Proponents of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) programs have long ignored the extent to which they contradict, in practice if not theory, the original civil rights goal of a "colorblind" society.
Thrown on the defensive because of their failure to address that contradiction, they have now even begun to dismiss the concept/goal of colorblindness as merely a cover behind which to perpetuate racial injustice and white supremacy.
This branding of belief in colorblindness as just another form of racism allows DEI supporters to smear critics and thereby relieve themselves of the burden of responding to their arguments.
In the topsy-turvy identity-politics world, the racists are now those who want to treat people equally regardless of race and the "anti-racists" the ones who want to treat people unequally because of it. For the latter, using such a new definitional standard, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin and just about all of the key figures of the civil rights movement were actually racists in disguise.
The central theme of that movement, which a vast majority of Americans eventually came to embrace--that racial discrimination is wrong, at all times, under all circumstances--has been replaced by "it depends."
Along these lines, the hunch is that the new anti-racism is being resisted largely because the original anti-discrimination message sunk so deeply into our consciousness; we now justifiably recoil at the idea that some forms of discrimination can be good, even necessary, depending upon who is discriminated in favor of or against.
Those who defend DEI and the racial preference system flowing from it claim that critics deny the historical significance and continuing existence of racism.
This is dishonest because it is entirely possible, even logically compelling, to believe both that racism still exists (hopefully in at least somewhat attenuated form, largely due to the success of the civil rights movement) and that DEI should be rejected on the grounds that it destroys the concept of merit and by doing so produces societal consequences far more negative than those flowing from whatever level of racism remains.
Going further, critics of DEI put forth certain claims--that DEI makes racism worse by embedding race consciousness in institutional settings, that it exacerbates racial tensions by making race the primary form of personal identity, and that it produces unfortunate perceptions of "tokenism" when it comes to Black accomplishment--that need to be assessed on their merits, rather than simply dismissed with the racism smear.
Most powerful of all among those claims is that the focus on lingering white racism and the alleged solution in the form of racial preferences tragically distracts attention from and does nothing to address what is now the far more significant obstacle to Black progress, the disintegration of the Black family.
A strange contradiction is consequently found at the heart of the DEI campaign--failure to accept DEI and racial preferences is taken as evidence of racism, but pointing out that minorities receive preferential treatment under DEI programs is cited as evidence of racism too. Racial preference is said to be necessary because of continuing racism, but all examples of Black success flow from something other than preference and all examples of Black failure are attributable only to racism.
There have all along been only two options before us: We can strive to create a colorblind society, even if we know we will never entirely get there, or we can throw in the towel and establish a permanent racial caste system wherein societal rewards are rigidly allocated according to ever-fluctuating racial formulae and hierarchy.
You can't pick both, or some combination thereof, because the underlying premises of each conflict with those of the other.
Seldom noted is that the entrenchment of DEI in all organized forms of societal activity will end up threatening not just the merit principle but our founding value of individual freedom as well. As long understood in liberal political theory, such freedom requires limits on government, but no limits would be possible were government given the task of administering a massive racial spoils system, with the need to precisely match allocation of resources in proportional fashion across all of the potentially endless victimized identity groups.
This would be social engineering on a scale that not even Marx or Lenin could have imagined.
Again, to embrace colorblindness does not mean you deny the wrongs of the past or that race and racism have ceased to matter; rather, it is to argue that it is the only way to eventually make them matter less.
America isn't now, and never has been, colorblind, but that acknowledgement doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to make it so in the future, or at least more so. Falling short of a lofty goal has seldom been a persuasive reason for rejecting it.
And as we ponder the two diametrically opposing options--colorblindness or greater race consciousness--we will all have to answer two key questions.
The first: "Do you believe people should be treated differently because of their race?"
If the answer to that question is "yes," then the second question would be "Why is that not racism?"
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.