With leading U.S. brands and universities scrapping their DEI policies, it seems Britain might soon join the exodus and wave goodbye to this dreadful fad, writes Micael Deacon in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt:
Trendy Left-wing opinions may be tiresome. But they do have one upside. Which is that, like all else in fashion, they’re sure to go out of style. One moment, some insufferable progressive notion is all the rage; the next, it’s shoved in the back of the wardrobe, never to see daylight again.
And the good news is, this appears to be what’s happening to DEI.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a radical progressive ideology that, in recent years, has held countless Western institutions in its miserable grip. This week, however, there have been multiple signs that, all of a sudden, the grip is finally loosening.
Harley-Davidson has just ditched its diversity targets. Jack Daniel’s, too. The University of Kentucky has said it’s disbanding its diversity office. Meanwhile, meritocracy has been restored to the admissions process at elite U.S. universities. New figures show that, since race-based “affirmative action” was banned by the Supreme Court, the proportion of Asian American students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shot up, while that of African American students has slumped. (This is the trouble with “affirmative action”: while benefiting one minority, it can unwittingly penalise another.)
Of course, all these examples are from the U.S. But since, these days, British elites slavishly follow all the latest American trends, DEI must be doomed over here, too.
The most pernicious element of DEI is surely “equity”: the idea that inequality of outcomes between groups can only be explained by injustice. Is this true? It’s just that, in the men’s 100m Olympic final, not one runner was white. Presumably this means white runners are victims of injustice, and should have been included in the final via affirmative action.
Still, now DEI is dying, I suppose they’ll just have to run faster, instead.
Worth reading in full.
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