Organic DEI

Discussion

Steven Lawrence:

"In the year 2023 alone, a growing number of institutions, state legislatures, and local governments throughout the United States and other English-speaking countries are dropping DEI frameworks altogether, adopting instead a more merit-based approach that focuses on building equality of opportunity for all people, rather than equality of outcomes that are often enforced by policies of positive discrimination in which groups that are deemed marginalized are provided opportunities ahead of demographic groups that are deemed privileged by followers of identity-based Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories.

But, I think we need to be careful not to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

We can and should critique and even remove DEI programs that rest exclusively on the principles and practices of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories of race, gender, class and other sociocultural identities, as they often lead to inter-group resentments and potential legal entanglements due to the unfairness of such principles and practices. But, while we may need to roll back some of these practices, we should continue to strive for inclusiveness to the best of our ability in our public and private policies, practices, laws, institutions, and societal norms.

As a longtime educator in both the private and public sectors—and as a person who has served in what the Department of Interior’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Civil Rights has designated as Minority Serving Institutions (MSI)—I can confidently attest to the need for our educational institutions to attend to the specific needs and rights of students from all backgrounds, including students of color, LGBTQ students, women, men, and all others.

We can do this by adopting more organic approaches to DEI. To do this effectively, we need to work consciously at avoiding the dogmatic ideological approaches that justify punitive and retributive interpersonal abuse against disfavored demographic groups, the double standards for hiring and job performance that has been adopted by an increasingly large number of institutions and companies, and the commitment insisted upon by some of the most vocal advocates of CSJ to applying interpretive absolutism in the analysis of all interactions between people categorized as belonging to marginalized and privileged identity groups.

By rigidly clinging to the pre-formed belief that bigotry and bias are the only explanatory factors in the outcomes of these interactions or in the life prospects of different communities, we close ourselves off from more accurate, or at least more complete, interpretations of scenarios and the possibility of finding optimal solutions to the problems we want to solve.

And, as many on all sides of the social and political spectrum will agree, the classroom from Kindergarten to college is the place where all of these questions and issues have the most potential for having a large impact on the direction of our society. There is no question that in the 2020s, the classroom on all levels of the educational arc has become the one of the main battlefields for the fights around cultural, social, economic, political, and even spiritual issues.

Because of this, we need to find a more unifying path that can protect the rights and dignity of all people. And that path must be organic."

(https://groundexperience.substack.com/p/organic-dei-empathy-beyond-ideological)