About a month ago now, there was some very interesting back and forth on X (formerly known as Twitter) between Bill Ackman, Mark Cuban, and Elon Musk on DEI. It was interesting not only because of its content, or because it was three billionaires arguing about policy, but rather because it perfectly exemplifies how American political debate goes these days.
You can start with Ackman's January 3rd post here: https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1742441534627184760, and then follow from there (for ease of access, I've included images of their responses below).
The process usually starts with Liberals / the Left / Democrats / Progressives, etc. identifying a problem in American society, and with the best of intentions, coming up with a prescription for that problem. Eventually, they prescribe a drug for the illness, which in the 21st century almost always is a remedy coming from the government, and usually, the federal government.
In this case, a lack of equality (of both opportunity and outcomes, but mostly the latter) among racial or ethnic groups is the ill. The drug that’s been prescribed is DEI, otherwise known as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The drug’s label told us that if we focused more intently on giving underrepresented minorities chances in higher education and job opportunities--to help correct for historical discrimination--we’d get much more equal outcomes, and without significantly pernicious side effects to the rest of society. You might think of DEI as a kind of Affirmative Action steroid. While American society had been on smaller spoonful's of the DEI drug prior to the pandemic, we meaningfully upped our dosage following the death of George Floyd in late May of 2020.
What’s happened since we took the drug? On the one hand, the drug has undoubtedly worked to accelerate the hiring of historically under-represented minority groups in colleges, businesses, and government. This is a good thing, and DEI certainly has this in its “Pros” column. On the other, this drug has brought with it some clearly problematic side effects. This is where we get to the frustrating part of the political debate.
Some perspective ought to be provided here before we go much further. According to sourcing software firm Talenya (https://www.hrdive.com/news/at-fortune-500-companies-women-account-for-a-third-of-workers-firm-says/602639/), as of mid 2021, about 60% of employees at Fortune 500 companies are white, and 20% are Asian, while roughly 10% are black or African American and 10% are Hispanic or Latinx. This compares to (non-Hispanic) whites comprising 59% of the population, Asians at 6%, blacks at 14%, and Hispanics at 19% of the population (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI725222). CEO statistics, by contrast, look much different (https://fortune.com/2023/06/05/black-ceos-fortune-500-record-high-2023/), with black CEOs comprising less than 2% of Fortune 500 CEOs. It's therefore totally fair to say that we still have plenty of room for improvement. But as we'll discuss more in a moment, how we get to where we want to go matters just as much as getting there at all. We can't risk crashing the car just because we want to get to our destination faster.
The biggest side effect of DEI is something Bill Ackman is almost assuredly correct about, and something he discusses in his January 3rd post: reverse-racism has now fully permeated almost all parts of American life. “You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe,” he says. Everyone knows this is true, and while it was also true before we started taking the DEI pill, this has only become more pronounced post-pandemic.
The situation on college campuses following the October 7th atrocities in Israel crystallized this dynamic perfectly, only this time with respect to Jews, a predominantly white minority group. College students were allowed to chant de facto genocidal terms about Jewish people and intimidate Jewish students on campus, not to mention allow 30+ student groups at Harvard to sign a letter “holding the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence.”[1] Had the protestors on campus been wearing white bed sheets and calling for the mass murder of blacks (or any other non-white minority group), you can bet your house that the presidents at these schools would have shut down those protests at the blink of an eye. But because the group being protested about was (mostly) white, they took a much different, generally more sympathetic course, and it wasn’t until alumni started to complain and pull donations that they started putting out statements condemning the rhetoric these students were using.
This is the blatant hypocrisy that has made people closely following DEI so frustrated with it, but which became much more clear to those following from a distance after the now infamous congressional testimonies of the college presidents at MIT, Penn and Harvard. What the presidents said before Congress wasn’t necessarily problematic because they said the wrong thing legally (they may very well have been correct with what they were saying, constitutionally, but we’ll get into that in another post). The reason people got annoyed is because they were now claiming they were trying to uphold free speech, when for years now, they had been doing the exact opposite under the guise of DEI when that speech was perceived to be slighting a protected group. Harvard not only finished dead last (248 out of 248) in the most recent FIRE college free speech rankings, and with a score of 0.0 (the scale is out of 100), but Harvard also leads the country in de-platforming invited speakers or sanctioning in-house students or scholars as well[2]. The principles of our society shouldn’t change depending on the color of the person’s skin, but in this case, that’s exactly how these colleges were trying to have it, and their presidents paid for it.[3]
To be sure though, this reverse-racism cuts in a lot of interesting directions. A good example here is the double-standard for those in the black community who are conservative. In September 2021, when Larry Elder—a black man—was challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom for governor of California, a white woman wearing a gorilla mask threw an egg at Elder while he was walking through the Venice area in LA.[4] Had this happened to Barack Obama, or probably any other black public official who wore a “D” next to their name, this would have been the main story in most of the media for a week, if not longer. Elder rightfully pointed out that this also probably would have been considered a “hate crime” if he was a Democrat. But because he was a Republican, no one cared[5]. To this day, you cannot find an article about the Elder incident, or even one that mentions it, on the New York Times website[6], and as best I can tell, no other black public officials ever spoke out condemning this act, even when Elder specifically asked Vice-President Kamala Harris—a black woman—to do so.
Additionally, the comments routinely made about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas by those on the Liberal side of the political aisle also seem equally hypocritical. If the same comments, in the same context, were made about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, it’s hard to believe accusations of racism from the national media wouldn't begin flying immediately. Elder and Thomas either somehow aren’t black enough, or otherwise “don’t get it.” Despite both clearly being part of exactly what DEI is supposed to promote and protect, because Elder and Thomas are generally not “on the right team,” they don’t seem to matter.
Another example comes from the UNC and Harvard Supreme Court cases on Affirmative Action last fall, where it was revealed that both schools were passing up on well qualified Asian applicants simply because they already had too many, and were therefore trying to make their student bodies look more like the demographics of American society in general. The cases made clear that Asians are now increasingly getting the short end of the stick too.
Mark Cuban comes at DEI from a different angle. He reasonably says “Diversity means you expand the possible pool of candidates as widely as you can. Once you have identified the candidates, you HIRE THE PERSON YOU BELIEVE IS BEST.”[7] (emphasis his). It’s not, he says in another tweet (see below), about “checklists and quotas.”
If this was indeed all DEI was, few people would have any issues with it. But DEI in theory has evolved into something much different in practice. This is where Cuban seems to be looking at the problem through the lens of his own glasses. Except for maybe the NFL (where the Rooney Rule requires minority candidates to be part of the interview process for coaches and senior positions), almost no one asks how many minority candidates were in a particular company’s “pool of candidates” when they were making hiring decisions this year. They ask about who was actually hired. Thus, DEI is exactly about quotas, and these quotas are now everywhere. You see it in admissions in colleges, in hiring decisions at those colleges, in hiring in businesses, in government contracting decisions, in government hiring decisions, in who gets appointed to governmental offices, in who should run for those offices, and now you even see it in public company annual reports too. And I can assure you, bragging about how many minority applicants were in their candidate pools the previous year is not the focus of what's in these filings. They all uniformly talk about the actual workforce, and who was actually hired. Diversity in applicants therefore only matters if it produces diversity in actual employees. Otherwise, it's just window-dressing, and you probably open yourself up to racism claims if you happen to have a greater share of minority applicants in the pool than the share of those you actually ended up hiring. Equality of outcome is entirely what matters here, not the equality of opportunity. The "equity" portion of DEI has completely overwhelmed the "inclusion" part.
While Ackman rightfully points out that we don’t know for sure if Harvard hired Claudine Gay because of her skin color, we do know that President Biden specifically appointed a black woman to the Supreme Court because she was a black woman. How? Because on January 27th, 2022, he said so[8]. "While I've been studying candidates' backgrounds and writings,” he said that day, “I've made no decision except one: the person I nominate will be someone with extraordinary qualifications, character, experience and integrity - and that person will be the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court. It's long overdue, in my view." It's worth pointing out that Justice Stephen Breyer, who Justice Jackson would replace, had only formally announced his retirement that same day, though news of it leaked the day before. While Biden undoubtedly had a preliminary list of potential candidates before this, given the procedures for vetting and selecting a Supreme Court nominee, it's highly unlikely Biden had already "picked" Jackson by the time he made his comment. Biden had actually already promised to put a black woman on the Court back in February 2020 during the South Carolina primary. "I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court to make sure we in fact get everyone represented," he said that night. (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/26/us/politics/biden-supreme-court-black-woman.html) What Biden said in January 2022 therefore shouldn't have surprised anyone. He was simply fulfilling a campaign promise. But if the shoe was on the other foot, and Biden had said he was going to only consider picking a white man for the Supreme Court, Liberals would have been outraged. This is exactly the kind of reverse-racism that--done under the guise of "inclusivity"--has become so frustrating to so many people.
Put them in the same situation, and most Americans likely would have likely done exactly what Mark Cuban was talking about: cast the widest net possible for candidates, and pick the very best justice possible based on merit. This isn’t to say Justice Jackson isn’t qualified: anyone listening to her during oral arguments can quickly answer yes to that question. But when only black women justices are explicitly being considered, that just feels like some perverse version of “separate but equal” that Brown v. Board of Education was supposed to rid us of a long time ago. To say then that DEI is not about quotas is just not being honest with how it’s actually being implemented.
The better question to ask, however, is should this really be that surprising to anyone? After all, inequality of outcomes was the whole reason why DEI was implemented in the first place. Why then is it strange that DEI itself is being evaluated based on how equal or unequal the outcomes still are, and not based on opportunities?
It might be nice if we could approach DEI as Cuban claims he does, but sadly, Cuban’s DEI philosophy doesn’t seem to be the version held by most of its other proponents. Cuban may have his own version of DEI at the Dallas Mavericks, but something closer to Critical Race Theory is much closer to what’s happening on the ground. CRT, as its become known, claims that any difference in the makeup of a group that is at all different from the racial demographics in society more broadly must by definition be caused by racism. This isn’t just a black-white thing anymore either, though it still usually only matters in one direction. Women, for example, currently make up about 77% of school teachers[9], but when have you ever heard any serious calls for women to be fired and men to be hired so that elementary and middle schools can look more like the 50 / 50 split we have between men and women in society more broadly? Or what about forcing more women into becoming garbage workers, an occupation where males make up roughly 95% of the total? Of course we shouldn’t do this, but this is the logical extension of the DEI philosophy: schools must be sexist against men, and the garbage industry must be sexist against women, because that is the only possible explanation. What else could possibly be the reason?
Notably though, it’s only when (straight, white) men are over-represented and women are under-represented, or when whites are over-represented and minority groups are under-represented, that people actually cry foul though. Other inconvenient examples like we highlighted above are overlooked and ignored. The recent "Monthly Diversity Digest" email from Johns Hopkins Medical School's Chief Diversity Officer discussing "privilege" is only the latest example making it abundantly clear that "Inclusion" only matters if you aren't "white," "able-bodied," "heterosexual," "male," "own property," "speak English," etc. etc. This kind of Liberal overreach is not only what makes people view DEI as inherently hypocritical, but also why Donald Trump has such a good shot at becoming president again.
The hardest example to rebut on this does have to do with race, and was something Ohio Senator JD Vance pointed out to Cuban on Twitter as well. Roughly 40%, 56%, and 70% of Major League Baseball, the National Football League (NFL), and the National Basketball Association (NBA) athletes are black, compared to black people only representing about 12% of the population more generally. Exactly no one says that we should replace those athletes that have clearly earned their place simply because of their skin color, yet DEI proponents routinely advocate for this everywhere else in our society now (though to be fair, in most cases they aren't bold enough to say we should outright fire people, but instead to make these decisions in hiring instead of firing to have the desired effect occur over time).
Following the recent NFL coaching changes, there are now six black head coaches (out of 32 teams), double the number from three the season before (https://apnews.com/article/minority-head-coaches-nfl-87059103e2051cf726cfbe4e610395b0), and at least two teams (Carolina and Washington) are still evaluating candidates, so that number could go higher. This is fantastic, but it just so happens that 6/32 = 19%, above the black share of the population (14%) we highlighted above. Does this mean one of those black coaches shouldn't have been hired so that it would have balanced out with their share of the population? If these teams deemed him the best person for the job, then no, absolutely not. But again, if the shoe was on the other foot, and three white men were given these roles instead, you can almost guarantee you would be reading about systemic racism in NFL head coaching decisions, even if those white men happened to be the best candidates for the job.
Cuban accused Vance of “trying to make a stupid comment,” but Cuban’s unwillingness to directly answer either this, or Musk’s retort asking “when should we expect to see a short white / Asian women on the Mavs” tells you about all you need to know. Cuban can only return to arguing his version of DEI—where the best people from a bigger, wider pool are hired—while Vance and Musk are arguing against everyone else’s version, and the one that most of us have seen implemented far more often than not in American life.
If we’re being honest, the reality is unequal outcomes happening for any reason amongst racial groups simply aren’t tolerated anymore. So instead, to avoid lawsuits, career risk, public shame, or any other form of humiliation, people do the easy thing now: hire the minority candidate even if they’re not the best candidate for the job. This is another key side effect of DEI, intended or not: opportunities are simply being given to people in the identity groups we’d like to see better represented simply because they’re in those groups. This isn’t to say more qualified people from us casting Cuban’s wider net aren’t rightfully getting jobs they may not have before: they absolutely are. Justice Jackson’s hiring is a good example of that. With most things, as we’ve highlighted earlier, there is a mixture of good and bad. But what Cuban seems to be missing is that we’re actually only casting the net to reel in more of certain kinds of fish. And at the moment, the most desired fish are those with darker skin tones, or who have non-cis (DEI speak for non-traditional) sexual orientations. Those whose skin is white and whose sexual preferences don’t have a letter of the alphabet attached to them are taken off the hook and thrown back in the water for someone else to catch.
Adding to these dynamics are that the side-effects we’re feeling from the DEI drug aren’t happening quietly, slowly and cautiously, but instead rather loudly, abruptly, and instantaneously. Instead of taking the Martin Luther King Jr. approach of patiently pursuing progress, DEI advocates have taken a Malcom X “by any means necessary” approach to accelerate social equality, and seemingly at any cost. The “Progressives” have now officially left Marx and instead turned to Lenin, seemingly with the attitude that life’s too short to wait for the progress we should have had yesterday. To be sure, this kind of “political correctness” has been around for decades, but today we just have new names for it (“Woke,” “Critical Race Theory,” or “Anti-Racist”) and, more importantly, a new pace (immediately).
But while Cuban’s heart is in the right place, he, like many on the Left, never seem open to acknowledging the side effects of the drugs that they prescribe for us. When someone does call attention to the side effects, those who wrote the prescription almost always instinctively accuse the person of being against fixing the illness. People who criticize government bureaucracy and the aggressive agency-level decisions that have come out of the Biden Administration (or frankly any administration of the last three decades) are tarred as “deep state conspiracy theorists.” Those who highlight the obvious credibility problems in scientific academia (just ask Carole Hooven from Harvard about this) or who didn’t like the lockdowns or vaccine mandates during COVID are “anti-science.” Liberals now often seem to confuse criticism of the implementation of their ideas with criticism of the ideas themselves. The ends have justified the means on the Left, and thus any criticism of the means therefore also means you are criticizing the end. If people like Bill Ackman don’t like DEI, that must mean he’s also in favor of racism, because that's what DEI is trying to combat. That’s just wrong, but it exactly typifies how political debate in 21st century American society goes now.
Another consequence of the Left’s conflation of the means to fix a problem and the problem itself is that it becomes almost impossible not to assume that Liberals are simply choosing to ignore both policies-gone-bad and the side effects of those policies, however pernicious they are. Governmental credibility is critical to getting societal buy-in on fixing social problems, so admitting you were wrong about policies in the past is absolutely crucial for getting buy-in the next time you want to fix another problem. Just like with individuals, if the last five things the government has said are wrong, we’re all less likely to listen the next time they talk. The problem for Liberals is that government credibility has been declining since Vietnam, and it took an additional massive hit during COVID, when Liberal elites aggressively told us that you were racist for believing COVID came from a lab in Wuhan, that you were against science for not wearing masks (unless of course you were protesting for Black Lives Matter, in which case you got a pass), anti-science for not wanting to take the vaccine, and anti-science if you said we shouldn’t lock society down, but instead we should protect the elderly and let everyone else generally go about their lives. Quietly, as the pandemic’s panic has subsided, what many people realized from the reality on the ground during 2020 and 2021 has come true: this was all just baloney. Nobody likes someone who never admits when they’re wrong, but this is exactly the position Liberals in America find themselves in today. What they choose to do next could go a long way not only in solving our problem of partisanship, but in restoring their credibility for future policy debates.
If we’re ever going to have civilized discourse in this country, Liberals have to acknowledge that sometimes the prescriptions they write to cure the ills of society just aren’t the right ones. That could be because the side effects are just too damaging, or, sometimes it could be because the dosages are too high. Sometimes it may even be because the ills just can’t be fixed at all. Thankfully in the case of racial inequality, it’s almost assuredly not the case that we can’t further improve the situation, and importantly, by using means other than DEI. Contrary to what you might have heard, the lives of minorities in America are getting better. Racial inequality will also continue to go away over time, just as it has in say, inter-racial marriage (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/11/same-sex-couple-diversity.html). Except no one has forced white people to marry people in minority groups simply to improve their marriage statistics. Lo and behold, it happened anyway, and that's because the American system works. It just sometimes takes longer to work than some would like. There is simply no reason to think that if given more equal opportunity in the beginning of their lives--particularly in education--that people of color are any less likely or capable of succeeding than anyone else.
Letting the system work of course doesn't mean we should just sit back and do nothing. Reforms are surely appropriate, but policies that don't break the all-important link between effort and reward would make us all a lot better off. DEI does just that. This is why moving vouchers, school vouchers, greater charter, technical and parochial school expansion to foster more educational options and competition, and other policies that allow people of color to lift themselves out of their current situations to a better life are so important. This should be the conservative counter-position to DEI. Hand-ups, not hand-outs, as Bill Clinton once said. Yet it seems as though we hear that rarely from conservatives. They'd rather just complain about the problem rather than solve it.
Stating the reality that sometimes Liberals don’t get the solution to our social ills right doesn’t make those of us who occasionally point this out racists, or that we’re against attempting to fix the ills in the first place. In a republic such as ours, it simply makes us citizens. The more people on the Left refuse to acknowledge their own infallibility in this regard, the more we have to deal with poor civil discourse, and counter-reactions from the Right that produce people like Donald Trump. That isn't good for anybody.
And no doubt about it, sometimes Liberals will also need to stand up and tell conservatives that the side effects are worth it, because the drug is working. To a certain extent, conservatives are likely always going to push back against change. But there needs to be a better balance between good benefits and bad side effects. Oftentimes conservatives think they’re healthier than they are, and that they don’t need the drugs. But they’re doing so because their hearts too are in a good place, just as the Liberals’ are. We have a good thing going in America, and Liberals are often too dismissive of the possibility of messing it up by prescribing drugs that are so radical that they kill the patient instead of fix it. Our little democratic experiment is fragile, and it’s almost broken several times before already. There is no guarantee our grip on it is any tighter than those civilizations who let it slip away in prior eras.
In this particular case, despite the drug certainly working to a certain extent, the level of erosion DEI is causing in the very fabric of our society doesn’t seem to be worth it. DEI is too blunt an instrument for an issue that deserves a scalpel. Rightly or wrongly, the associated taint accompanying many of the hiring (and firing) decisions driven by DEI also brings with it significant added resentment, not only towards the people making the hiring and firing decisions, but regrettably towards the recipients of those hiring and firing decisions as well. There are undoubtedly good arguments about fairness on each side of this debate here, but it’s always amazed me how so many Liberals—supposedly the biggest believers in education—are against trying to fix racial inequality from the ground roots up, that is, through the K-12 education system (and without employing DEI in the K-12 educational system itself), rather than the more disruptive versions of affirmative action we’re now employing. This should be exactly the solution though: level the playing field from the get go, so that we can someday actually say with a straight face that there is something close to "equal opportunity" in America. But we simply can’t have a situation where by the time the DEI “project” is complete, whatever that means, the very society we want underrepresented minorities to be more a part of is compromised and devoid of the very things that makes it tick: hard work, merit, fairness, integrity, and all the like.
You’d be historically naïve to think that once upon a time, we were all completely on team red, white, and blue (i.e. Team USA), and that it’s only recently that we’ve decided to join the red team (Republican) or the blue team (Democrat). But regardless of its intentions, the reality of how DEI has been implemented is exacerbating this “teams” dynamic. Today, there’s not only a red team and a blue team, but a black team, a white team, a Hispanic team, an Asian team, a gay team, a lesbian team, a B team, a T team, and what feels like a hundred other categories of “teams” that have been created in the name of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” If we didn’t have a specific team created in our identity group’s name before, we’re told now, we probably were never really on Team USA before in the first place. And because of that, we probably never really had a fair shot at playing in the game in the first place either. This is the logic of DEI. Rather than trying to make sure that the coaches of team red, white and blue give all of us an equal opportunity to succeed in tryouts, DEI encourages us to divide up into other teams so that no matter what, we all get completely equal playing time, social side-effects be damned.
To carry the sports analogy one leg further, in athletics, we all acknowledge that the referees, umpires and other rules officials sometimes get the calls wrong, but almost no one openly advocates for “make up calls” when they do. Most of us just want the refs to get the calls right going forward, and we actually often mock the refs for their lack of integrity when they do seem to pursue a make-up call. Yet in politics now, because there’s so many teams all arbitrarily put into a false sense of competition with one another, many of us seem to openly advocate this “two wrongs make a right” approach to fix some of our most important problems, including racial inequality. Sadly though, this belief that each team should get “their fair share of the calls” only creates a perpetually vicious cycle of the same “separate by equal” philosophy at the expense of objective umpiring, without which the integrity of the game itself becomes completely compromised. This is just not the way to go.
American liberals could do us all a favor by returning to their progressive roots and learn again to tolerate incremental progress rather than only the revolutionary kind. American history has repeatedly shown that most Americans are ultimately on the side of progress, but how you do things matters. The ends do not always justify the means. Being a revolutionary may feel good in the moment, but the reality of life is people are intractable to even modest change, and that’s just as true in diets or haircuts as it is for social change more generally. The bigger the change, the harder it is to implement. The DEI that Mark Cuban talks about sounds great on paper, but the reality of what DEI has become has transformed it into something that does constitute radical change. With credibility being paramount to getting people to follow your lead, Liberals would do well to acknowledge the negative side effects of the DEI drug so that they have the credibility to give us others we might need in the future.
[2] See FIRE 2024 College Free Speech Rankings for more on this here: https://reports.collegepulse.com/college-free-speech-rankings-2024 and a list of sanctioned here:
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/scholars-under-fire#home/?view_4_search=harvard&view_4_page=1
[3] Something that has gotten a little overlooked is that it took a plagiarism scandal after her congressional testimony to ultimately cause Claudine Gay to step down as president of Harvard, when she essentially said exactly the same things as Penn president Liz Megill did. This raises questions about DEI hypocrisy even further.
[5] https://nypost.com/2021/09/09/larry-elder-egg-throwing-would-be-a-hate-crime-if-i-was-a-democrat/
[6] A search for “Larry Elder” on the New York Times website produces four articles, all of which occurred after the egg-throwing incident. Three were from Tim Arango on September 14th and 15th, and one was from Reid J. Epstein on September 15th. None of those articles mentioned the egg incident.