The great DEI rethink
Like many seemingly promising progressive ideas, DEI has not turned out quite as planned
How's that hopey, changey stuff working out?
Sarah Palin (to Obama), 2010
The great test of multicultural nations is to create a broad inclusive identity, but not so broad that tribalism seems to keep its attractions in comparison. It’s a critical time once more for Australian multiculturalism, requiring Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to highlight Australia’s broad civic identity and its larrikin egalitarianism that applies to everyone ahead of the tribal markers that are flaring up again.
Tanveer Ahmed, AFR, 8/7/24
We have to lock up people, without trial, whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, whether they are religious extremists. If you don’t do that, the country would be in ruins.
Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s founder
Up until about five seconds ago, it was ‘courageous’ for anyone to question the widely observed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion faith.
It seems as if DEI has been a big deal forever. But according to this WSJ article it only really went viral after McKinsey published a report that corporate profits were positively correlated with “executive and racial diversity” about a decade ago.
As the WSJ – now edited by a British woman, as it happens – notes:
There are obvious benefits of diverse corporate leadership for society, both in providing role models and in showing a commitment to promoting the best people, irrespective of skin color or gender. But doing it because it is the right thing is not the same as doing it because it makes more money.
Since 2015, the approach has been tested in the fire of the marketplace and failed. Academics have tried to repeat McKinsey’s findings and failed, concluding that there is in fact no link between profitability and executive diversity. And the methodology of McKinsey’s early studies, which helped create the widespread belief that diversity is good for profits, is being questioned.
Many people – especially on the Left – want there to be a connection between Vibrant Diversity and Good Things.
But it simply doesn’t exist, at least in this context.
Reality is a cruel mistress
As someone who has churned out his fair share of hardnosed business content, I can’t say I was surprised by the recent revelations. I’d long wondered why Anglosphere businesses, especially in the past, and Asian businesses, especially in the present, seemed to rub along OK with very little diversity. If you go to the websites of Alibaba, Samsung, or Softbank and click on the ‘About Us’ page, it’s unlikely to resemble a Benneton ad from the 1990s.
Whether one classifies as diverse often depends on the context. If you’re of Han Chinese descent, you’re part of the (overwhelming) ethnic majority in mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore. However, you immediately turn into a member of an ethnic minority if you migrate to an Anglosphere nation. Of course, the obverse obtains when white Westerners go and work in China, Hong Kong and Singapore.
In either scenario, the ‘fish out of water’ board member/CEO/employee is likely to have a potentially useful outsider perspective. But they have that outsider perspective precisely because they are an outsider. They simply don’t ‘get’ the local culture as intuitively as those immersed in it all their lives.
Given this inescapable reality, I always assumed a bit of diversity could be beneficial, but the ROI would likely quickly drop off as diversity increased.
That is, while it might be useful for an Asian company to have one or two non-Asian board members, things probably wouldn’t work out well if the entire senior leadership of Tencent were non-Chinese.
I just checked the websites of the aforementioned Asian companies, and they all seem to have embraced exactly this ‘tokenistic’ strategy.
But the Anglosphere has veered towards a more Robespierrian approach.
There now appears to be a widespread belief on the Left in the Anglosphere that Caucasians (broadly defined) – and white heterosexual men in particular – had their turn at the steering wheel and screwed things up.
A significant number of culturally influential, progressive white Westerners are emotionally invested in this narrative. These people seem to believe that, firstly, welcoming the maximum possible of immigrants will somehow wash away their nation’s historical sins (i.e. imperialism, slavery or dispossession of Indigenous peoples) and, secondly, swapping the members of ethnic/religious/sexual/neurotypical majorities with members of ethnic/religious/sexual/neurodiverse minorities will somehow magically resolve a host of societal problems.
I wish it were that simple, but I fear it isn’t.
The “rumpled margins” mindset
Given the way my brain works, I find the illogical arguments made by those on the identity-politics Left frustrating.
If you’re someone – at any point on the political spectrum – who experiences similar distress, you may benefit from reading the latest article from
, one of the best writers on Substack. Or anywhere else.Revisiting the short-lived enthusiasm for defunding the police in 2020 – among culturally upper-middle-class white progressives, not African-Americans living in crime-ridden ghettos – de Boer details his fruitless attempts to get his comrades to see the utopian impracticality of the proposal before noting:
The general response was, instead, that I was missing the point (they didn’t say how) and that I was guilty of a lack of solidarity (they didn’t say why) and that I was revictimizing someone or another (they didn’t say who). To be honest, I don’t entirely blame them. Their impatience was the impatience of those who believed, not incorrectly, that they are operating under a tacit social compact not to identify the elephant in the room. These people weren’t stupid. They were just playing by rules I wasn’t. They knew it was nonsensical to demand that the state employ its apparatus for violence to lock us all down at the exact same time they were demanding that said apparatus be dismantled. But they were relying on the assumption that everyone present knew better than to bring it up…
I had taken as a matter of politics that which was really a matter of feelings. They were sincerely moved by the death of George Floyd, and the social conditioning and path dependence of lived politics had compelled them to invest those feelings in the idea of abolishing the police, which probably seemed like as good an idea as any. And they were sincerely moved by the death toll of Covid, to the point that they wanted to embrace extreme action like harsh lockdowns. To recognize that those two simultaneously-embraced policies were the negation of each other was to fail to understand that they were meant only to be felt, not thought, much less to be implemented. All of this on a forum of educated lefties, activists and writers and critics who ostensibly wanted real change but had lived in our rumpled margins their whole lives. Which is probably why they didn’t want to be taken seriously, not in any real way. I suspect they knew from bitter experience better than to take themselves seriously, let alone literally. That is why their politics was all a kind of feeling - because it didn’t make a difference whether it was.
Donald Trump is now on track to regain the presidency, in no small part thanks to the diversity mania of recent times.
Back when he was still compos mentis, Joe Biden almost certainly could have beaten Trump in 2016. (It’s difficult to imagine ‘Scranton Joe’ being caught out slagging off the deplorable underclass during an LGBT fundraising event, for instance. Or attracting the same amount of widespread animosity as Hillary did.) However, most Democrat primary voters decreed the first black American president be succeeded by the first female one.
After suitably chastened Democrat primary voters, especially the African-American ones, decided to go back to the passed-over pale, stale male in 2020, he declared he would limit the pool of potential VP picks to those who were black females (i.e. 93.5% of the US population – including black men and non-black females – need not apply).
To paraphrase Palin, how’s that diversity hire working out?