From Vox: How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEI
What’s worse, certain diversity trainings promote ideas that are at once arguably racist and organizationally unhealthy. For instance, one of the most influential equity gurus, Tema Okun, argues in her trainings that “objectivity,” “a sense of urgency,” and thinking in binaries such as “good or bad” and “right or wrong” are defining characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” She therefore advises organizations to be on guard against these exclusionary tendencies.
The idea that there is something inherently racist about believing in a binary between “right and wrong” reads like a parody of liberal thought. And encouraging organizations to stigmatize a “sense of urgency” or “objectivity” sounds like a recipe for institutional self-sabotage. Meanwhile, Okun’s implication that standards of timeliness and impartiality are exclusionary for nonwhite people would be problematic, even if she weren’t herself a white woman.
And yet, her work has been used in trainings for school administrators in New York City, and recommended by the National Education Association, the Minnesota Public Health Association, the Los Angeles chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, and the Society of Conservation Biologists, among other progressive institutions.
Conservatives who deemed all this absurd would, unfortunately, have a point.
