How to stop the new “anti-racism racism”:

I am non-racial.  When you call me “X” (white, black, yellow, red or whatever) that is just a social construct. 
I do not identify as “X”.  I am not a member of that or any category.

Lynn Uzzell writes at Real Clear Politics Three Words to Defeat CRT: ‘I Am Non-Racial’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.  

Their apparent political success notwithstanding, foes of CRT warn that the only way to defeat the menace is through political activism, fundraising, and a cascade of litigation. And even then, they fear, the juggernaut that is CRT has become too powerful a force to be overcome in our public schools.

But there is a far simpler solution, and one that promises better success in the long run. It can be achieved through three simple words: “I am non-racial.”

For the past 20 years, CRT has achieved enormous success in placing race at the center of public discourse and convincing otherwise rational people that their race is the most important facet of their identity. If a substantial mass of Americans refused to identify as any race, the whole project would collapse.

Identifying as non-racial is morally right, politically expedient, socially advantageous, and it has the added benefit of conforming one’s identity to the racial reality of America.

The Morality of Being Non-Racial

Most of us, when we were little, were taught to believe that it was immoral to judge people according to their race. We were urged to share Martin Luther King’s famous dream, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” We understood that the dream was not fully realized in America, but nearly everyone felt committed to working toward that goal.

Critical race theory teaches a contrary vision of morality. It deliberately rejects the goal of a race-blind society. Authors of one textbook on CRT express their “deep dissatisfaction with traditional civil rights discourse.” They wish to replace it with an “explicit embrace of race-consciousness,” especially “among African-American and other peoples of color.”

This particular feature of the theory—the deliberate heightening of race consciousness—has been the most prominent aspect of CRT in schools today. One school district in Oregon has developed a “white identity development” strategy, because, after all, what could go wrong when white people are segregated from others and trained to view themselves as a unique interest group?

CRT has been remarkably successful in encouraging greater race-consciousness throughout America’s institutions. Use of the terms “racist” and “racism” have skyrocketed in the mainstream media in the last 15 years, especially in leading newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times.

The moral choice is clear: Either we are aiming for a society where race no longer matters, or we are aiming for a society where race consciousness predominates. If the lessons we imbibed when we were young were correct, then refusing to identify as any race is the next logical step toward achieving true racial justice and harmony.

The Political Expedience of Being Non-Racial

American policy and public discourse have been focused on race for so long that it is easy to forget that it doesn’t have to be this way. France has long maintained an official stance of color-blindness: a law passed in 1978 explicitly bans most collections and computerized storage of race-based data.

In America, the collection of racial data is still voluntary, though it has become ubiquitous. But the march of CRT would be stopped dead in its tracks if Americans would stop volunteering any answer to the question of racial identity beyond “non-racial.” Imagine how transformative that option would be.

Schoolchildren could not be taught that they are “oppressors” on the basis of their “whiteness” if parents insist that their family opposes categorizing people by race and that their children do not identify as white.

Currently, the “Asian American penalty” means that Asians are significantly less likely to be accepted into elite universities than any other race, and it’s getting worse. California’s recent decision to do away with admissions tests for its UC schools is a barely disguised effort to reduce the number of “overrepresented” Asians admitted there. But the Asian American penalty would instantly evaporate if these students chose to be non-racial instead.

Seattle would not be able to hold training sessions exclusively for “city employees who identify as white” in order to teach them about their “complicity in the system of white supremacy,” if city employees, and all employees, would instead identify as non-racial.

Obviously, not everyone would benefit in the short term from the “non-racial” category. Currently, students, applicants, and workers who officially identify as historically marginalized races reap tangible benefits in admission, hiring, and professional advancement. And it is too much to ask that everyone would be willing to give up those privileges immediately. But in the long run, even those who now stand to benefit from the current brand of racialism will begin to see the benefits of working towards a truly post-racial society.

The Social Advantages of Being Non-Racial

Over the same period that CRT has achieved institutional hegemony in America, race relations have gotten much worse. As Charles Murray has shown, in just seven years—between 2013 and 2020—“Americans’ perceptions of race relationships had gone from solidly optimistic to solidly pessimistic.”

Correlation is not always causation, but in this case it is. Racial discord is not an unintended consequence of CRT; it is its lifeblood. As reductionist history, CRT teaches that America’s past and its essence are tethered to the unremitting march of white supremacy. As a reductionist political agenda, CRT teaches that underprivileged races must seize and redistribute the property and power hitherto accumulated by whites.

This teaching not only stokes racial competition, enmity, and grievance. It cannot survive without them. Just as Marxism is sustained by class conflict, CRT feeds off of racial conflict. If total racial harmony were ever achieved in this country—if all Americans of every race were ever to clasp hands in brotherly love—CRT would wither away and die.

The more that this hyper-racialized theory takes hold in our country, the more it drives a wedge between us and our in-laws, nephews, nieces, and neighbors.

Renouncing racial identities does not mean renouncing other social, religious and political identities that can actually draw us closer together. Those who choose to be non-racial do not have to give up celebrating Chinese New Year, St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, or Ethiopian Timkat. It simply means refusing to be subsumed under a contrived category that has always been more divisive than cohesive in America.

The Reality of Being Non-Racial

Although there is much to criticize in CRT, it contains some kernels of truth. In particular, it recognizes that race is “socially constructed (the idea of biological race is ‘false’)”; nevertheless, race has always been very “real” as an instrument of power.

Indeed, whatever scant biological reality might once have been attached to the idea of dividing humanity by races centuries ago, when peoples were divided by continents, race has never been a scientific way of categorizing the people who inhabit the United States. Take, as Exhibit A, the uniquely American and invidious “one-drop rule,” whereby a single ancestor from Africa could condemn a person to chattel slavery or to a subordinate caste. Racial categories in America have never been anything more than cynical attempts to advance one group’s interests over others.

Yet this acknowledgement of the unnaturalness of racial distinctions potentially posed a problem for CRT. Did it not follow that “it is theoretical and politically absurd to center race as a category of analysis or as a basis for political action,” if that category was nothing more than an artificial construct?

It is on this question that CRT takes a sharp turn against the traditional liberal order. Believing that systems ostensibly founded on the rule of law or meritocracy are actually blinds for consolidating and protecting structures of racial privilege (even if the racial categories benefiting from that privilege are arbitrary and artificial), CRT openly advocates distributing wealth, power, and privileges according to race (even if the newly privileged racial categories are based on no less arbitrary and artificial distinctions).

Hence, according to this logic, it makes perfect sense for Harvard to claim blue-eyed Sen. Elizabeth Warren as a diversity hire—even if her racial identity is based on no more than family lore and DNA evidence showing that her bloodlines can boast between 1/64 and 1/1032 indigenous ancestry. Today, we’re seeing one-drop redux in America. But now that single drop is being used to confer social, political, and economic advancement instead of stigma and exclusion.

According to this logic, even Rachel Dolezal’s choice to pass as black makes sense. If something as meaningless as a single drop can determine one’s racial status, why insist even on that single drop?

By refusing to identify as any race, we can stop this madness.

Choosing to be non-racial conforms to racial reality in this country. Most Americans, looking backwards toward their ancestors, see a mélange of nationalities, ethnicities, and races. Looking sideways, our own families are more racially diverse than ever before. And peering into the future, racial categorizations in America will become ever more absurd with every generation. It’s high time that our self-identities matched our objective reality.

Of course, we can expect that the same people who agree that race lacks any objective reality will also resist any attempts to banish self-identifications by race. And won’t it be ironic if the folks who insist that individuals be given the option to select “non-binary” when asked to choose between male and female are the same folks who object to the choice of “non-racial” when asked to choose a mere social construct?

Being Non-Racial in Practice

Our local school district’s anti-racism policy is just one example of the sort of policies being adopted across the country. It requires staff to “collect, review, and provide an annual report to the School Board on data regarding racial disparities in … student achievement.” The report must “also include evidence of growth” in reducing “equity gaps.”

Obviously, one way to reduce disparities between racial groups is to improve the academic achievement of historically under-performing races. However, parents beware: This aim can be achieved equally well—and at much less cost and effort—by diminishing the academic achievement of historically “over-performing” races. The goal of boosting one or more races’ standing—not in absolute terms, but only relative to the standing of other races—is wholly unrelated to, and potentially at odds with, the vocation of educating all children.

It may seem unfair to suppose that teachers and administrators might try to meet their “equity” goals by sacrificing the educational achievement of any portion of their students. Then again, it seems even more unfair that teachers—who have a hard enough job educating our youth—are now expected to single-handedly fix entrenched social problems that no one else has been able to solve.

Forcing schoolchildren to confess to “white privilege” is the poisonous fruit of CRT, and it’s understandable that such ripe, juicy stories receive the most notice. But the noxious weed invading our schools spreads underground, and parents could cut it off at the roots if they took the simple expedient of refusing to allow their children to be classified by race from the outset.

The beginning of the school year is an excellent opportunity to make this change.

Parents, remember, whenever you are asked to identify a race for you or your children, the most ethical and judicious answers are “Decline to answer,” “Other,” or “Non-racial.” Teach your children while they are yet babes: You are non-racial. Inoculate them early against the disease of racialism that has infected the schools, the universities, and the workplace. Don’t let anyone else saddle them with a racialized identity that will haunt them throughout their lives.

Lynn Uzzell is Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University. She specializes in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the political thought of James Madison.

Julius Reuchel writes at substack The Emperor Has No Clothes: Finding the Courage to Break the Spell.  Excerpts in italics with my  bolds.

To all the silent good people watching our society tear itself in two, this essay is for you.

Those in charge have long since signalled that they have no intention of returning to a liberal democracy founded on the recognition of inalienable individual rights and freedoms. If data were the ingredient required to confront them, they would have folded long ago. They are impervious to data. This isn’t about a virus. This is a psychological game and it’s all about power and control.

In this Brave New World, the regime will grant temporary conditional privileges tied to virus seasonality, good behaviour, or whatever other conditions they choose to set to achieve the social engineering agenda of the day. Once they opened Pandora’s Box to a society based on conditional rights, there is no limit to where their imaginations will take them.

How do we stop this neo-feudal re-imagining of society? How do we play chicken with a regime that appears to hold all the cards? At this point it is clear that regaining our freedom depends entirely on the government losing the support of the crowd. To use the words of Hans Christian Andersen’s timeless folktale from 1837, we need to shake our frightened fellow citizens out of their stupor by getting them to see that “the emperor has no clothes” but, more importantly, we need everyone who sees it to be willing to say it out loud.

So, in this essay, I am going to dissect the psychology of dissent.

Winning Hearts and Minds – How to Open the Mind to Doubts

Data plays an important role in changing hearts and minds, but only as a secondary ingredient.
We are fighting a psychological battle, not an intellectual one.

Data will help those who start to ask questions, but first they need to ask their first question. First there needs to be a seed of doubt. Data will not plant that seed of doubt. Data does not have the power to break the spell.

A frightened mind seeks certainty because certainty feels safe, which is why a frightened mind rejects anything that undermines the feeling of certainty. Uncertainty is scary. This desire for certainty makes people savagely hostile to conflicting data and capable of entertaining the wildest of logical fallacies. The facts simply do not matter to their feelings. People only begin to seek out data after the spell begins to break. Something else must first plant that initial seed of doubt.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable so if it cannot be pushed aside, then and only then will the mind enlist rational thought processes to work through the dilemma in order to regain a sense of certainty. That is the psychological game we need to play. We need to create the sense of uncertainty that forces our frightened peers to enlist their rational minds. Once doubt sets in, the data will take them the rest of the way.

Thus, the willingness to look at data is merely the second step along each individual person’s journey to recognizing that the emperor has no clothes. Much of our effort in this battle for our freedom has been focused on that second step. More data. But the first step along that path requires planting the initial seed of doubt. How do you seed doubt without data?

The simple reality is that this first step is fought with symbolism, with herd psychology, and with the courage to bear the cost of speaking out when others will not. Navigating this first step is the focus of this essay because that is where we are falling short.

To plant a seed of doubt, to help people take that first step, it is not what you say that matters so much as being seen to say it, out loud, in public, in a way that allows you to be identified and counted, and being willing to face the music when the world can see what you really think. And saying it over and over again, relentlessly, until enough voices join in, until the counter chorus can no longer be dismissed as fringe.

Doubt is created by breaking the illusion of consensus.

This first seed of doubt happens on a deeply subconscious emotional level. There are three different ways that it can happen:

Many only start to ask questions after getting their first COVID vaccination. As they begin to feel safe, they regain their ability to think, which gives rise to questions and doubts. It is why the regime is creating a hyperventilating drumbeat about “variants” and stoking hysteria about the unvaccinated. The regime is trying to keep the vaccinated in fear in order to prevent them from regaining their ability to see clearly and think independently.

Doubt can also be created when someone’s personal experience doesn’t match the propaganda that they’ve been fed. The regime is fighting that part of the battle for us. When someone is injured by a vaccine, sees a loved one trapped in isolation in a nursing home, or is at risk of losing their business to lockdowns, doubt in the narrative begins to creep in. There is only so much pain that anyone can bear before their certainty in the regime begins to waiver.

And doubt can be created simply by depriving someone of the illusion of consensus. Remember Hans Christian Andersen’s folk tale. It was a child that broke the illusion because it was unafraid to say out loud that the emperor’s fine gown didn’t exist, that he was wearing nothing at all. Data didn’t break the illusion. All it took was a pointed finger, a well-timed laugh, and the courage to speak out.

Doubt creates conflicting emotions that can only be resolved by enlisting the rational mind. Doubt leads the mind to seek out data, not the other way around. The regime is doing everything it can to prevent the fearful from thinking. This is a psychological war.

This is a war about the role of government. It is about your freedom to think, to speak, and to ask questions, and about whether your individual autonomy is downgraded to a conditional privilege or whether it remains a right. It is a war about whether you are to remain a citizen or become a subject. It is about who owns you, you or the state.

The question at the forefront of this psychological battle, accelerated by the lens of COVID, is about whether we will remain a society based on legal equality and inalienable rights or whether, in the name of safety, equity, and political correctness, we will allow ourselves to be reduced to a society of masters and servants, as was the norm throughout much of human history, with the masters granting or withdrawing conditional privileges to pursue whatever they perceive as the greater good.

To have a psychological impact, you have to voice your dissent in person, out there in the real world where the risk of repercussions is real. Where you can make eye contact while you are doing it. At work, at home, at school, at church, at the gym, at the mall, and out on the street. You have to say it where those who disagree with you can see you saying it. You have to be the little boy who stood in front of the crowd and pointed at the emperor’s lack of clothes. That is how democracy works in its rawest form when the institutions of liberal democracy cease to function.

Words are not violence. Words are 100% peaceful, no matter how much you disagree with them or how much you are offended by them. But censorship in any form is a form of implied violence because, without your voice, you are held hostage by your censor and have no peaceful means of self-defence.

A liberal democracy cannot function in an atmosphere of censorship. Brute force begins with censorship. Allowing yourself or others to be silenced ushers in a world where the only means of self defense is through brute force. That is what is currently being normalized under the guise of saving the world from COVID.

History shows that once the norms of a liberal democracy give way to brute force politics, even if the regime does change hands, those that emerge on top are themselves rarely champions of freedom and tolerance. The only way to prevent brute force politics from becoming normalized is if the good people refuse to shut up. So, this is not just a war against bad people with bad ideas, it is equally a war to defend the only system ever invented that gives citizens autonomy over their own bodies, minds, and voices, along with the mechanism to defend that autonomy through peaceful means.

Our opponents are well aware of the power of conformity and are using it to their advantage. Do not mistake their feigned ignorance about basic medical facts as stupidity. Do not mistake the media’s blockade of dissenting views as ignorance. They all know the game they are playing. Why do you think they are so careful to avoid any debate about the data?

The desire for conformity is one of the most powerful emotions in the human species. It is our natural herd instinct – our hive mind – asserting itself. We are a social creature. Safety lies in numbers. Our herd instinct is so strong that when the dominoes line up just right, it can lead us into blind groupthink, cults, and mass hysterias in defiance of all rational logic. The rational mind is a thin crust perched precariously on a much larger, highly emotional, subconscious neurological tool kit. Conformity is the subconscious search for safety. We are wired to seek safety at the center of the herd even when that conformity is leading us straight over a cliff.

If you have never seen the videos of the Asch Conformity Experiments, take the time to watch this brief clip before reading further. It is one of the keys to fighting the psychological battle to regain our freedoms.

Currently the regime is manufacturing an illusion of consensus to use herd instinct as a means of control. But the moment we deprive the herd of the comfort of consensus, we will be in the driver’s seat. Breaking the illusion of consensus is what will give us the power to force the herd to think for itself. That is why it is so important that the silent good people speak out.

We don’t need to agree with one another to challenge the regime. We don’t need to speak with one voice. To break the illusion, we simply need enough people to speak out in disagreement of the “consensus”.

The Ash Conformity Experiments taught us that even a single person standing up in a room will give others with doubts the courage to speak out. Breaking the illusion begins with a single voice. But for a phenomenon as global as the current mass hysteria, it will take more than a few voices to create a loud enough counter-chorus to break the spell.

As the counter-chorus becomes more visible, the regime has no choice but to ramp up or lose the illusion of consensus it has manufactured. This traps the regime in a catch-22 in which doing nothing allows the counter-chorus to reach that 10% tipping point but doing something increases the pain so quickly that it erodes its support base. Visibility puts us in the driver’s seat because it traps the regime in that untenable catch-22.

A slow consolidation of power allows the regime to strip our freedoms slowly enough that the crowd becomes accustomed to its own subjugation. That is why they keep letting off a little pressure after a period of control. They are teaching us to accept the bridle of our serfdom.

The actions taken by our government made it clear, “if you want to practice medicine or pursue an academic career in Canada, toe the line by self-censoring or we will destroy your reputation and come after your career.” If this is allowed to go unchallenged, it will mark the end of academic freedom and professional discretion in Canada. The regime is watching, waiting to gauge the response.

Publishing more data won’t fix this. The regime doesn’t care about data. And frightened members of the crowd will never look at it. In this game, more data is the equivalent of silence. More data is the nod of consent.

The only way to confront this is for the silent good doctors, medical professionals, and academic professionals to publicly stand up and speak out, on principle, to break the illusion of consensus that has been cultivated by our public health authorities and media. The silent good doctors must speak out to signal that the censorship of Dr. Christian was wrong, that they will not be cowed by the regime’s treatment of Dr. Christian, that scientific questions should be settled through debate and not through sanctions, and that they have lost faith in our public health authority’s ability to function as an evidence-based policymaking institution.

I hear rumors that up to 50% of medical professionals are not okay with the public health response. I also hear rumors that outspoken doctors who faced a deluge of ridicule and chastisement from peers in the early days of the pandemic are now rapidly seeing that criticism fade away. I have no way of gauging if those rumors are correct, but it suggests that the tide is turning in the medical community and that the numbers have long since crossed the 10% threshold needed to break the illusion. If only they were all willing to step out from behind a veil of anonymity and say it out loud.

The Soft Underbelly of the Regime Is Exposed

In Quebec, the healthcare system is already on the brink of collapse (see my Twitter thread) because of a mass exodus of staff quitting the system during COVID. Some hospitals have already lost over 50% of their staff.

Anecdotal reports from other provinces show they are not far behind. There has never been a time when medical professionals have had more leverage to force a revival of scientific debate and evidence-based policymaking. And there has never been a better time speak out in defense of Dr. Christian.

Public health officials cannot afford to alienate more doctors and nurses. They cannot afford alienating or firing a horde of outspoken disgruntled medical professionals. The soft underbelly of the regime is exposed.

In short, as long as enough medical professionals speak out, now is the time that they have the upper hand in this game of brinksmanship. Now is the time that they can throw off both bridle and saddle and take back their professional and academic freedoms. The window of opportunity to rescue the system from itself is now. But only if enough of silent good doctors break their silence.

[Note Reuchel is focused on the Covid tyranny, but there are three cudgels beating on free enterprise democracies:  Covid, Climate and Racism. See also: Climate Reductionism]

Heather Mac Donald explains the origins and preoccupations of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE).  Whoops, I mean Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)  which is now an academic degree you can acquire.  Her Quillette article is Almost Four Decades After Its Birth, The Diversity Industry Thrives on Its Own Failures.

The diversity business originated in 1984, when R. Roosevelt Thomas, a Harvard business school graduate, founded the American Institute for Managing Diversity at Morehouse College. Corporations had been practicing affirmative action for years, but the women and minorities whom employers had hired to meet equal-opportunity obligations weren’t advancing up the career ladder in acceptable numbers. Thomas came up with a novel explanation. The problem wasn’t that preferentially admitted recruits were underqualified; the problem was that their supervisors didn’t know how to “manage diversity.” It was those supervisors who needed remedial training—lots of it—not the affirmative-action beneficiaries themselves.

Managerial expectations about merit and performance often reflected cultural prejudices, Thomas and the consultants who followed him insisted. “‘Qualifications’ is a code word in the business world with very negative connotations,” a consultant with the professional-services firm of Towers Perrin (as it was then called) said in 1993. If minorities don’t meet existing employment criteria, then corporations need to expand their definition of what it means to be employable, said Alan Richter, creator of the 1991 board game, The Diversity Game. Promptness, precision, and a cogent communications style were among the attributes that diversity advisors deemed likely expendable.

A lucrative new consulting practice was born, its growth driven by a constant churn in terminology. “Valuing diversity” was different from “managing diversity.” Each newly spawned phrase came with a cadre of high-priced tutors. Lewis Griggs currently offers video trainings in such subjects as “Communicating Across Differences,” “Supervising and Managing Differences,” and “Creating, Managing, Valuing, and Leveraging Diversity,” with each video purporting to contain specialized content appropriate for different parts of an organization.

“Diversity” was eventually joined by “inclusion.” “Equity” was then added, thus yielding today’s DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) triumvirate (sometimes also going as “EDI”). The most cutting-edge organizations have lately appended a “B” (for Belonging), as at the Juilliard School in New York City. Distinguishing these terms is a core function of diversity training—and now, at Bentley, of diversity scholarship. The university’s new DEI major, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, will help graduates understand the “nuances of and differences between diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice.”

Even by 1993, half of Fortune 500 companies had a designated diversity officer, and 40 percent of American companies had instituted diversity training. Diversity conferences were occurring regularly, attracting government and business attendees. And yet many reporters, academics, corporate consultants, and activists still insist that managers not only fail to “value diversity,” but remain complicit in creating a dangerous environment for women and racial minorities.

Example: Levi Strauss & Co., which was recognized on Forbes’s list of “Best Employers for Diversity” in 2019. The company itself boasts: “In the 1960s, we integrated our factories a decade before it was required by law. In the early 1980s, we joined the fight against HIV/AIDS early on. Furthermore, our president and CEO, Chip Bergh, was one of the first company leaders to join the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion™ [in 2017], and has been on the front lines of efforts to protect Dreamers knowing that diversity and inclusivity makes our company better and our country stronger (after all, Levi Strauss himself was an immigrant).”

And yet the situation for minority employees at Levi Strauss is still so dire that the company has been hosting racially segregated healing sessions with professional mental health experts. As the Washington Free Beacon recently reported, its chief executive for DEI is trying to provide a “safe space for employees to express themselves” without feeling “triggered.”

Bentley University itself has yet to yield dividends from its longstanding diversity efforts. The school has been “working for decades on issues, challenges, and opportunities” pertaining to diversity, according to its Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Over 900 faculty and administrators have attended two-day diversity retreats; numerous committees, departments, and offices have focused on improving the school’s “diversity climate.” Bentley even has its own diversity consulting outfit, the Center for Women and Business, which advises employees and managers on such diversity pitfalls as being a mere “performative ally” of oppressed colleagues (as opposed to an active ally).

And yet, despite this effort, a Bentley Racial Justice Task Force recently found that the campus still did not understand how “race and racism” operate at the university. So difficult is it to be a diverse member of Bentley that the task force, formed in July 2020, began with a moment of “restoration,” providing to all “those who had been traumatized” at the school a “time to heal” and a time to “process the pain of racial injustice.”

One of Bentley’s biggest failings, according to the task force, has been its “false confidence” in “objectivity and meritocracy.” These are the norms of a “historically and predominantly white institution (HWI/PWI),” per the task force members. Typical of HWIs/PWIs, Bentley does not pay sufficient attention to the “systemic inequality” that such white norms engender. Equally dismaying, many students and professors apparently would rather study subjects other than racism, the task force lamented, thereby betraying their “lack of understanding about why the study of race is critical to the creation of a full academic experience.”

Diversity industry proponents would argue that white supremacy is simply too ingrained in America’s institutions to be rooted out within a mere three to four decades of diversity work.

But another possible reason why diversity training has not met its stated goals is that the field is intellectually bankrupt: Its practitioners peddle empty verbiage to fix a problem that is largely imaginary. I asked Bentley’s press office what the difference is between “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The answer was a dodge: “Rather than give students one particular view of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice, Bentley’s DEI major encourages students to compare and contrast approaches to diversity, equity, inclusion and justice from across disciplines and perspectives and show how they intersect with one another.” Other questions—how the school defines a “real discipline,” what are the core texts of this new discipline, and why Bentley’s decades of diversity work have not lessened the school’s purported racism—were ignored entirely.

Bentley sociologist Gary David says that “more and more studies have shown” that diversity training and DEI perspectives make “good business sense.” But this oft-asserted claim rests on a few studies of dubious experimental design, lacking control groups. The one thing diversity trainees reliably learn is how to answer post-training survey questions “in the way the training said they ‘should,’” reports sociologist Musa al-Gharbi. As for actually changing behaviors in a diversity-approved direction, the training is not only ineffective, it is often counterproductive, according to al-Gharbi.

Far from being institutionally racist, Bentley University, like virtually every other American college today, is filled with well-meaning adults who want all their students to succeed. Corporations, law firms, Big Tech, and government agencies are bending over backwards to hire and promote as many underrepresented minorities (i.e., blacks and Hispanics) as possible. If the number of those minorities in a college or business organization is not proportional to their population share, that underrepresentation is due first and foremost to the academic skills gap. Mention of the skills gap is taboo in diversity circles, but it is real—repeatedly documented by the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, the SAT, the LSAT, the GREs, the GMAT, and the MCAT—and it is consequential.

Hiring based on any extraneous selection criterion inevitably lowers the average qualifications of the resulting employee group. Hiring based on race entails a particularly significant deviation from a meritocratic ideal, since the only reason why color-conscious hiring is implemented in the first place is that merit hiring often fails to produce a critical mass of black and Hispanic employees. In essence, the diversity conceit is a perpetual motion machine: If underqualified diversity hires are promoted out of diversity pressure, resentment and obfuscation follow. If they hit a glass ceiling, accusations of bias are inevitable. In either situation, a diversity consultant is waiting in the wings to teach managers that their expectations and standards are racist.

The increasing power of college diversity bureaucrats over academic affairs since the 1990s has been stunning. Diversity vice-chancellors oversee faculty hiring searches, mandate quotas regarding whom search committees may interview, and sometimes even mandate quotas regarding whom they must hire. Chief inclusion officers track departmental race and sex demographics, pressuring department chairs to correct diversity deficits. Associate provosts for diversity coordinate campaigns for required courses on identity and grievance within the curriculum. Deans of inclusion teach students to recognize their place on the great totem pole of victimization. Vice presidents for equity monitor campus speech, on the lookout for punishable microaggressions. Senior advisors on race and community lead crusades against faculty who have allegedly threatened the safety of campus victim groups through non-orthodox statements regarding race and sex.

Now that the fictions underpinning this enterprise are being enshrined as an academic discipline, the possibility that the university will return to its status as an institution dedicated to the unfettered search for knowledge—and even, dare one say it, objectivity and meritocracy—will grow yet more remote.