Diversity, equity, and inclusion is on the ropes. The Trump administration has banned DEI in all federal agencies and organizations that receive federal funding, including universities. This public erasure of DEI complements a litany of private companies that have done the same, including Walmart, Toyota, McDonald’s and even Microsoft.
This is all good news. But as DEI recedes, it’s important to clarify why it was and always will be a terrible idea.
DEI opponents typically make two objections: 1) it is unfair, and 2) it lowers workplace standards. Both are sound positions. If racial discrimination is wrong–and it is–then all instances of discrimination are wrong, no matter which race is targeted. DEI also introduced criteria into hiring and promotion that had no relation to individual talent and competence.
This is not only prejudicial against those who were more qualified but not hired or promoted because of irrelevant criteria; it also undermined the common good of organizations and the public they serve by pedestaling ideology over providing high-quality products and services, including in fields such as the military, public safety, and medicine, in which lower standards can cost lives.
These are solid reasons to oppose DEI. But there’s a deeper, even more urgent reason: DEI detaches institutions from reality.
At the core of DEI is a radical theory of knowledge that takes the form of what DEI proponents call “lived experience.” “Lived experience” lies at the heart of both critical race theory and queer theory, two ideological pillars that hold up the DEI apparatus. The problem with lived experience is that it is simultaneously a) entirely subjective (individuals have the power to determine the content of their own “truth”), and, consequently, b) immune to contestation and therefore unassailably authoritative. It is, in short, a tyrant’s epistemology, a mutation of the libertarian, “I live my own truth” into the totalitarian, “and you must too.”
Lived experience is conspicuous in transgender ideology, which endows its practitioners not only with the authority to redefine biology but also to coercively impose their fiction on the rest of society. It also fuels the Orwellian “anti-racist” trainings that, until recently, were common in corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and governmental agencies.
To get a sense of the havoc lived experience causes to both language and logic, consider the now widely discredited Ibram X. Kendi’s assertion in his book, How to Be an Antiracist, that “racial discrimination is not inherently racist.”
The plain meaning of Kendi’s words is that it is both rationally and morally possible to make evaluative distinctions among people based on race and yet not be a racist. What, then, defines racist racial discrimination? That depends on Kendi and his anti-racist collaborators: racial discrimination that advances their political goals is not racist; racial discrimination that undermines their political goals, on the other hand, is racist.
Lived experience is also evident in a now infamous video celebrating the Los Angeles Fire Department’s first female deputy chief, Kristine Larson. Responding to the self-posed hypothetical question, “Are you able to carry my husband out of a fire?” Larson states in a now-viral clip, “[H]e got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.” This casual victim-blaming does not only reflect the lowering of performance standards; more radically, it marks the dissolution of standards themselves.
By empowering people to subjectively determine the meaning of professional qualifications (in this case, Larson asserting that her biological sex is a more important “skill” than being able to carry men out of harm’s way) any objective criteria for determining what constitutes acceptable job performance goes up in smoke.
Whatever the motivations of those who believe lived experience is a valid form of describing and responding to the world (a tenuous philosophical position at best), its central place in DEI’s theory and practice means that, eventually, any company or organization that operates on DEI principles is guaranteed to fail.
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No matter what the field, the minimal condition for competence is adherence to transparent, universal, equally-applied standards–standards that pertain to everyone no matter their identity or subjective self-experience. If each person is permitted to — or, even worse, feted for —creating their own truth in the workplace, the best we can hope for is inefficiency and the worst we should expect is total collapse.
Few tears may be shed for companies that go under because they embraced DEI and refused to let go even when its failings became empirically verifiable. But when DEI infects our civic and governmental bodies–bodies that protect, sustain, and unite us as a nation–the right response is an unapologetic wholesale rejection, no matter what your politics. Turning the helm of our most important institutions over to those who believe they have the power to create reality is not only poor governance. It’s madness. Thank God the spell is breaking.
Matthew R. Petrusek, Ph.D, is the senior director of the Word on Fire Institute