Identity Politics Threatens The Achievement Of A Genuinely Color-Blind Society
By
Allan C.Brownfeld
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Those of us who remember the years of segregation, particularly those of us who lived in the South at the time, recognize that the American society has been transformed.
If anyone suggested, in the years I was in college in the segregated South, that we would live to see a black president and that black officials would serve in positions such as Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Justice of the Supreme Court, we would have been told that we were mad. At that time a black person could not get a cup of coffee anyplace but at one or two “blacks only” establishments.
The goal of the civil rights movement, which included men and women of goodwill of all races, was to achieve a genuinely color-blind society in which, as the Rev.Martin Luther King, Jr. declared, men and women would be judged on the “content of their character,” not “the color of their skin.”
In 1980-81, I served as a member of President Ronald Reagan’s transition team for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and wrote the report of policy recommendations for the new administration. The chairman of the transition team was J.A. Parker,who,headed the Lincoln Institute. He was a leading black advocate for the creation of a genuinely color-blind society. Our report called for an end to race-based quota systems of any kind and urged that men and women be judged on the basis of individual merit and achievement, not race.
We have made notable progress in this regard. But problems still remain, as the police shootings of George Floyd and others have shown us. In recent days, many who previously shared the goal of creating a genuinely color-blind society seem to have altered their position and now pursue a kind of identity politics, using the terms “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)” to characterize their goals.
Various DEI programs are now being challenged in court. Employees in various institutions are required to attend what are called “anti-bias training sessions.” The Washington Post reported about the case of Joshua Young, a corrections officer in the Colorado prison system. According to the Post, “He was shocked by the lessons of the anti-bias training session he was required to attend in March 2021. With its references to ‘white supremacy,’ ‘white exceptionalism,’ and ‘white fragility,’ the training sent a clear and disturbing message to his mind: All white people are racist.”
Young sued with a number of others, alleging that workplace bias trainings tread on their civil rights. The cases are part of a broader legal and political backlash that has targeted an array of DEI programs, Of the 59 cases across the country, six challenge the legality of the trainings, according to a database compiled by New York University’s Meltzer Centrr.
Consider the case involving Penn State Abington, a campus just north of Philadelphia. The case was filed by English professor Zack De Piero, who claimed he was discriminated against for being white. In August 2020, De Piero says he was forced to watch a presentation captioned, “White teachers are the problem.” During a breathing exercise the same year,De Piero claims that white and other non-black faculty were told to hold their breath longer than black faculty members so they could “feel the pain.”
In January, a federal judge in Pennsylvania allowed De Piero’s claim to proceed, writing that the trainings “discussed racial issues in essentialist and deterministic terms—-ascribing negative traits to white people or white teachers without exception and as flowing inevitably from their race.”
Now, in at least 22 states, the legislature has enacted legislation, or public universities have set policies prohibiting or modifying DEI measures at state university systems, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Among the earliest restrictions on DEI came in the 2023 legislation in North Dakota that prohibits asking students and prospective employees about their commitment to DEI. Florida followed last year with a law that does away with DEI. Alabama in 2024 enacted a law restricting public employees from being forced to agree with diversity statements, including the idea that,by virtue of an individual’s race, color, religion,sex,or national origin, “the individual is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted in May to shift $2.3 million of DEI spending to public safety and policing on campus. Then, the entire University of North Carolina system Board of Governors declared, “We voted to abolish DEI policies in place since 2019 at all 17 of its campuses.” At the University of Texas, anti-DEI legislation led the system to eliminate 30 positions and to cut diversity training programs.
A 2023 survey by Pew Research Center found that 52% of employed U.S. adults say they have DEI tracings or meetings at work and 33% say they have a designated staff member who,promotes DEI. In the view of MIT president Sally Kornbluth ,”We can build an inclusive environment in many ways,but compelled statements impinge on freedom of _expression_ and they don’t work.”
Ryan P.Williams, president of the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, states that, “The words that the acronym ‘DEI’ represent sound nice, but it is nothing more than affirmative action by a different name,a system that features racial headcounts and arbitrarily assigned roles of ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed groups in America.’ If we continue to do democracy this way, it will only end in acrimony, strife, resentment and American collapse.”
For those of us who remember segregation, counting everyone by race as DEI does,looks very familiar. Finally, let us do what men and women of good will have always advocated, judge individuals on their own unique merits—-on the “content of their character,” not “the color of their skin.”
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