Ticky-Tacky Little Diversity Boxes

One of the greatest privileges I have enjoyed is being able to work for a decade in another country. I got to work with, interact with, and learn from, people from all over the world, from a wide range of different cultures, and with a wide range of different skin tones. It was bloody brilliant.

I consider myself to have been a real beneficiary of this diversity.

My own ‘race’ - wicked whitey - was in the minority. I came back to the UK 3 years ago - partly because my dad’s health was deteriorating rapidly (he passed away 2 months after I got back), partly because the Covid Zombie Juice was going to be mandated, and partly because, for all its flaws, I missed the UK. I also missed my family very much - and seeing them only at holidays just wasn’t enough.

Recent events have conspired to bring the whole issue of diversity in our western societies - along with its siblings of equity and inclusion - under a microscope, and this closer examination has exposed the flaws of this massive cultural movement to a wider audience.

And not before time. This whole protection racket known as DEI needs to go.

It’s not just about the hiring process, although that in itself is cause for concern, but the whole DEI ethos that has, effectively, turned everyone into woke zombies. If you think DEI is good, you’re one of the ‘good’ people; if you think DEI is bad, you’re one of the bad, really bad, awful, bigoted, terrible, inhumane, hateful, disgusting, people.

That’s OK (sort of¹), but speaking out against DEI and its underlying philosophy, no matter how sound or rationally-based is your reasoning, will in many cases be severely career-limiting. The net result is that you end up with swathes of people who either (a) really do agree with it or (b) think it’s a load of crap but just pretend to agree with it (or keep quiet) because they need to feed themselves and their families.

There’s probably a third option there - people who agree with some of the DEI goals and processes, but who won’t speak out because any criticism of the Party will not be tolerated.

My youngest daughter has some experience of this. She tells me about the regular ‘training’ sessions she’s had to attend at work in which she’s asked to reflect on, and share, things like her “white guilt”. Dissent is not an option.

I bear not one single iota of guilt, not one single nanogram, for things someone with the same skin colour as me did centuries ago. I bear the same amount of guilt (which is to say none whatsoever) for the actions today of any white person who is not me. Similarly, unless they actually took part in them, there is no black person who bears any guilt whatsoever for the massacres in Rwanda. Nor do they bear any guilt for the black people in history who sold other black people into slavery.

Well, they say, the UK has benefitted from slavery. Perhaps that’s true - some people certainly did. But if that’s true, then everyone living in the UK today has benefitted from this. And even if it were true, what should we do about it today, many decades later? Which particular bits of the benefits of the UK accrue from slavery, or colonialism, or whatever the trendy cause du jour is?

How do we “undo” all this historical slavery and colonialism?

We can’t.

My answer to all this tiresome historical moral dissection over things like slavery and colonialism is to ask, so what? We did some bad stuff, we had an empire. Your point being?

The only legitimate point that could be made is that, decades later, the impact of these past misdeeds is still being felt and is still adversely affecting a certain demographic. That’s an argument that is much more pertinent for the US than the UK, I feel, but even if we recognise this, we still have to ask for how long do we have to recognise it?

The argument from the ‘woke’ is that inequalities still persist and this is evidence that whatever forces were arraigned against certain demographics in the past are still in effect today. I suspect this is partially true. But only partially. The real difficulty is in trying to make all of this concrete. How much is still left to eradicate? How much progress has been made? How do we know when we’ve reached our desired goal? How much of this inequality we see is a direct result of past injustices?

All of these things cry out for a degree of analysis and accurate metrics that just don’t exist. White privilege, you say? Can you tell me how much of it I have? Have we got more, or less, of it today than in 1990, say? And how do you know that, whatever you answer here? Can you tell me, in financial terms, how much I have benefitted from my privilege? When will you be able to say you’ve eradicated white privilege and how will you measure that?

These questions are unanswerable - because they’re questions about ideas and hypotheses that are assertions, rather than actionable and measurable things.

I have white privilege, you say? OK, what am I supposed to do with that knowledge? Apparently, it means I must debase myself and feel white guilt and defer to people with different skin tones. Bollocks to that. Nobody - nobody - should be feeling like that, or doing that to anyone, whatever their skin tone.

It’s this perceived array of “forces of unfairness and oppression”, which get characterized as things like white privilege, that DEI has been designed to tackle and to overthrow.

I’m all in favour of increasing fairness and reducing oppression. Big time. But DEI smacks too much of a “solution looking for a problem”. Actually it’s worse than this; it’s more like

a bad solution looking for a problem

The problem with not having any decent metrics, or measurable hypotheses, is that you don’t know when to stop. And DEI sure as hell doesn’t know when to stop.

If, for some reason, you’ve got it into your head that demons are the cause of the increase in diabetes then you’re going to suggest “laying on of hands” as a good solution - when laying off that pizza is a better one.

That’s the issue with DEI - it’s based on a very questionable “analysis” of what has caused the perceived problem, and so any ‘solution’ it offers is going to be ineffective - and probably make thing worse.

In the weird woke wonderland we’ve managed to build for ourselves, so much is like this. Hate speech? How much ‘hate’ was there in what I said? Was it more on the Hitler end of the spectrum or the JK Rowling end of the spectrum? If I asked 100 people to judge what I said and 10 people found it hateful, does that make it only 10% hateful?

Is all ‘hate speech’ equally hateful? And if not, how does one go about measuring the degree of hate? Or is it just a binary?

Can I be non-binary on the issue, please?

It’s all very reminiscent of, dare I say it, the black/white thinking that people with serious personality disorders (like BPD) exhibit.

It’s actually worse than this - but I’ll return to this later.

For some people, the recent resignation of Claudine Gay was as a result of pressure because she was black. That is partially correct - but in a very specific sense. The black part is because it was one extra of those ticky-tacky little diversity boxes she ticked.

It’s crushingly obvious to me she was a DEI-inspired diversity hire - something that will, doubtless, be vigorously denied by Harvard. But there does come a point where there just aren’t enough C’Mon Man’s available to express one’s scepticism. If she was the ‘best’ candidate Harvard could find - I really do shudder to think what the rest of the candidate pool looked like.

An academic with 11 publications (that she even wrote bits of herself) - and this, this, is who you pick for one of the most prestigious academic leadership roles on the entire planet?

It’s a joke. Just not a very funny one.

The whole DEI schema is built on an unverifiable foundation of fantasy. It posits that certain groups have been oppressed, or ‘marginalized’, and that this continues unabated today. In order to make things ‘fair’, everything has to be tilted in favour of these supposedly disadvantaged groups.

This so-called oppression by so-called oppressors, which operates within a so-called oppressive system, is responsible for holding back person X. The more ticky-tacky diversity boxes person X can tick, the more they’ve been held back.

OK - even if we take this all at face value (which I most certainly do not) what are we supposed to do with all this? None of it can be measured. How much more ‘oppression’ has person X suffered than person Y precisely? Does person X get 10 free passes and person Y get 5 free passes because X is higher placed on the victim’s podium?

Are we going to get to a point where the DEI commissars say “OK - we’ve redressed the injustices. Now we can go back to merit-based fair hiring processes”?

Of course not.

But, as I mentioned, it’s not just about hiring. There’s a whole substrate of viciousness and vindictiveness of which hiring is just one visible manifestation. Take hate speech.

If you’re a member of what is deemed to be a privileged class you have to be extra careful. Your utterances will be scrutinized in ultra-fine detail for evidence of wrongthink and hate. Even your non-utterances will be used against you. If you don’t actively oppose whatever you are told to oppose, you will be deemed to be tacitly supporting it. Bigot.

If you have said something in the past that some woke genius deems to be verboten, then you can wriggle out by issuing a grovelling apology. That only works if you are seen to be in club woke with all the ‘right’ ideas in your head now. This is why people like Trudeau can get away with wearing blackface, but others can’t.

Hate, like everything else, is a non-objective function of your politics and forgiveness depends on all sorts of things like the degree of wrongthink you possess and the number of tick-tacky diversity boxes you tick.

Take the case of Monroe Bergdorf. She² was a dude who has transitioned into a dudette. She’s recently been named as the first United Nations “UK champion” for women in the UK. It’s a strange³ choice to pick someone who is not, biologically, a woman for this role.

But in 2017 Bergdorf was discovered to have written on her FarceBook page that

white people’s entire existence is drenched in racism

and that

white people are the most violent and oppressive force of nature on Earth

Which rather calls into question her being able to represent women of all races properly. She was sacked from her role representing L’Oréal for this, back in 2017 - but she’s obviously been forgiven for these comments and has bounced back.

Do the usual. Change the white to black in these statements and ask yourself whether a person who made such comments in their past would ever be appointed by the UN. Would such a person ever be forgiven?

Munroe ticks all the right ticky-tacky diversity boxes - and so she gets extra free passes.

I have no beef with diversity (true, unforced, diversity) - it’s awesome - but let the chips fall where they may. Compelled diversity is a wicked idea that can only operate within an unfair system. The notion that you can solve past unfairness with current unfairness is rather bizarre - but it’s the technique favoured by the wokerati.

There are problems. As I understand it, black kids in the US are underperforming at school, for example. The reasons for this will be multi-faceted and complex. One factor might be racism, systemic or otherwise, but rather than “do the work” to actually find out what the root causes are, the woke just scream “whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite stuff”.

It’s lazy - and helps no one. Solving difficult problems takes work and insight. Not feelings and screeching.

Indeed, if you don’t understand the true reasons for something, you’re likely to implement solutions that are (a) ineffective and (b) actually make things worse.

But what is a favoured “solution” to this underachievement? Do away with the tests that reveal this.

This seems to be a characteristic of the woke - they want everyone else to “do the work” for them. They look for the simple path that blames someone else.

There will come a time, hopefully before society completely collapses under the weight of woke, when being able to tick a decent selection of ticky-tacky diversity boxes will no longer be seen as sufficient. People will, eventually, require character above colour, expertise above equity, once again.

Meanwhile the “elites” are loving it all.

1. Personally, I don’t care if I get called any or all of these terms. They don’t mean anything these days, anyway. But that won’t be true for everyone. If you’re in employment, for example, and you get perceived to be ‘racist’ and get fired - then good luck trying to get a decent reference for a new job.

2. I know, I know - technically it should be “he” - but I’m gonna be polite.

3. In these days of “representation” it’s seen as a strange choice - but I, personally, have no real issue. I don’t see why a woman, for example, could not properly champion the cause of men. Many do - a good example of this might be Janice Fiamengo.