs.

Her reasoning, she said, comes down to one word: innovation.

In her estimation, institutions that truly appreciate diversity, including viewpoint diversity, are less inclined to group-think and more likely to power societal progress and reinvention.

And anyway, in 21st-century America, diversity is simply a “fact of life,” she said.

“You’re not going to command it away. You’re not going to wish it away,” she said.

But Manji is a critic of many mainstream DEI programs, which she says too often attempt to shame people into submission, focus on sorting people into groups rather than looking at what makes them unique, and try to train people to comply with orthodox thinking.

Rather than sorting people into identity groups — black, white, Latino or Asian; male or female; gay or straight — Manji focuses on individuals, with all their unique attributes and shortcomings. She accuses many mainstream DEI programs of pushing what she calls “dishonest diversity” — a fixation on external markers such as sex and complexion that ignores diversity of thought. External labels, she said, come with baggage. “So, to think you know me by knowing my labels is a cognitive illusion, and sometimes a dangerous one,” said Manji, who added that she was once denied her approved green card by a nonwhite Border Patrol officer “precisely because he saw the word Islam in my Wiki profile and decided I must be a threat to domestic tranquility.”

Manji also teaches people how to accept disagreement and to be slow to take offense.

“Innovation requires creating environments in which people can actually speak from a space of sincerity without being immediately judged for the content of what they say,” she said. “Notice I said ‘immediately.’ I’m not against judgment. I’m against pre-judgment. Those two words, shrunk together, amount to prejudice. If we’re going to have institutions that can reform themselves through the people who inhabit them, we’ve got to have cultures in which inquiry doesn’t devolve into inquisition.”

In other words, Manji isn’t interested in canceling or shutting up people with unorthodox views.

“It goes beyond not wanting to shut you up. I actually want to hear more. I couldn’t have come up with your thoughts because I’m not you. So, I’m intrigued. How did you come to that at least tentative conclusion?” she said.

“In my view, unless it’s a genuine life-and-death situation, I don’t see a huge downside to hearing a point of view that contradicts my own,” she added. “To me, that’s a gift.”

A New Approach

Manji’s approach to diversity and inclusion stems from her experiences publishing two books calling for the reform of her faith, Islam, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Knowing that her position as an out woman raised in the West would likely lead to claims that she wasn’t an authentic Muslim, she prepared to fight back. That led to her turning “perfectly healthy discussions into noxious debates, out of my own insecurity,” she said.

The result: her detractors were more defensive, and the fighting took a toll on her health, at one point landing her in the hospital. Manji said she realized then she needed a new approach.

“I knew what I stood for: universal human rights, individual liberty, freedom of thought, and pluralism of peaceful ideas,” she said. “I shouldn’t have to compromise those ideals.”

After some reflection, and some study of the science of human behavior, Manji said she realized she didn’t have to change her convictions, but she did need to change the way she expressed them. She vowed to turn debates into civil discussions, and not to view people with opposing views as enemies.

And, she said, it worked. After a “toxic” decade of championing liberal reform of Islam, some imams who had been skeptical of her previous approach engaged in coaching sessions with her about how to bring her message of reform to their traditional congregations, she said.

Manji developed her Moral Courage program to encourage people to speak truth to power, she said, but over the years it evolved to include something more: training people to speak truth to the power of their own primitive brains, which naturally see disagreement as threatening.

She said she’s learned that “how you speak truth to power matters at least as much as the truth that you’re speaking.”

Empathy Instead of Equity

Manji focuses her diversity efforts on individuals and recognizing individuality. She is quick to note, however, that she is not a proponent of Donald Trump–style individualism that says, “I don’t care if my society benefits; I’m more important.”

“I’m not an individualist,” Manji said. “I’m an individual who is also part of different communities, including the tennis-playing community. In other words, not just demographic communities, but communities of interest.”

Her efforts are centered on cultivating understanding and acceptance of differences. In her framework, the E in DEI stands for empathy, not equity. Manji said the trend in the DEI universe of adding B, for Belonging, to the end of DEI, making it DEIB, is evidence that the way DEI has been taught in traditional circles has been a failure.

“I’m of the belief that inclusion well done, properly done, is belonging,” she said.

She questions the way mainstream DEI training efforts often deploy language. For example, assigning people “white privilege” without clarity about what that does and does not mean, or offering them opportunities to explain their disapproval, is “a one-way ticket to generating exclusion in the name of inclusion,” she said. Trying to change people by shaming, blaming, or humiliating them is typically counterproductive, and leads to defensiveness and resentment.

She also questions the effectiveness of assigning agency — and racism — to systems and structures, when those systems and structures are really just collections of human beings.

“If you leave people feeling like [racism is] just an amorphous kind of force out there, how is that empowering? You don’t have any way of tapping into that amorphous force, because it is amorphous,” she said. “But if you bring it back to people, now what? You’re a person, and I’m a person, and we’re surrounded by people. Okay, now that’s tangible.”

Asked what conservatives get wrong about DEI, Manji, a woman of the Left, said that many well-meaning people on the right have come to oppose the broad idea of DEI, rather than how it has been practiced. “There is this reactive, knee-jerk opposition even to the word diversity, when the reality is human beings — the human condition — is that we are going to disagree with one another,” she said. “So, viewpoint diversity is part and parcel of diversity. Certainly, these days, much of the Right opposes viewpoint diversity as well.”

Manji said too often conservative skepticism about DEI turns into cynicism.

“Preaching that others should have an open mind if your own is closed just doesn’t work,” she said. “I say this to progressives all the time. Conservatives should take it to heart, too.”

‘It Comes Back to Us’

Last year, the Society for Human Resources Management, a leading organization of HR professionals, partnered with Manji’s Moral Courage College to promote Diversity Without Division programming among its members.

Still, Manji acknowledges that the field of non-divisive DEI professionals is “very small.”

“There’s not a lot of competition just yet,” she said.

Comedian and radio host Karith Foster offers a training course called INVERSITY — the inverse of traditional diversity training — which seeks to “take the division out of diversity by shifting the focus from what separates and divides us to what we have in common,” her website states.

Chloé Valdary, a former Wall Street Journal fellow, offers an anti-racism program, the Theory of Enchantment, that uses branding and pop-culture references to improve interpersonal relationships by treating people as human beings rather than political abstractions.

In an 2021 interview with National Review, Valdary said her program teaches people “how to be a good citizen in a functioning democracy, how to wrestle with the civilization in which you were born in a healthy way, not in a way that shames you or embarrasses you, but in a way that truly sets out to empower you, regardless of the skin color of the person who’s taking the course.”

“We do not believe in stereotyping or caricaturing anyone who comes to our courses, including white people,” she added. “We try to avoid all racially essentializing language.”

Manji acknowledges that American culture is sharply divided, and our cultural conversations around divisive topics such as race, sex, and gender are often “abysmal.”

“And it shakes my faith in humanity,” she said. “I don’t mind admitting that.”

But then, she said, she is uplifted by the people who are interested in a new approach to diversity, an approach that values diversity in all its forms, including viewpoint diversity.

“I then say to myself, by the way, what choice do you really have?” she said. “You can be down on humanity. But even if, Irshad, you believe that we should just leave the planet to the furry, feathered, scaley, and four-legged creatures of this world, in the meantime, it’s human beings who are going to ensure that those creatures are going to stay alive.”

“In other words,” she said, “it still comes back to us.”