The revolt against DEI is in full swing, and activists like Christopher Rufo have been making progress in revealing just how toxic the ideology is.
DEI bureaucracies are on the ropes and keep hearing stories about corporations rethinking their commitment to it.
I’ll believe DEI is losing the fight when I see it go down for the count. Right now I believe that the DEI crowd is just playing rope-a-dope; Muhammad Ali spent a lot of time on the ropes, and we know how that usually ended.
From @WSJopinion: If you’ve heard that the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda is going away, don’t believe it. An emerging practice at elite medical schools segregates students by race to teach them about alleged structural racism in healthcare. https://t.co/blyMn0ybBk
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) January 13, 2024
By now, most rational people understand how toxic DEI ideology is; you have to be as disconnected from reality as Mark Cuban or the average Democrat to believe that DEI is just about eliminating racism from the workplace or college. It is cultural Marxism.
But cultural Marxism is no longer fringe. It has taken over our cultural and intellectual bastions and is deeply entrenched in the C-suits of transnational corporations. Ordinary people may be repelled by DEI and these institutions may retrench to let the controversies die down, but they aren’t giving up without a fight.
The Wall Street Journal published a piece about just how entrenched and dangerous DEI ideology is. Among other places, it now permeates our scientific and medical bureaucracies.
If you’ve heard that the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda is going away, don’t believe it. An emerging practice at elite medical schools segregates students by race to teach them about alleged structural racism in healthcare.
The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine requires that first year students take a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” as part of the standard curriculum. In one exercise for the course, students divide by racial group and retreat to different areas to discuss antiracist prompts.
This is known as racial caucusing, a teaching device that UCLA describes as an “anti-racist pedagogical tool” to “provide a reflective space for us to explore how our positionality—particularly our racial identities as perceived within clinical spaces—influence our interaction with patients, colleagues and other staff.”
The particular exercise requiring racial “caucusing” was dropped from the course, but it took a lawsuit to make them do so. UCLA isn’t dropping its “antiracist” propaganda–they are as committed as ever to the concept of “antiracism.”
Medical students in the class are asked to choose which of three racial categories they will identify with. They can select among “white student caucus group,” “Non-Black People of Color (NBPOC) student caucus group” or “Black student caucus group.”
In case students think they have a choice of which group to join, a letter from the school makes clear they should sort themselves by how they look to others. “[R]ecognizing the imperfect and problematic nature of our socially constructed racial categories,” the school says, “we ask that you identify the group in which you feel you are most perceived as in clinical spaces.”
The exercise is necessary, UCLA’s letter continues, because “For white folks, we often feel uncomfortable talking about our own race and our own identities without Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) in the room.” And “for Black folks, discussions of race/racism with non-Black folks can be burdensome and exhausting.” Caucusing is a chance to “discuss this exhaustion and share strategies for individual and collective healing and self care.”
The day the civil-rights complaint was filed, UCLA abruptly informed students that the caucusing exercise was cancelled, which suggests that administrators know the practice is legally suspect. In accepting federal funds, schools must agree to abide by Title VI, which prohibits discrimination by race. It contains no exception for discriminating in pursuit of an antiracist agenda. As a public university, UCLA is also governed by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Just as universities have been strategizing about how to get around the Supreme Court’s outlawing of Affirmative Action, DEI advocates will find a way around the clear illegality of segregation.
What matters is the commitment of the administrators to racialism. That commitment is firm and will not waver.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, Board Chair of Do No Harm, rebuked the medical school for “perpetuating” racism with the practice.
“That UCLA encouraged racial segregation in its medical school class is an absolutely outrageous abandonment of nearly 65 year old national commitment to eliminate racism in society. All medical students should be working together to learn to provide optimal medical care to all patients rather than to perpetuate, absurd, racist notions,” he said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
The school reportedly dropped the exercise immediately when the complaint was filed by Do No Harm.
I am extremely skeptical of the proposition that DEI is in deep trouble, at least not yet. Americans are waking up to the problem of the Left’s cultural dominance, and some corporations will be less obvious about their commitment, but it will take a sustained and aggressive effort to root it out.
If we can.