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On DEI [1]

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Date: 2025-04-16

This essay is for the many Republicans who argue against DEI programs because discrimination is discrimination, and we cannot allow it. Unfortunately, few of them will see this on this site.

Is there systemic racism in America? Mountains of studies have shown that people of color are less likely to get into schools, to get jobs, to get mortgages and other loans, to get appropriate health care; they are more likely to be suspended/expelled from schools, to be searched for drugs (even though white people are more likely to actually have drugs) to be arrested for crimes, to be convicted of those crimes, to spend longer times in jail, etc, etc, etc, than otherwise identical white people. Many of these studies are conducted blind, where identical applications are sent in under the name of Peter or Rashaad, and Peter is much more successful. This occurs even if the reader is Black. Other studies show that when Black people get their houses appraised for possible sales they get one value, and if you take the same house but replace the family pictures on the wall with white folks, the value comes back higher. Probably no white person reading this has ever been pulled over by a cop and wondered whether they would survive the encounter; Black people do all the time. I think we all agree that society should not be this way, and we often disagree on what should/could be done to correct it, but it is hard to deny that these facts exist.

We also disagree on what to call this phenomenon, partly because it is point-of view dependent. Imagine there are two guys running a race and one is winning. Describing the same situation, one guy says there is someone behind him, and the other guy says there is someone ahead of him. To a Black person, the first paragraph describes “white privilege.” To a white person, it describes barriers that should not exist for people of color. But they are describing the same situation.*

These things are baked into society, you cannot wish them away or wave a magic wand and make them disappear. It is mostly involuntary and unnoticed, but that slight increase in your pulse rate when a Black man is coming towards you on the sidewalk, the guard who brushes his fingers against his gun when a Black person enters the bank lobby, the fear felt by both the cop and the driver at a traffic stop if the driver is Black, all of these are uncontrollable. Recently I have been playing golf with a Black guy. While I am on the course with him, my mind is saying, look, aren’t I great, here I am with a Black guy treating him exactly the way I would treat a white guy. But I am not, because my mind would not dream of saying that if I were with a white guy.

In today’s society it is virtually impossible to be color blind. Does this mean everything is all about race? Despite efforts by conservatives to put words into our mouths, it is 100% NOT that we are saying that your future depends on your race, and you can’t get out of it so there’s no point in trying. But it does mean that effectively no interactions are devoid of race. No matter what you are doing with whom, there would be at least subtle differences if the person you are with were of a different race than they are. And even if we could turn off race completely, make everything color blind, as conservatives suggest, that would not do it either.

Imagine you are in a Monopoly game. From the beginning Jamaal has been restricted to buying property along the first street. Although he started with as much money as anyone else, he was not allowed to buy anything past the first corner. Through excellent play and an abundance of good luck, Jamaal is still in the game, but just barely—everyone else has 10 times as much money as he does, not through any fault of his own but because no one in the nice areas would sell to him. Suddenly enlightenment comes, and the other players realize they have been discriminating against him all this time. Their solution is to stop discriminating. But Jamaal still has to pay their high rent when he lands on their properties, and they still have to pay his low rent on his. Plus they start with much more money. So although removing all the barriers to his ability to make deals technically makes the playing field even, the reality is that he will lose this game quickly, both because he begins the non-discrimination era with less than everyone else, and because all of the good properties are already owned by other players who continue to make good income from them.

The conservative chorus, that the way to end racism is to end racism, does not end racism. If you really want to do this right, you have to go back in time and allow Jamaal to start over, along with everyone else, with the same stake and no restrictions on his actions. But you can’t go back in time. The next best thing is to recognize that if you could, Jamaal would have today about the same amount of money as everyone else. So to make the game fair now, after hours (centuries) of discrimination, we should even out the amounts everyone has. Reparations.

To really even things out, we would have to take a lot of money/property away from people who personally did nothing wrong, although they clearly are where they are today because of the actions of long-dead people. I don’t believe America has the political will to do this thoroughly, and one could make a case that we should not (although the case that we should is likely stronger). What we are talking about is wealth redistribution, which is a dirty word to conservatives. Why are you taking money away from people who earned it? But as the monopoly game shows, they did not earn it fair and square, and would have less if they (meaning their ancestors) had played fairly. Indeed, the real redistribution happened in the past, it was an upward redistribution and it benefitted us white people. What we are suggesting here is un-redistributing it to set things right.

Now I know this is a non-starter. The whole point of this essay is not to argue for giving massive amounts of money to Black families, although there is a case to be made for doing just that. My point is simply that fixing the rules and doing nothing else does NOT fix the problem, and we need to make some allowance to people of color to correct for past discrimination. If we can agree in principle that stopping discrimination completely at time Y still leaves previously discriminated-against people at a disadvantage, then we can begin a productive conversation about what kind of allowances should be made for that past discrimination so that their families have the same chances as ours going forward.

I want to add here that not only does “ending racism” not end racism, as I have argued above, it actually makes things worse, because by declaring an end to racism, we white people can continue to reap the benefits of a society that was rigged in our favor without feeling the need to do anything about it, while people of color continue to suffer, starting at the time of the declaration that racism is over, and through no fault of their own, from having less, living in poorer neighborhoods with worse schools, etc, etc, etc, but now with fewer prospects of seeing the problems corrected because “they already have been.”

So, Republicans, when you tell us that we may not use race in hiring and admissions decisions, that is precisely the characteristic that was used for generations to create the current unbalanced representation of people in jobs and student populations, and correcting that is precisely the purpose of the laws that were written. When you tell us that certain categories of people do not exist, when they are standing in front of you, that is precisely the kind of discrimination that the laws were written to prevent. And Mr. president, just because you sign a piece of paper saying that your interpretation of the law is correct, does not make it so. In this country, it is the courts who decide the meaning of laws.

*The term “white privilege” was not intended to make white people feel guilty; it is simply a way to say “those people are ahead of me in this race because they started ahead of me, not because they ran faster.” And the white people who are ahead, they followed the rules: they went to the starting line they were assigned and started running when the signal sounded. Hard to blame them for being ahead, it was their ancestors who determined the starting lines. Now it is true that some people, when they discover the reality of this situation, feel guilty about it, but it should not be (and I think in most cases it is not) a feeling that they themselves did something wrong, it is more guilt that people in the past (some of whom we might be related to) were really mean. And hopefully, it leads to an urge to make things better in the present. Frankly, this is what “critical race theory” is all about, I think, and I do not see how learning the truth of what happened in the past to bring us to our current reality can be harmful.

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