DEI – what’s it FOR?

Respect (Image by rrafson, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Since I wrote a piece last month about the retreat of mainly American companies from the mantra of diversity, equity and inclusion, many more companies have backed away from the idea.

As I write, it’s Inauguration Day in Washington, and the new president of the United States is promising to issue a string of executive orders to overturn the sort of things that sit under the wide DEI umbrella. News reports suggest he may ban federal officials from giving their “pronouns” in official communications and from other “woke” policies that the Biden administration seems to have pursued. The reversal begs the question: Whatever is (was) DEI for?

Talk of DEI has always seemed (to me) to be a political act. In 1955, the philosopher J.L. Austin delivered an influential series of lectures at Harvard University, while disclaiming to have made any breakthrough in thinking:

What I shall have to say here is neither difficult nor contentious; the only merit I should like to claim for it is that of being true, at least in parts. The phenomenon to be discussed is very widespread and obvious, and it cannot fail to have been already noticed, at least here and there, by others. Yet I have not found attention paid to it specifically.

It was for too long the assumption of philosophers that the business of a “statement” can only be to “describe” some state of affairs, or to “state some fact”, which it must do either truly or falsely (Austin, 1962, p. 1).

But Austin’s message was profound: Statements are often more than mere descriptions of fact. They are attempts to persuade the listener, the reader, to accept a point of view. They are, essentially, political acts. Such a sentence is often a “performative utterance” (p. 6). We speak and write to change the attitudes and behaviour of others, and sometimes of ourselves.

In Austin’s terms, what I argued in the previous piece was this: Saying “diversity, equity and inclusion” is performing an action, validating a concept often without having considered what the words mean. As I wrote, all three terms are disputed, and diversity seems on the surface to include inclusion, and the latter is, therefore, redundant. Unless, in Austin’s terms, its performance is designed to lead to actions we can measure, normalise, and use to hold other actors to account. “Diversity” points towards adoption of quotas of some protected categories. “Inclusion” to tearing down barriers to individual liberties – for example, by mandating wheelchair access to buildings, or – in that flashpoint of the new discourse in Washington – of permitting genetically male persons to use toilets previously mandated only for women.

Words do things. They change behaviour. Repeated behaviour changes attitudes, which then change the nature of “facts”. Often without thinking.

The problem with DEI is two-fold. First, the mantra stops us from thinking about the concepts that underpin them, prompting us to act without thought. Second, acting impels the assessment of the action, when we’ve lost sight of the what the issue originally was.

Let me declare a manifesto, then, an attempt to do things by changing the words, changing them back to the concepts, fuzzy as they may be, so that we cannot be held to account by others but then have to hold ourselves to account.

• To promote an equitable distribution of the benefits of social organisation – what each deserves – let’s just use that fuzzy but immediately recognisable term that John Rawls (1958, 1971, 1985) brought to our attention: Fairness.

• To ensure we hear all the sides of an argument, all the diverse opinions and interpretations, let’s avoid quotas based on characteristics. Instead, we must demand of ourselves what Karl Popper (1945a, 1945b) told us really matters: Openness.

• To include everyone’s interests as we decide which actions our words will engender we should treat all the “others” with Respect (with a hat-tip to Aretha Franklin).

Not DEI, please. Not the metrics that go with it, the quotas, the performative utterances that then enforce the would-be standards, the mindless behaviour that ignores the substance. Instead, we enforce ourselves to engage with others by being fair, open, and respectful.

Isn’t that, deep down, what we’re striving to achieve? Isn’t that what DEI is (was) FOR?

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures at Harvard University, 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Popper, K. F. (1945a). The Open Society and its Enemies: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (Vol. 2 ). George Routledge & Sons.

Popper, K. F. (1945b). The Open Society and its Enemies: The Spell of Plato (Vol. 1). London: George Routledge & Sons.

Rawls, J. (1958). Justice as Fairness. The Philosophical Review, 67(2), 164-194. doi:10.2307/2182612

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rawls, J. (1985). Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 14(3), 223-251.