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.
This is literally the point I’ve been making.
What fits under the umbrella of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is _huge_.
It’s like railing against ‘Public Relations’, claiming it’s some sort of evil entity that denies real life dangers of products. A statement that has,, in fact, been true about the public relations of, for example, cigarette companies back in the 60. But it’s not a generally true statement.
Oh, and the article is straight-up lying about this, repeating falsehoods from conservatives.
Yes, Tema Okum does point out that thinking in binaries is bad. Thinking in binaries is incredibly reductive and not at all good approach to manage people. Conservatives lie about this point, trying to imply that this is saying that right and wrong don’t exist, which is an entirely different idea. She doesn’t say that. She merely says ‘Do not run around classifying everything you see as X or Y’, and one of the things she lists is right or wrong, a perfectly normal lesson to teach people and not controversial except among lunatics. You should not run around classifying all human behavior as good or bad.
In fact, this is _literally_ how you behave here, Jaybird: Talking about Team Good and Team Bad in sarcastic ways, trying to make the point that people have picked sides and see every thing that anyone on their side does through that lens. I disagree with a lot of the point you think you’re making there because the two sides do not behave identically at all, but the actual concept holds, and you can see how that would be a bad _management_ style to do that, right?
Or to put it in management terms: You don’t need to classify any employee’s request for accommodations as right or wrong. You can just do it if it’s possible, or not if it is not. You don’t need to make a _moral_ decision about it. Likewise, you don’t need to have an opinion if an employee’s boyfriend is ‘good for her’. Or judge their lunch. That’s not actually within your remit.
What has happened here is the same thing that has always happened: Conservatives have tracked down a single example of something that they can remove all context from and invent distortions about, and then repeat it over and over as if their distortion not only is true, but the entirety of the thing. So suddenly DEI becomes teaching ‘there is no such thing as right or wrong’, instead of the actual thing it’s teaching, which is ‘Why are you trying to judge if this disabled person ‘needs’ his wheelchair?’Report
These lies, distortions, and misinformations have gotten so bad that they’ve even infected Vox. Vox!
I went to look at Jacobin and The Nation and they don’t have any articles about the importance of a Steelmanned DEI instead of a Strawmanned one.
Are there no objective opinion writers out there?Report