When the Ottawa County Commissioner’s defunded the county’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) office in January this year, it instigated an intense and continuing backlash from a small but very vocal segment of our population. I’ve watched quite a few of this year’s board of commissioner meetings, and the public comment is filled with citizens that remain mortified that the county’s DEI office was shut down. A typical comment goes along the lines of, “I can’t believe this board would defund our diversity, equity and inclusion office. Who could be against no-brainer ideas like diversity and inclusion?”
In common parlance, the terms diversity and inclusion actually do sound like no-brainers and seem like ideals that everyone should aspire to. The problem with DEI, as multitudes of unsuspecting employees have discovered in DEI training sessions across the country over the past few years, is that it tends to instigate victimhood mentality and shut down office discourse. There is no better person to discuss how DEI goes off the rails than someone that used to be a DEI trainer. Erec Smith is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at York College of Pennsylvania, and he recently sat down with John Stossel for the segment A Diversity Trainer Speaks Out Against DEI. This interview is very enlightening on how everyday meanings for words like diversity and inclusion have been hi-jacked, and how the academic culture that drives DEI thought patterns has come to resemble religious devotion.
Discussing the Real Meanings of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Stossel: All this money is spent, all these courses, all this time, why doesn't it get the results they want?
Smith: Well, it might be getting the results they want. Depends on who you mean by they.
Stossel: Why doesn't it bring racial harmony to the office?
Smith: Because diversity, equity and inclusion, those words don't mean what most people think they mean. Diversity is diversity of bodies, of skin color, ethnicity, not of thought. You can have many different bodies, but they have to be basically on the same page ideologically. That page is often something akin to critical social justice. Inclusion means, well, you can't make people uncomfortable and in a world of microaggressions, that's easy to do. So now inclusion means, I'm going to silence myself and not talk to the black people, right. And equity, as most people know, does not mean equality. It means equality of outcome, right? We have to make sure everybody ends up at the same place no matter how they got there. Which is why we get rid of aptitude tests. Which is why we get rid of AP classes. Which is why we have equitable math and things like that. That's equity.
Studies Show Poor Results of Anti-Bias Trainings and DEI
Stossel: Hundreds of studies suggest anti-bias training doesn't reduce bias.
Smith: I believe that. Yeah. I mean, what it's doing is creating more chaos, in certain places. Now, maybe there are places that are having, big issues with race relations and things like that. And that can be dealt with in various ways. But some places are, people are getting along, right? They're working well together. But the implicit bias training is put there because Human Resources said we have to do this and now we're thinking about things like, I want to ask this guy what time it is, but is that bad? In some way, that has to be bad now, right? So, you get people apprehensive and they're not talking to each other anymore.
Stossel: Asking people to suppress stereotypes tends to reinforce them.
Smith: Well now you're thinking about it more, right? You know, if you're constantly thinking about, oh, am I going to say something wrong? And you're thinking about saying something wrong. You're thinking about those stereotypes. So, yes, it puts these things in the forefront of our minds, and that's not necessarily a good thing.
Stossel: Researchers looked at 800 companies after mandatory DEI trainings. Five years later, no increase in diversity of hiring. Companies actually saw a 9% fall in how many black women were hired.
Smith: It's one thing to say they don't work. It's another thing to say they make things worse, right? You would think that people would see that data and change their minds or change their methodologies or something like that. It's not about that.
Stossel: Data doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.
Smith: No, it's not. It doesn't have much to do with it. It's not about data. It's not really about material change. It's about a power grab. It's about a culture change.
When Erec Smith Questioned DEI Dogma
Stossel: What made you think something was wrong?
Smith: Well, I thought something was wrong for a while. I didn't realize how wrong it was until 2019, when a keynote address at the primary conference for my field, college composition and communication.
The video shows a segment of Arizona State University professor Asao Inoue speaking, “Melt the steel bars of racism and white language supremacy.”
The keynote argued that, among other things, teaching standard English to students of color, particularly black students, is inherently racist.
Asao Inoue continues, “If you use a single standard to grade your students languaging you engage in racism.”
Stossel: It's racist to teach black kids standard English. That perpetuates white supremacy.
Smith: Yes, that's the idea. Right. And even the presence of white professors is a problem that does some kind of psychic harm to students of color. So, I heard that. I thought it was a bit misguided and said so on a listserv in my field, the Writing Program Administrators listserv. I put it out there basically in a long form way asking Is this really a good idea? Is the best way to go about this? And what ensued was hardly a conversation. It was more like a social media mobbing session.
Stossel: You wrote, "I am concerned that the current leadership will have you believe that teaching standard English is experienced as tyranny by our black and brown coeds."
Smith: Yes. So, what they're saying is that to have students of color, especially black students, who are descendants of slaves and things like that, to, on top of everything, force them to speak in a way that isn't their language or write more appropriately in a language that isn't theirs, is inherently oppressive. The idea is that if you learn one dialect, you're replacing another. There's no idea that you're adding a dialect to your repertoire of dialects. That's not a possibility. It has to be rendered as some kind of oppressor-oppressed dichotomy in order to fit a particular narrative. […]
Stossel: Instead of a discussion, people called you racist. "Do you enjoy using Western modes of argument to invalidate people of color?" "Check your privilege."
Smith: Yeah, that old chestnut. Check your privilege. Yeah. That happened. And it happened because what they saw in me was a bigger threat than anything they've seen before. A black person saying it's okay to teach black students standardized English.
Stossel: Why is that a threat?
Smith: It's a threat because when a white person does it, "Oh, well of course you don't understand this." But when I do it, it's a more difficult challenge, right? So, they have to pull out all the stops.
Stossel: And they did. People piled on. Professor at Portland State said, “Thank you. Powerful post”, to the person who criticized you.
This next portion of the conversation might be a little confusing to some readers. Someone named Eve has been thanked for responding to Erec’s questions. Eve is referred to as ‘his’, which I assume to be an application of gender pronoun usage.
“Thank you, Eve. Eve spent tremendous labor physically, intellectually and emotionally to write his response. And most probably took him extra time to recover from that labor.” It's like they're victims.
Smith: Yes. Well, that's the point. You have to perpetuate the victimhood. That's part of the narrative. The victimhood is being used here as a cudgel of sorts to gain power, right. And to try to de-center what they see as what they're calling anyway, whiteness or toxic whiteness or white supremacy or something like that. It's a power grab. It's a dignity grab and that's all it is.
If you can spare the time (about 30 minutes), I suggest you listen to the entire interview. The point here is that local media and progressive advocates eschew the loss of Ottawa County’s DEI office, but much empirical evidence shows that DEI programs on the whole do not work and in fact achieve the exact opposite of what they claim to accomplish – racial division and lower standards. The state of Florida is embarking on a new program called Equality, Merit and Colorblindness (EMC). As Erec Smith says in the interview, “I like equality and merit and colorblindness.” As long as EMC isn’t co-opted by the billion-dollar DEI industry, we all should. We don’t need more DEI-inspired debacles like Grand Valley State University’s nationally mocked segregated graduation ceremonies.