America's Story of Diversity, Inequity, and Exclusion | Opinion

Here's the tricky thing about the debate about diversity: achieving actual social justice, which I believe most people want, requires balance, and defies facile politics. It is a matter of degree, and therefore it is subjective.

The issue is on fire this week after the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay. Her stumbles on combating antisemitism (only when it "crosses into conduct," she told Congress) and accusations of plagiarism, finally forced her hand. Some think Gay, who is Black, was hounded out by racists, while others argue her incompetence illustrates why diversity hires will destroy civilization.

I'd like to argue for a compromise approach. It is not "the mushy middle," as one senior editor of questionable worth once told me in acid tones, but rather the golden mean.

To oppose diversity efforts altogether—to simply declare that diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) efforts must be killed, as some now do—is to ignore the reality of Americans of African descent. The huge income and wealth gaps between them and the others are unacceptably high more than a century and a half after the abolition of slavery (whites have tenfold the wealth); their ghettoization is corrosive to society; the crime and incarceration rates are—despite improvements—still hugely disproportional); the broken family incidence is unhealthy (about 70 percent of Black kids born out of wedlock).

Unless one believes there is something natural about this disaster—which would indeed be a racist view—then it should be obvious that corrective measures are needed. And there is nothing wrong, per se, with applying corrective measures to a free market; the almost universally accepted concept of progressive taxation, by which the wealthier are taxed at higher marginal rates, is a form of exactly that.

But it is also wrong to ignore the corrosive nature of affirmative action that goes to the extreme advocated by the far left in the United States. There is a veritable cult that not only aims to fix the problems of Black Americans, but to reshape society entirely. Their concerns about self-identification, especially regarding gender, have gone to absurd extremes.

Those uncomfortable with affirmative action can cite the classic liberal view that people should be treated as individuals and judged on their own merit alone, not on unchosen affiliations and tribal attachments they may hardly even desire.

Moreover, it is foolish to claim that quotas and diversity drives might not come at the expense of merit, undermining the tasks at hand. Introducing any filter at all beyond the ability to perform given tasks will affect the other variables, including merit—it's mathematical. A person will rarely be both the tallest and the smartest at the same time; introducing multiple criteria will yield perhaps an optimum, yes, but never a maximum of either.

And that might be OK. Pure merit is an ideal to be found perhaps in heaven—certainly not on earth, where half the world—women—were denied almost all opportunities a mere century ago.

Another argument for some form of affirmative action is that potential merit can be more difficult to prove for people who have never had the opportunity to develop or display that potential—and there are ways to identify it and make up for lost time on the fly. That potential is more important than past achievement should be clear on practical grounds.

Yet a third is that while a given business unit might suffer, the overall benefit to society is enhanced by diversity hiring, and therefore it must be incentivized and encouraged anyway.

We find this latter idea not only in the work of modern thinkers who addressed social justice issues, like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin (who argued that affirmative action is necessary to overcome the legacy of past discrimination), but even in the classics: Aristotle's concept of distributive justice, which focuses on fairness in the distribution of goods and resources; John Stuart Mill's "utilitarian philosophy" arguing that all of society benefits from ensuring the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

I am inclined to accept all of this, but only to a degree. And we have gone beyond what most people over 20 would consider reasonable. That's why there seems to be a slight majority opposing affirmative action. That is the subtext of the furor over Gay's attaining her lofty position and then her resignation under pressure—it feeds the sense of many that diversity has gone berserk.

Is that sense unfair? Well, I have literally seen an extremely senior editorial position go to a person who regularly confused the words "idea" and "ideal"—purely based on diversity. I have seen senior appointments made with the unofficial but rock-solid understanding that the appointee needed to come with a particular chromosome attached, no matter what.

In the final analysis, the way American society has tried to correct past injustices is both strangely insufficient (for the gaps remain huge) and way more than just unpleasant. Every time a straight white man has to admit to these characteristics on the weirdly intrusive modern job applications, suspecting a ploy to flag their application and cast upon it disfavor, something dies inside every old-school liberal. Many straight white men feel shunned—and the openness of it is bizarre. That they are still holding on to majority status in CEO suites overall cannot disguise the dynamic in which they are cast as the beheaded aristocrat.

So, even though I favor a measured form of encouraging diversity, I hope it will be temporary. There is a much better form of levelling the playing field: actually levelling it by investing massively in schools in underprivileged areas, as well as in every kind of program, public or private or mixed, that aims to undo the unfair and damaging legacy of past injustice. Some will say we do this already; they're fooling themselves. We do not do this at the level of the Marshall Plan or with the drive we displayed to put a man on the moon. We do it unseriously and inefficiently.

That I support some corrective action but think we have gone astray, that I write about it, all exposes me to the most horrible calumnies and invective from the far left and might even make me, in some circles, unemployable (or would, if age had not done the trick already). Which brings us to the cancellations abomination.

"People are terrified of saying anything against wokeness out loud," said a genuine liberal who has the traumatic misfortune of being a senior executive in Silicon Valley. My friend fidgeted and whispered as he said it, glancing over his shoulder with deep unease, thousands of miles from colleagues. One can be recorded.

Is he paranoid? Perhaps a little, but not by much. Take that understanding, add to it the idea that children should be in any way encouraged to explore gender-altering surgery, drone on about how everything is racist, and sprinkle on top forgiveness to thieves as long as they come from marginalized groups, and you get otherwise sane people voting for former President Donald Trump.

That may be the most insidious aspect of the whole catastrophe: it is undermining the true cause of social justice by helping the Republicans and driving that party not only to Trump but to a perhaps permanent state of grievance and irrationality. Almost every otherwise decent person I have queried who considers voting for the right cites the culture wars as the reason. Are they being duped by Republican inventions? I do not think so.

That is basically the reason why we ended up with a Supreme Court that in the middle of last year declared unlawful affirmative action in college admissions. How's that working out for you, progressives?

I live abroad, watching this from a distance and observing how outsiders see what's happening in America. They think America has lost its mind—caught between angry white grievance hatemongers who would support Trump on the one hand, and a mirror image of their lunacies on the other. This is how empires crumble.

Dan Perry is managing partner of the New York-based communications firm Thunder11. He is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.