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John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
According to the lawsuit, Haltigan believes in “colorblind inclusivity,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “merit-based evaluation”—all ideas that could lead to a low-scoring statement based on the starting rubric UC Santa Cruz publishes online to help guide prospective applicants.
“To receive a high score under the terms set by the rubric,” the complaint alleges, “an applicant must express agreement with specific socio-political ideas, including the view that treating individuals differently based on their race or sex is desirable.” Thus, the lawsuit argues, Haltigan must express ideas with which he disagrees to have a chance of getting hired.
The lawsuit compares the DEI-statement requirement to Red Scare–era loyalty oaths that asked people to affirm that they were not members of the Communist Party. It calls the statements “a thinly veiled attempt to ensure dogmatic conformity throughout the university system.”
Conor Friedersdorf: The DEI industry needs to check its privilege
UC Santa Cruz’s requirement is part of a larger trend: Almost half of large colleges now include DEI criteria in tenure standards, while the American Enterprise Institute found that 19 percent of academic job postings required DEI statements, which were required more frequently at elite institutions. Still, there is significant opposition to the practice. A 2022 survey of nearly 1,500 U.S. faculty members found that 50 percent of respondents considered the statements “an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom.” And the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group composed of faculty members with a wide range of political perspectives, argues that diversity statements erase “the distinction between academic expertise and ideological conformity” and create scenarios “inimical to fundamental values that should govern academic life.”
The Haltigan lawsuit—filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a right-leaning nonprofit—is the first major free-speech challenge to a public institution that requires these statements. If Haltigan prevails, state institutions may be unable to mandate diversity statements in the future, or may find themselves constrained in how they solicit or assess such statements.
“Taking a principled stand against the use of the DEI rubric in the Academy is crucial for the continued survival of our institutions of higher learning,” he declared in a Substack post earlier this year.
Alternatively, a victory for UC Santa Cruz may entrench the trend of compelling academics to submit DEI statements in institutions that are under the control of the left—and serve as a blueprint for the populist right to impose its own analogous requirements in state college systems it controls. For example, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, who was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to help overhaul higher education in Florida, advocates replacing diversity, equity, and inclusion with equality, merit, and colorblindness. If California can lawfully force professors to detail their contributions to DEI, Florida can presumably force all of its professors to detail their contributions to EMC. And innovative state legislatures could create any number of new favored-concept triads to impose on professors in their states.
That outcome would balkanize state university systems into factions with competing litmus tests. Higher education as a whole would be better off if the Haltigan victory puts an end to this coercive trend.
The University of California is a fitting place for a test case on diversity statements. It imposed loyalty oaths on faculty members during the Red Scare, birthed a free-speech movement in 1964, was a litigant in the 1977 Supreme Court case that gave rise to the diversity rationale for affirmative action, and in 1996 helped inspire California voters to pass Proposition 209. That voter initiative amended the Golden State’s constitution to ban discrimination or preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. In 2020, at the height of the racial reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder, voters in deep-blue California reaffirmed race neutrality by an even wider margin. This continued to block the UC system’s preferred approach, which was to increase diversity in hiring by considering, not disregarding, applicants’ race. Indeed, the insistence on nondiscrimination by California voters has long been regarded with hostility by many UC system administrators. Rewarding contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion is partly their attempt to increase racial diversity among professors in a way that does not violate the law.
[Read: The problem with how higher education treats diversity]
The regime these administrators created is a case study in concept creep. Around 2005, the UC system began to change how it evaluated professors. As ever, they would be judged based on teaching, research, and service. But the system-wide personnel manual was updated with a novel provision: Job candidates who showed that they promoted “diversity and equal opportunity” in teaching, research, or service could get credit for doing so. Imagine a job candidate who, for example, did volunteer work mentoring high schoolers in a disadvantaged neighborhood to help prepare them for college. That would presumably benefit the state of California, the UC system by improving its applicant pool, and the teaching skills of the volunteer, who’d gain experience in what helps such students to succeed. Giving positive credit for such activities seemed sensible.
But how much credit?
A 2014 letter from the chair of the Assembly of the UC Academic Senate addressed that question, stating that faculty efforts to promote “equal opportunity and diversity” should be evaluated “on the same basis as other contributions.” They should not, however, be considered “a ‘fourth leg’ of evaluation, in addition to teaching, research, and service.”
If matters stood there, the UC approach to “diversity and equal opportunity” might not face legal challenges. But administrators successfully pushed for a more radical approach. What began as an option to highlight work that advanced “diversity and equal opportunity” morphed over time into mandatory statements on contributions to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The shift circa 2018 from the possibility of credit for something to a forced accounting of it was important. So was the shift from the widely shared value of equal opportunity to equity (a contested and controversial concept with no widely agreed-upon meaning) and inclusion. The bundled triad of DEI is typically justified by positing that hiring a racially and ethnically diverse faculty or admitting a diverse student body is not enough—for the institution and everyone in it to thrive, the best approach (in this telling) is to treat some groups differently than others to account for structural disadvantages they suffer and to make sure everyone feels welcome, hence “inclusion.”
That theory of how diversity works is worth taking seriously. Still, it is just a theory. I am a proponent of a diverse University of California, but I believe that its students would better thrive across identity groups in a culture of charity, forbearance, and individualism. A Marxist might regard solidarity as vital. A conservative might emphasize the importance of personal virtue, an appreciation of every institution’s imperfectability, and the assimilation of all students to a culture of rigorous truth-seeking. Many Californians of all identities believe in treating everyone equally regardless of their race or their gender.
UC Santa Cruz has not yet responded to Haltigan’s lawsuit. But its chancellor, Cynthia K. Larive, states on the UC Santa Cruz website that the institution asks for a contributions-to-DEI statement because it is “a Hispanic-Serving” and “Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution” that has “a high proportion of first generation students,” and that it therefore seeks to hire professors “who will contribute to promoting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment.” In her telling, the statements help to “assess a candidate’s skills, experience, and ability to contribute to the work they would be doing in supporting our students, staff, and faculty.”
Perhaps the most extreme developments in the UC system’s use of DEI statements are taking place on the Davis, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Riverside campuses, where pilot programs treat mandatory diversity statements not as one factor among many in an overall evaluation of candidates, but as a threshold test. In other words, if a group of academics applied for jobs, their DEI statements would be read and scored, and only applicants with the highest DEI statement scores would make it to the next round. The others would never be evaluated on their research, teaching, or service. This is a revolutionary change in how to evaluate professors.
This approach—one that is under direct challenge in the Haltigan lawsuit—was scrutinized in detail by Daniel M. Ortner of the Pacific Legal Foundation in an article for the Catholic University Law Review. When UC Berkeley hired for life-sciences jobs through its pilot program, Ortner reports, 679 qualified applicants were eliminated based on their DEI statements alone. “Seventy-six percent of qualified applicants were rejected without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence, or their ability to contribute to their field,” he wrote. “As far as the university knew, these applicants could have well been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students’ lives.”
At UC Davis, 50 percent of applicants in some searches were disqualified based on their DEI statements alone. Abigail Thompson, then the chair of the mathematics department at UC Davis, dissented from its approach in a 2019 column for the American Mathematics Society newsletter. “Classical liberals aspire to treat every person as a unique individual,” she wrote. “Requiring candidates to believe that people should be treated differently according to their identity is indeed a political test.”
More striking than her argument was the polarized response from other academics, captured by the letters to the editor. Some wrote in agreement and some in substantive disagreement, as is appropriate. But a group letter signed by scores of mathematicians from institutions all over the United States asserted, without evidence, that the American Mathematics Society “harmed the mathematics community, particularly mathematicians from marginalized backgrounds,” merely by airing Thompson’s critique of diversity statements. “We are disappointed by the editorial decision to publish the piece,” they wrote. Mathematicians hold a diversity of views about mandatory DEI statements. But just one faction asserts that others do harm merely by expressing their viewpoint among colleagues. Just one faction openly wanted to deny such dissent a platform. Are members of that progressive faction fair when they score DEI statements that are in tension with their own political beliefs? It is not unreasonable for liberal, conservative, and centrist faculty members to be skeptical. And many are.
A rival group letter decried the “attempt to intimidate the AMS into publishing only articles that hew to a very specific point of view,” adding, “If we allow ourselves to be intimidated into avoiding discussion of how best to achieve diversity, we undermine our attempts to achieve it.”
The most formidable defender of mandatory diversity statements may be Brian Soucek, a law professor at UC Davis. He’s participated in debates organized by FIRE and the Federalist Society (organizations that tend to be more skeptical of DEI) and recently won a UC Davis Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity and Community. In an April 2022 article for the UC Davis Law Review, he acknowledged that “certain types or uses of diversity statements would be indefensible from a constitutional or academic freedom standpoint” but argued that, should a university want to require diversity statements, it can do so in ways that violate neither academic freedom nor the Constitution. He has worked to make UC Davis’s approach to DEI statements more defensible.
Someone evaluating a diversity-statement regime, he suggests, should focus on the following attributes:
Soucek argues that the ability to help diverse students to thrive is directly relevant to a law professor’s core duties, not something irrelevant to legitimate educational or academic objectives. As for concerns that mandatory diversity statements might entrench orthodoxies of thought in academia, or create the perception that political forces or fear of job loss drives academic conclusions, he argues that those concerns, while real, are not unique to diversity statements—they also apply to the research and teaching statements that most job candidates must provide.
“Academic freedom, and the system of peer review that it is built upon, is a fragile business, always susceptible not just to outside interference, but also to corruption from within,” he wrote in his law-review article. But diversity statements strike me as more vulnerable to “corruption from within” than research statements. Although a hiring committee of chemists might or might not do a fair job evaluating the research of applicants, at least committee members credibly possess the expertise to render better judgments than anyone else—they know better than state legislators or DEI administrators or history professors or the public how to assess chemistry research.
[Read: What is faculty diversity worth to a university?]
On what basis can chemistry professors claim equivalent expertise in how best to advance diversity in higher education generally, or even in chemistry specifically? It wouldn’t be shocking if historians or economists or sociologists were better-positioned to understand why a demographic group was underrepresented in chemistry or how best to change that. Most hiring-committee members possess no special expertise in diversity, or equity, or inclusion. Absent empirically grounded expertise, academics are more likely to defer to what’s popular for political or careerist reasons, and even insofar as they are earnest in their judgments about which job candidates would best advance diversity, equity, or inclusion, there is no reason to afford their nonexpert opinions on the matter any more deference than the opinions of anyone else.
Ultimately, Soucek’s idealized regime of mandatory diversity statements—tailored to particular disciplines and judged by faculty members without outside political interference—strikes me as a theoretical improvement on the status quo but, in practice, unrealistic in what it presumes of hiring committees. Meanwhile, most real-world regimes of diversity statements, including those at campuses in the University of California system, lack the sort of safeguards Soucek recommends, and may not assess anything more than the ability to submit an essay that resonates with hiring committees. Whether an applicant’s high-scoring DEI statement actually correlates with better research or teaching outcomes is unclear and largely unstudied.
The costs of mandatory DEI statements are far too high to justify, especially absent evidence that they do significant good. Alas, proponents seem unaware of those costs. Yes, they know that they are imposing a requirement that many colleagues find uncomfortable. But they may be less aware of the message that higher-education institutions send to the public by demanding these statements.
Mandatory DEI statements send the message that professors should be evaluated not only on research and teaching, but on their contributions to improving society. Academics may regret validating that premise in the future, if college administrators or legislators or voters want to judge them based on how they advance a different understanding of social progress, one that departs more from their own—for example, how they’ve contributed to a war effort widely regarded as righteous.
Mandatory DEI statements send the message that it’s okay for academics to chill the speech of colleagues. If half of faculty members believe that diversity statements are ideological litmus tests, fear of failing the test will chill free expression within a large cohort, even if they are wrong. Shouldn’t that alone make the half of academics who support these statements rethink their stance?
Mandatory DEI statements send a message that is anti-pluralistic. I believe that diversity and inclusion are good. I do not think that universities should reward advancing those particular values more than all others. Some aspiring professors are well suited to advancing diversity. Great! The time of others is better spent mitigating climate change, or serving as expert witnesses in trials, or pioneering new treatments for cancer. Insofar as all academics must check a compulsory “advancing DEI” box, many will waste time on work that provides little or no benefit instead of doing kinds of work where they enjoy a comparative advantage in improving the world.
And mandatory DEI statements send the message that viewpoint diversity and dissent are neither valuable nor necessary—that if you’ve identified the right values, a monoculture in support of them is preferable. The scoring rubric for evaluating candidates’ statements that UC Santa Cruz published declares that a superlative statement “discusses diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values of the University that every faculty member should actively contribute to advancing.” Do academics really want to assert that any value should be held by “every” faculty member? Academics who value DEI work should want smart critics of the approach commenting from inside academic institutions to point out flaws and shortcomings that boosters miss.
Demanding that everyone get on board and embrace the same values and social-justice priorities will inevitably narrow the sort of people who apply to work and get hired in higher education.
In that sense, mandatory DEI statements are profoundly anti-diversity. And that strikes me as an especially perilous hypocrisy for academics to indulge at a time of falling popular support for higher education. A society can afford its college professors radical freedom to dissent from social orthodoxies or it can demand conformity, but not both. Academic-freedom advocates can credibly argue that scholars must be free to criticize or even to denigrate God, the nuclear family, America, motherhood, capitalism, Christianity, John Wayne movies, Thanksgiving Day, the military, the police, beer, penetrative sex, and the internal combustion engine—but not if academics are effectively prohibited from criticizing progressivism’s sacred values.
The UC system could advance diversity in research and teaching in lots of uncontroversial ways. Instead, in the name of diversity, the hiring process is being loaded in favor of professors who subscribe to the particular ideology of DEI partisans as if every good hire would see things as they do. I do not want California voters to strip the UC system of more of its ability to self-govern, but if this hypocrisy inspires a reformist ballot initiative, administrators will deserve it, regardless of what the judiciary decides about whether they are violating the First Amendment.
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This week, Donald Trump was arraigned on 34 felony counts and pleaded not guilty to all. His indictment has sparked debates about the legal soundness and wisdom of the criminal charges against him, his future in politics, and how the press is covering it all. What do you think?
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In the past decade or so, many institutions of higher education have introduced or expanded administrative bureaucracies dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, a trio of concepts that many Americans understand to mean different things, in some cases without even realizing it.
Now the costs and benefits of those bureaucracies are being debated throughout the country. And although no two institutions are the same, many people talking about DEI are talking past one another.
I’ll give you two specific examples:
First, Compact magazine recently published an account by Tabia Lee, a DEI administrator who was fired from De Anza College in Cupertino, California. She wrote, in part:
On paper, I was a good fit for the job. I am a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, I established a network to help minority teachers attain National Board Certification. I designed and facilitated numerous teacher trainings and developed a civic-education program that garnered accolades from the LAUSD Board of Education.
My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions. When I interviewed for the job in August 2021, there was no indication that I would be required to adhere to this particular vision of social justice … I told the hiring committee that I valued open dialogue and viewpoint diversity. Given their decision to hire me, I imagined I would find broad support for the vision I had promised to bring to my new role.
I was wrong.
Although Lee’s essay is filtered through her experience of the events that led to her dismissal, I wonder how many DEI staffers are hired with an understanding of the role that is completely different from, and even incompatible with, the understanding of the very people who chose to hire them.
The second example emerges from my own work. Last week, The Atlantic published a feature article I wrote on New College of Florida. The college’s new board of trustees, who were appointed in January by the Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, recently voted to abolish its DEI bureaucracy. In my interviews at New College, I found a mostly unspoken divide among faculty members with regard to DEI work: Some understood it to be ideologically neutral, such that anyone amenable to a diverse and welcoming community should have no objections to it. Others understood it to be highly ideological, presuming particular and highly contested understandings of what diversity, equity, and inclusion mean and how they ought to be pursued.
But no one made an argument as extreme as one I encountered last week in The Boston Globe, where Ya’Ke Smith, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, invoked New College as an example in an article that was headlined “DEI Denial Is the Modern Day Lynching.”
He wrote:
In these times, a traditional lynching is almost universally unacceptable. Most people can’t even fathom the barbaric act happening now; and they can’t believe that their ancestors may have participated in the carnage back then. However, modern day attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies in higher education institutions are the equivalent of the tightened rope, and just as suffocating.
There is a perception among DEI opponents that the initiatives are about exclusion and indoctrination, but as someone who oversaw a DEI office for several years, I know it is neither. The primary functions of DEI are to make people think more deeply about how discrimination is baked into the structures of organizations, and to collectively find solutions to disrupt these inequalities and inequities. These initiatives are meant to provide tools for dismantling historically oppressive and violent systems—systems that impact everyone.
Most responses to Smith’s article focused on the analogy to lynching, but I was more interested in his claims that DEI in higher ed primarily (1) “make[s] people think more deeply about how discrimination is baked into the structure of organizations, (2) facilitates “solutions” to “inequalities and inequities,” and (3) aims to “provide tools for dismantling historically oppressive and violent systems.”
In my conversations with New College administrators, faculty members, students, and alumni, I heard a lot of frank critiques of the school. But no one told me that discrimination is baked into the structure of the organization, or that New College constitutes an oppressive or violent system that must be dismantled. Perhaps there is someone at New College who believes all that, but given what I know of its history, its structure, and its personnel, it would be tough to make a case for those propositions.
So I’m left wondering what, in particular, Smith thinks the dean of DEI was doing at New College. I emailed him to ask but haven’t heard back; in the spirit of this newsletter, I would love to hear him out and converse with him in response if he is ever up for some correspondence. Meanwhile, I’ll be thinking about a long conversation I had with Dr. Diego Villada, a theater professor at New College who was an outspoken faculty defender of DEI there.
“No one makes me take DEI training. The administration doesn’t force me to learn about DEI. I seek it out,” Villada told me, “because I want to be more respectful and inviting towards my students.” When the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence at New College programmed events for heritage-history months, or developed an educational program about a particular religious identity, he tried to attend, and when the office sent an email that included guidance or links to outside resources or organizations, he filed them away in case they proved useful in a future situation.
“Looking back through my email right now, when there was a tragedy that targeted a specific type of people––in this case LGBTQ people––it explained that tragedy in a way that I could understand, and pointed me towards other resources that would help me expand in my understanding about sensitivities around these matters,” Villada said. To me, information of the sort that Villada values is potentially helpful, but could be compiled by one person for the entire system of public education in Florida and dropped onto an intranet of resources available to any educator. But to Villada, DEI infrastructure on campus is essential to being “as welcoming and inclusive as possible,” and cutting DEI programs is like saying “it’s too much trouble to try to make people feel respected.”
When I suggested that many people contest how best to help everyone in a diverse community to feel respected, and that varying and sometimes contradictory answers can be found among people of all identities, he argued that the particular approach advocated by the new trustees at New College “is detrimental to the fabric of the community” because treating everyone the same regardless of their identity is, as he sees it, a wrongheaded approach to education.
Of course, he was speaking for himself, not the college or his colleagues––to my point, any two faculty members are likely to have different understandings of what DEI means, because there is neither an official nor a generally agreed-upon definition of the terms––but his opinion is relevant to his understanding of DEI, how he implemented it in his capacity as a faculty member, and what he wants to conserve when he voices opposition to abolishing DEI on campus.
For example, he said:
I highly respect the religious beliefs of my students. So let’s say that I have a Muslim student and it’s a woman, and her religion does not allow for her shaking hands with men... So if I go to shake her hand like I would anybody else in class, I might tell her, ‘Oh, well, this is just how we are in a professional setting. Everybody shakes hands.’ And that would not be welcoming or respectful. That would be me treating everybody the same—and completely disregarding that person’s religious identity. Instead, what should happen is that I shake the hands of the students that feel comfortable, and I use a consent-forward way of asking that student, ‘I see that you are wearing a hijab. May I ask, hey, are you a Muslim and are you okay with me shaking hands with you? And if they tell me no, I won’t do it.’ The idea that everything needs to be merit-based with sameness negates the fact that there are sociocultural, political, racial, and gender differences people bring with them through the door.
On the theme of talking past one another, two things strike me about Villada’s comments: first, as someone who is concerned that DEI is too often invoked to justify ideological discrimination or bias in hiring, infringements on academic freedom, free-speech violations, and bloat, I have no objections to `Villada’s diligent efforts to make all of his students feel welcome and believe he should be able to conduct his classes as he sees fit regardless of whether I agree or disagree with a particular judgment he reaches about what being inclusive means; second, note that what Villada describes as the utility he got from actual DEI efforts at New College was very different from (for example) tools for dismantling an oppressive or violent system.
The DEI debate undoubtedly includes lots of substantive disagreements, but I suspect it would be somewhat less polarizing and intractable if everyone involved clarified their views with more specificity and concreteness rather than debating the matter in terms of abstract generalities.
An Underdiscussed Threat to Free Speech
In The Popehat Report, the attorney Ken White describes a speech-chilling tactic that he sees regularly in his legal practice:
There is a vast amount of “practical censorship” operating below public notice. By “practical censorship” I mean censorship that happens not by state action or court procedure, or through public pressure, but by non-public threats to invoke our thoroughly broken civil justice system through a defamation claim. I get one or two requests a week for pro bono help in situations where someone has been threatened with litigation over their speech. In the vast majority of these cases, the potential defendants lack the resources to get good legal advice about their rights, let alone litigate the case. Most of the potential defendants are not lawyers, do not have the training necessary to evaluate the threats and their rights and potential defenses, and don’t even know the right questions to ask.
The ones who reach out to me are few and lucky because they at least have an idea of how to start to seek help. The much more common result is that people with the right to speak stop speaking, delete online content, and withdraw from the fabled marketplace of ideas. This is a rational response to a system that is completely unaffordable and incomprehensible to most Americans. Is your free speech worth your financial ruin? Most people would say no, at least about most topics. Lawyers know this, and unscrupulous lawyers use it to make meritless threats and demands. They bluster about the law while misstating it, invoke completely irrelevant legal principles, make demands they have no legal or ethical right to make, and invoke potential consequences that they can’t actually inflict. They do it because it’s often effective.
How much speech protected by the First Amendment gets “practically censored” this way?
There’s no way to keep track, but I see it constantly.
White goes on to allege that Whittier College is a bad actor in this regard––for the particulars, see this colorfully written letter that he sent to the liberal-arts institution’s legal team on behalf of one of his clients.
This past winter caused my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig to meditate on a perennial part of the human condition:
Winter is over, and what a wretched one it was. There came a point in the season when everyone in our house was sick. I stood at the top of the stairs one cold morning, gazing down blearily at the pile of mail and magazines that had accumulated by the door, knowing there were dishes dumped in the sink to match and laundry heaped in the hampers as well. I thought of Henry Knighton, a medieval cleric who witnessed the Black Death’s scouring of Europe. I once read his firsthand account of the sheep and cattle that went wandering over fields where the harvest had rotted on the vine, crops and livestock returning to wilderness amid the great diminishing of human life. I now reigned over my own plagued realm, having lost this latest confrontation with nature.
As winter passes and (God willing) this long season of sickness fades into memory along with the public-health emergency that preceded it, we seem to be entering an era of the retrospective and the speculative: While some news agencies are looking back on the lockdown days of early COVID to try to understand what lessons our public-health policies taught us, others are bracing for the next pandemic … All of these avenues of exploration provide potential room for discovery … But they seem as yet insensitive to the very basic and animal fact of the pandemic and the winter it gave us this year: People get sick.
There is a profound helplessness to falling ill, even in cases of ultimately mild and transient illness—which nevertheless can take the form of long, grueling, raw struggling against mucus and body aches. There is even greater helplessness in caring for another in their time of sickness—especially a child, when you have been up to this point the source of every imaginable comfort. If the pandemic ought to have given us anything, it should have been a more universal empathy toward the condition of illness, of being susceptible to getting sick. It should have been a more urgent will to enact policies that would give people—all people—time to rest and recover when stricken with illness. It should have left us with the impression that the foundations of our society aren’t terribly different from those of Henry Knighton’s, and are subject to the same disruption by pathogens.
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This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
How have cars shaped your life, and/or what do you think about their future? (I’m eager to hear anything from attacks on the automobile to defenses of the great American road trip to eagerness for driverless electric cars to laments that the kids these days don’t learn how to drive when they turn 16, let alone how to drive a stick shift. Do you hate your commute? Do you like toll roads? Do you love your Harley-Davidson? Do you regard the replacement of tactile stereo interfaces with touch screens as a scourge? If you want, you can even send me a paean to the rotary engine, if it’s well written.) As always, while you are opining on anything related to cars or trucks or even parking spaces or meters, I especially encourage stories and reflections rooted in personal experience.
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The New Anarchy
In an article about political violence in America, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance takes a detour to Italy to reflect on how a country that suffers an outbreak of domestic terrorism can regain stability:
On Saturday, August 2, 1980, a bomb hidden inside a suitcase blew up at the Bologna Centrale railway station, killing 85 people … the deadliest attack in Italy since World War II. By the time it occurred, Italians were more than a decade into a period of intense political violence, one that came to be known as Anni di Piombo, or the “Years of Lead.” From roughly 1969 to 1988, Italians experienced open warfare in the streets, bombings of trains, deadly shootings and arson attacks, at least 60 high-profile assassinations, and a narrowly averted neofascist coup attempt. It was a generation of death and bedlam. Although exact numbers are difficult to come by, during the Years of Lead, at least 400 people were killed and some 2,000 wounded in more than 14,000 separate attacks.
As I sat at the Bologna Centrale railway station in September, a place where so many people had died, I found myself thinking, somewhat counterintuitively, about how, in the great sweep of history, the political violence in Italy in the 1970s and ’80s now seems but a blip. Things were so terrible for so long. And then they weren’t. How does political violence come to an end? No one can say precisely what alchemy of experience, temperament, and circumstance leads a person to choose political violence. But being part of a group alters a person’s moral calculations and sense of identity, not always for the good. Martin Luther King Jr., citing the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” that “groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.” People commit acts together that they’d never contemplate alone.
Vicky Franzinetti was a teenage member of the far-left militant group Lotta Continua during the Years of Lead. “There was a lot of what I would call John Wayneism, and a lot of people fell for that,” she told me. “Whether it’s the Black Panthers or the people who attacked on January 6 on Capitol Hill, violence has a mesmerizing appeal on a lot of people.” A subtle but important shift also took place in Italian political culture during the ’60s and ’70s as people grasped for group identity. “If you move from what you want to who you are, there is very little scope for real dialogue, and for the possibility of exchanging ideas, which is the basis of politics,” Franzinetti said. “The result is the death of politics, which is what has happened.”
Talking with Italians who lived through the Years of Lead about what brought this period to an end, two common themes emerged, LaFrance argues:
The first has to do with economics. For a while, violence was seen as permissible because for too many people, it felt like the only option left in a world that had turned against them. When the Years of Lead began, Italy was still fumbling for a postwar identity. Some Fascists remained in positions of power, and authoritarian regimes controlled several of the country’s neighbors—Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey. Not unlike the labor movements that arose in Galleani’s day, the Years of Lead were preceded by intensifying unrest among factory workers and students, who wanted better social and working conditions. The unrest eventually tipped into violence, which spiraled out of control. Leftists fought for the proletariat, and neofascists fought to wind back the clock to the days of Mussolini. When, after two decades, the economy improved in Italy, terrorism receded.
The second theme was that the public finally got fed up. People didn’t want to live in terror. They said, in effect: Enough. Lotta Continua hadn’t resorted to violence in the early years. When it did grow violent, it alienated its own members. “I didn’t like it, and I fought it,” Franzinetti told me. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara who lived in Rome at the time, recalled: “It went too far. Really, it reached a point that was quite dramatic. It was hard to live through those times.” But it took a surprisingly long while to reach that point. The violence crept in—one episode, then another, then another—and people absorbed and compartmentalized the individual events, as many Americans do now. They did not understand just how dangerous things were getting until violence was endemic. “It started out with the kneecappings,” Joseph LaPalombara, a Yale political scientist who lived in Rome during the Years of Lead, told me, “and then got worse. And as it got worse, the streets emptied after dark.”
A turning point in public sentiment, or at least the start of a turning point, came in the spring of 1978, when the leftist group known as the Red Brigades kidnapped the former prime minister and leader of the Christian Democrats Aldo Moro, killing all five members of his police escort and turning him into an example of how We don’t negotiate with terrorists can go terrifically wrong. Moro was held captive and tortured for 54 days, then executed, his body left in the back of a bright-red Renault on a busy Rome street … It shouldn’t take an act like the assassination of a former prime minister to shake people into awareness. But it often does. William Bernstein, the author of The Delusions of Crowds, is not optimistic that anything else will work: “The answer is—and it’s not going to be a pleasant answer—the answer is that the violence ends if it boils over into a containable cataclysm.”
The rest of the article is similarly thought-provoking.
Good News for Low-Wage Workers
Also at The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey argues that we’re in the midst of a significant socioeconomic shift:
After a brutal few decades in which low-wage jobs proliferated and the American middle class hollowed out, the working poor have started earning more—a lot more. Many low-wage jobs have become middle-wage jobs. And incomes are increasing faster for poorer workers than for wealthier ones, a dynamic known as wage compression.
As a result, millions of low-income families are experiencing less financial stress and even a modicum of comfort, though the country’s surging rents and rising pace of inflation are burdening them too. The yawning gaps between different groups of American workers—Black and white, young and old, those without a college degree and those with one—have stopped widening and started narrowing. Measures of poverty and income inequality are dropping. I hesitate to call this the “Great Compression,” given that earnings disparities remain a dominant feature of the American labor market and American life. (Plus, economists already use that term to refer to the middle of the 20th century.) But it really is a remarkable trend, a half-decade-old “Little Compression” that policy makers should do everything in their power to extend, expand, and turn great.
What’s needed next is enough new construction of houses, condos, and apartment buildings to bring costs down. All we have to do is stop preventing real-estate developers from erecting them.
A Lonely Generation
After endorsing Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge’s thesis that smartphones and social media are among the most significant factors making young people today more anxious and depressed than bygone generations, Freddie deBoer speculates about how the cause and effect might work: When he was young, “the constant adolescent itch to be with other people, to see and be seen, could only be fulfilled by being in the physical presence of others,” and when cell phones and social-media sites “presented the opportunity to connect with people whenever you wanted,” what at first seemed liberatory and world expanding was actually a powerful trap:
This form of interaction superficially satisfied the drive to connect with other people, but that connection was shallow, immaterial, unsatisfying. The human impulse to see other people was dulled without accessing the reinvigorating power of actual human connection.
Being social is scary. Sometimes you ask someone to hang out and they don’t want to; sometimes you ask someone for their phone number and they don’t give it to you. Precisely because connection is so important to us, rejection of intimacy is uniquely painful. Our constant task as human beings is to overcome the fear of that rejection so that we can connect. I would nominate this dynamic as one of the great human dramas, a core element of being alive. The danger of constant digital connectivity is that it cons us into thinking that we can have the connection without the risk, that we can enjoy a simulacra of fulfilling human interaction without ever leaving the safety of online quasi-reality.
And so no wonder kids spend less time with friends, have less sex, feel no need to get their driver’s licenses ... They’ve been raised in an environment where massive corporations spend billions of dollars to convince them that they never have to leave their digital “ecosystems.” But only human connection is human connection. There is no substitute for IRL. And I think our adolescents are bearing the brunt of a vast social experiment where we tried to substitute something else for face-to-face interaction, and found it didn’t work.
At Blackbird Spyplane, a Substack unlike any other, the journalist Jonah Weiner and the design scout Erin Wylie argue that sometimes, that a food or paint stain on your shirt is a good thing:
Don’t think of stains as “stains,” think of them as “patina” — that is, natural, inadvertent, beauty-deepening decorations. Paint is the ur-example of a sick, “inadvertently decorative” stain. Paint on your shoes, paint on your pants, paint on a sweatshirt — f**k it, paint on a chunky knit sweater: You get a little paint on pretty much anything and 9 times out of 10 you’ve made yourself look cooler. Sometimes, of course, paint can read as “cool” to the point of parody / “get a load of Jasper Johns over here” cosplay. But all things being equal, paint communicates two swag-compounding things about you at once:
- You’ve been in the lab getting some fly s**t done (whether it’s whipping out these still-lifes or “rolling up your sleeves” on some honest-labor house-painting type s**t), and
- You aren’t overly precious about your presentation. We’ve written here about how flambéeing and pan-searing a jawn in this exact spirit is a great way to assert ownership over, e.g., a hyped pair of sneakers you love but don’t feel quite yourself in when they’re box fresh.
This is why all kinds of fashion designers—Margiela, Junya and Visvim leap to mind—sell signature pre-paint-splattered pieces. As with pre-distressed denim, such clothes tend to strike me & Erin as palpably fugazi and unrockably “extra” (it’s wild how well the eye can tell the difference between paint splatter actually incurred in the line of duty and artful facsimiles!!) but that only buttresses the underlying case for paint’s power.
This also helps us understand, by extension, why wine and tomato-sauce stains can also read as mad chill and cool. As with paint, these kinds of stains communicate un-preciousness on behalf of the wearer while simultaneously indicating that you have been busy doing fun, interesting s**t: imbuing clothes with stories and putting them to your own JOIE DE VIVRED-out purposes, rather than “letting them wear you.”
These stains conjure up an ambiance of romance, where your clothes serve as a visual index of an INVIGORATED LIFE. You’d have to be a fusty buzzkill to deny that that’s tight!!
Here’s where things start to get murky, though, because a major part of what’s going on here is that wine and arrabbiata sauce tend to code as just the right patina-boosting degree of, like, “Continental” and “refined.” The implicit message is that you probably dropped some $$$ in the process of accumulating those stains, and you did so in “good taste.” This is why, even though you have literally spilled food on yourself, the wine or tomato-sauce stain in question does not communicate sloppiness the way, say, a mustard stain does.
What follows is a meditation on “good” versus “bad” stains.
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This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
I recently asked readers to describe their relationship with organized religion. What follows is a continuation of the outpouring of responses I received.
Betsy explains why she rejects hierarchical religious organizations:
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and [religion] is no exception. There are many fine and generous people who practice religion as it was meant to be, but those numbers are small and usually not in positions of influence. I have not abandoned spirituality, and feel that there is an existential need for imparting a value system that inculcates consideration, concern, and care for all human life. This is the root value of faith communities, but so often it’s co-opted by those unavoidable humans who see an opportunity for influence and self-aggrandizement.
Chad explains why he values organized religion:
I am a Christian who believes that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin, lived a life without sin, died a death he did not deserve, and rose from the grave on the third day. And it is through faith in him alone that I can be saved from my sins and receive eternal life.
I have been a part of a church since I was born, in childhood as a member of the Church of Christ, and later as a member of a Southern Baptist Church. Overwhelmingly, my experience has been loving and good. That goodness has been founded in the love between the fellowship of believers in those places. I have loving parents, and found in the Church other loving adults who deeply cared for my development and well-being as a child. As an adult, I live in Madison, Mississippi, where neither I, nor my wife, grew up. We found a very supportive community in our church as we seek to raise our own children.
While these aspects of Church have certainly been beneficial, the reason I go to church is because my heart is so humbled by a God who would love me, and send his son to die for me, despite how many times I fail. What I mean is that at my core, I seek to glorify myself above others. I am prideful. I think if all humanity were honest with themselves, they would say the same thing. If we believe that there is a God who is perfect who created the heavens and the earth, and has revealed himself to us through his word, choosing to glorify ourselves over him has to be sinful. Yet, despite us constantly only thinking about our own personal wants and well-being, this God still loves us anyway.
That kind of unconditional love is worthy of my worship and affection. I have experienced the failings of Church leadership. I went to a church growing up where two of the three pastors are now professing atheists and disavow what they once taught. We had a pastor embezzle hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Southern Baptist Convention has a well-documented history of sexual abuse by its clergy. While these failures require accountability and justice, my faith has not wavered. That is because my faith is not in men but in a God who is perfect in his love, justice, and forgiveness. Churches are made up of people who will continue to fail. But the reason to go to church is because we are all broken and marred by sin, and in Church we find a God who loves us anyway.
Paul describes his religious evolution:
I grew up in an Irish Catholic family that went to church every Sunday (at 7 a.m.!) my entire childhood (’80s–’90s). Somewhere around my preteen years, I realized not everyone’s family was as strict with attendance, and I couldn’t understand why these nice families would be going to hell just for not being observant enough. Later in my teen years, I knew plenty of Jewish people and Hindus who I really thought were going to hell for not being born in the right “type” of family (I realized at that time that most people are “born” into a religion—it’s not a choice). And since God created them all … why did he not even give them a chance to follow the rules? They were basically sentenced to damnation upon creation.
I didn’t have any “bad” experiences; I just started to see holes in the foundational doctrine. I kept going to church with my family, and even continued briefly in college, then slowly tailed off. It wasn’t a “moment” where I stopped feeling Catholic; more of a slow letting go. I got married in a church and got my children baptized, but mostly out of family obligation (the “training” classes for each of these confirmed my fears of the dogma).
Then in my early 30s I started suffering from depression and anxiety. I have an engineering background, so figured I could fix it like an engineering problem: all by myself! I dove deep into general psychology and CBT. It worked a little, but I was still having issues. Then I came across the whole “mindfulness movement.” After doing some research, I saw that it was rooted in some science. I was willing to give it a try and saw some immediate results! I then started diving much deeper into the practice and Eastern philosophies … which are directly tied to Eastern religions, especially Buddhism.
I found an opening to overcome my aversion to all organized (Western) religions—the historical Buddha clearly stated not to believe anything because it is said or written down; you must experience these things for yourself. I didn’t realize it ’til then, but there was a “hole” that was previously filled by religion (common beliefs, community, identity, etc). I started practicing Buddhist meditation daily by myself for a few years and saw a lot of improvement: I had fewer critical thoughts, was a better employee, and less of a “jerk.” A few years ago I finally joined a Zen Buddhist Sangha (a group led by a Zen priest) and found just what I needed (even though we mostly sit there in silence together).
Right or wrong, that I feel I was able to CHOOSE my path really opens doors and increases my faith in “something” bigger. And I just don’t think “He” cares what I do on Sunday mornings.
Bob describes a break with his faith community:
My wife and I moved from Chicago to Kansas City 43 years ago as [Reform] Jews. One of the first things we did was join the largest [Reform] congregation in town. After conversations with the rabbis, we were placed in a havurah (a small group of 10 couples) with similar backgrounds. It was up to the hosting couple to determine the topic of the month (somehow or another tied to Judaism). After 20 years of being part of this “second” family, sharing family events from births, bar/bat mitzvot, weddings, and funerals, this was very comfortable for us. Although we didn’t agree on many things, as we had many conservatives as well as liberals/progressives within the group, it made for interesting discussions.
Then, 20 years in, major issues were coming up in the congregation at large of approximately 1,800 households, like dismissing the senior rabbi underhandedly, moving the temple cemetery, and funding a new building on a new site. About 400 households (us included) objected to some/all of the changes and met to push back against the executive director and board, including members of our aforementioned havurah. The next time the group got together, we had other plans and did not attend; we were voted out of the havurah and haven’t spoken to these couples in over 20 years.
We decided then that if we had an opposing viewpoint and could be “voted” out, we were done with the congregation. No more dues, holiday celebrations, and everything else connected to membership. I’ve become more of an agnostic, secular Jew in the meantime and I don’t miss the human tribalism of being in a temple congregation. I know who and where I came from. My parents were Czech Holocaust survivors and I’m comfortable in the decisions we’ve made being secular Jews without a congregation to call home.
Jess isn’t spiritual:
I identify as a Reform Jew and have been raised as such from birth. I enjoy attending synagogue and participating in holiday rituals. My husband was raised Episcopal but converted before our marriage, having immensely enjoyed his first visit to a synagogue and finding it more meaningful and relevant than any religion he’d explored before. We intend to raise our son as a Jew. All this said, belief in God has never been a factor for me. No living person can possibly answer the God question, and therefore it isn’t worth pondering. The organized nature of Judaism is more important to me because it helps maintain a connection with our cultural traditions. It has been a uniformly positive influence in my life and one that I’ve never felt compelled to hide. The best way to describe my outlook is “religious but not spiritual.” If there’s a simpler term for that, I haven’t heard it.
Jan urges a kind of religious pluralism:
Swami Vivekananda (the hit sensation of the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions) once said the highest manifestation of genuine spirituality will be seen when each individual develops their own unique approach to the supreme reality AND understands that underlying the multiplicity of such approaches is a unity which can never be defined or summed up in any creed or dogma. I have found that underlying unity in contemplative traditions around the world, from Christianity, Kabbalistic Judaism and Sufism to Vajrayana Buddhism and Kashmir Saivism. There are now millions of sincere individuals in every culture who are similarly discovering the unity that Swami Vivekananda pointed to. And many are internationally recognized scientists who, like myself, were atheists when all they knew were the dogmas of organized religion.
Tyler has been a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints his entire life. At 48, he appreciates the organized aspect of faith more than ever:
This past week I was made aware of a neighbor whose wife had passed away after a long illness, after which the widower contracted pneumonia and was hospitalized. Alongside other members of our faith (and others not of our faith), we were able to provide meaningful service to this man in an hour of great need. The service rendered was immediate and multifaceted due to the organized priesthood structure and Relief Society organization (composed entirely of women) at the local level of our small congregation.
Conversely, I was served by members of this same congregation this past Sunday as I listened to the sacrament-service testimonies of God and his love—offered by my fellow believers. This took place at our regularly scheduled 9 a.m. sacrament service—just one small example of the blessings of a structured, organized, consistent element of our Church.
I understand the criticisms of organized religion and its historical abuses. But without organized religion today, I would be without blessings and support that I consider vital to my spiritual progress.
Kathleen’s conversion to “very conservative Protestantism” eventually led to her earning a Ph.D. in religion from the secular graduate school now named Claremont Graduate University. She writes:
When I was in the sixth grade, my parents sent me blithely off to Calvin Crest Camp, a mainstream Presbyterian camp. My little girlfriend’s father was a Presbyterian minister in town. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the camp was staffed by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. While there I had a “born again” experience under the guidance of a staffer named Becky Cowan (I even remember her name). I came home with a Bible. My parents were dismayed. My atheist maternal grandmother, who was the executive secretary of the San Francisco Marin Medical Society, the first woman to chair the California medical board, and one of the original Terman children, called a friend on the faculty at UC San Francisco, a sociology professor, and asked him, “How long will my granddaughter be in this cult?”
I ended up at a small, conservative Baptist school. Graduating a year early, I went to Westmont College in Santa Barbara at 17. Although discouraged from even attempting to take Koine Greek by my first adviser (a Ph.D., but still a graduate of Bob Jones University), I took it anyway and decided I wanted to be a New Testament scholar and professor. From there I went to Fuller Theological Seminary, in Pasadena. I also learned Coptic, as I was interested in the Gnostic Gospels, along with a full year of Biblical Hebrew.
I had no women role models. The theology building did not even have a women’s bathroom; all professors were men. After two years I transferred to Claremont Graduate University, where I worked first with Bernadette Brooten, then James M. Robinson and Burton L. Mack.
With every year of my education, I moderated, and went from being a fundamentalist to being a pretty liberal Episcopalian. After being at several deathbeds of men who died of AIDS as a volunteer for APLA, I came to believe that gays and lesbians should at the least be allowed civil unions. My very first academic article in a very conservative evangelical theology journal challenged the validity of Paul’s rejection of same-sex relationships in Romans 1:26-27. My mentor Bernadette went on to write an entire book on the passage, for which she received a MacArthur “genius grant.” Unfortunately, at the end of my first semester, she took a position at Harvard. She wanted me to move with her, but I could not afford it.
In 1989 I took a full-time job at the University of Sioux Falls, in South Dakota, as the first woman ever to teach in theology or Bible. This is an American Baptist school. It had no formal statement of faith I had to sign, and assured me it was ready for a feminist woman. I was there for three years, and it was awful. My support for gay and lesbian people continued. Without any process, six weeks after I had refused to make a public statement in a university publication that I was not a lesbian, I was denied renewal for my “activities,” and for not being a good “fit” for the school. I prepared a grievance, but the campus did not even have a committee to receive it.
I defended my dissertation in the fall of 1991; it was accepted for publications with a trade press without revisions, and I had several on-campus interviews. Although invited by the dean at Notre Dame to take a tenure-track job there, all of my feminist mentors told me to instead take a job at a state school in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which at that time had a large, well-respected religious-studies department. So I came to the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh in the fall of 1992.
After Sioux Falls, I finally realized I was no longer an evangelical. I no longer was committed to the evangelical belief in the full authority of the Bible, nor felt I had what is understood to be a “personal relationship with Jesus.” I remained a committed Christian but obviously no longer was able to conform to an evangelical institution. I feel free to not apply biblical passages to my life that I can argue are time- and culturally based. After being threatened by violence from my husband, I decided that I was free to divorce, even though I agreed that Jesus himself prohibited divorce for any reason. I also saw no reason to reject gays and lesbians outright, as God had created them, too, in his image, and I had firmly decided that gay men with AIDS were being dehumanized based on a culturally biased argument of the Apostle Paul that I saw as completely outdated.
I have spent a great deal of time doing adult ed and other weekend seminars in churches around the country helping other Christians grapple with passages that have led them to treat others poorly when (I believe) God wants us as Christians to show mercy and compassion for every human being we encounter, and to fight for justice for all whenever possible. I still find great meaning in the scriptures, and my education deepens my love of these texts upon which my faith is based. I now am active in a Presbyterian Church, where I attend with my husband, an evangelical Christian a bit more conservative than I am. He is a lifelong Republican and an Army veteran.
He did not vote for Donald Trump as he thinks he is an immoral man.
Irene was raised in the Orthodox Christian Church by a priest and presvytera (the title for a priest’s wife) of a Greek Orthodox parish:
I never felt a need to leave the Church, and always felt like I was at home within its traditions and community of faith. In graduate school, I met my future husband through Church. He attended seminary, and we married the week after he graduated. It never occurred to me to marry outside of the Church.
Together we have traveled for more theological training in Greece; we have raised two children and have served our parish for over 30 years. Even though my husband is now retired, we still are in the parish. The people in our parish are “family,” and we are united in a common bond of faith and devotion to God. I love welcoming new members to the faith. Orthodoxy is a rich faith that stays true to the teachings of Jesus, and even though we seem strange to the American religious landscape, we have lots to offer. It frustrates me that we are not better known, and it frustrates me that today, orthodoxy is known primarily because of ethnic festivals and the horrible invasion of Ukraine. I am a chanter in the church, and chanting the hymns greatly deepens my faith. The depth of theology shown in the hymnography is fathomless. Another thing that helps me grow in my faith is charitable outreach, especially through the local and national ministries of our Church.
Max counsels against polemical atheism:
I’m now in my 70s, and my disbelief has become only more certain. Yet, I’ve withdrawn my support for militant atheists as their provocations are not diminishing militant religiosity but encouraging it. Religious faith is not amenable to reason, but reason is vulnerable to faith, and when we make people choose between faith and reason, most will choose faith and then go on to defend it and their choice by rejecting reason and evidence. Articulate voices arguing that there is no God and that religion is harmful have caused an opposite but more powerful backlash that is partly responsible for the shocking abandonment of reasonable thought and opinions that has dominated the Trump era.
Benjamin found his Christian faith with help from another believer:
I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Going to church was just something my family did: Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights were spent there, but, strangely enough, we never spoke much about the Bible or faith at home. For us, the organized religion of the Church was scantly personal, not intellectually rigorous, and didn’t clearly change the way people lived; the Church was a social gathering based loosely on Jesus. When I went to college, then, I had a vague intuition/baked-in belief that Christianity was good somehow, and so I began attending a Christian campus ministry. For whatever reason, I kept visiting the weekly meetings and grabbing coffee with the intern of this ministry for my first year and a half of college. While this campus ministry probably isn’t the kind of organization that you think of when you hear “organized religion,” it was very much an expression of religion that is organized at the local, regional, and national level, so I’d say it counts.
My sophomore fall was a tumultuous one to say the least, but that intern was always there; I knew I could count on him to just show up to talk about whatever I wanted to talk about. Since this is a religious group, I could also count on him tossing in a couple Bible verses and applying them lovingly to my situation, even if I didn’t really understand why. My relationship with that intern was the first time I witnessed an inkling of God’s goodness that I had probably only heard about for an hour on Sunday. That sophomore winter break is when I believe I understood God’s love for me in Christ for the first time—it became tangible, fulfilling, something I desperately longed for. Undoubtedly, to me, it was the intern back on my college campus that showed me this truth, lived it out, even if I can’t remember how exactly he articulated it (though I have no doubt he did).
Today, I work in that same internship in New York City. Organized religion went from a seemingly hollow social club to a peripheral pursuit to showing me a God who draws near and sends out—one who sent me far from home to cast the light of his embrace over students here, to demonstrate that the organized faith is not just a value-add or a fragment of the person I call “me” but a transforming embrace that will encompass everything about me and can do the same for you. I never would have known the grounding peace that I believe only comes from knowing Jesus if it weren’t for that group on my campus and that intern. Now I just hope I can be for a student a sliver of what he was to me.
Jaleelah’s best experience with organized religion was as a kid:
For a few years when I was growing up, I attended a Muslim Sunday school that used an atypical teaching style to impart traditional religious beliefs. Muslim schools for children in Canada tend to focus solely on Arabic grammar and Quran memorization. The school I attended aimed to impart core religious beliefs and practices through interactive group lessons. Students were never told they should believe in God or the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) simply because the adults said so—they were invited to raise doubts and provided with logical responses. I credit some of the thinking prompted by that school with ensuring my belief in God remains sound (“if a number of physical and metaphysical forces each affect a certain amount of mass, surely one is quantifiably stronger than the rest”). Unfortunately, as I grew older, I found out that adult religious communities operate quite differently.
Many religious people are more concerned with pointing out the flaws of others than improving their own. This is, of course, true of atheists as well, but the culture of moral righteousness has unique consequences in religion. For Christians and Muslims alike, religion is often the center of the community. Small Christian towns organize events around churches, and communities of immigrants who come from everywhere between Palestine and Malaysia stick together by attending celebrations and dinners at masjids. When a center of religion is unwelcoming to people who cannot or will not practice “perfectly,” they lose far more than eternal salvation: They lose their family and their biggest connection to their culture.
I still admire Islam’s systems of justice. I will still fast throughout Ramadan in March and April because it is an excellent exercise in humility, empathy, and self-control. But I will also continue to approach religion with skepticism, which may unfortunately lock me out of truly engaging with it.
Cherry counsels going to church in person:
We need the coming together, the prayer and worship time, and we need to publicly acknowledge we believe in God. When I was more committed to being a part of organized religion, I felt less isolated and I did not take dust issues and transform them into mountains. People also need to be with groups that they relate to and feel comfortable with.
Now, people can view church services via online media and don’t need to get dressed, burn expensive gas, and put miles on their vehicles. But something is missing when you do this. When entering a house of worship, there is a peace, as if you have entered the presence of God. It could be that this space has been dedicated to God, or it could be all of the prayers that have been offered up. The holiness of that space is felt.
Isaa, 70, is “a baptized believer in God and a lay member of God’s Eastern Orthodox Church.” He writes:
God has sustained me all these years; I am one of the few longtime San Francisco bike messengers to reach my age and have also survived some years in Afghanistan (as an aid worker), two years of homelessness, and two heart conditions ongoing since 2006. Before and after my baptism in 1984, I was also someone who saw religion as a consumer item, something that I could use to improve my life. That feeling still comes back on occasion. But I have become aware of the vital fact that it is not God who must do for me; God has already done so much for me—given life to me and my loved ones and created an Earth that is stunning in its natural beauty and variegated bounty.
So, after all God has done and still does for me, I must do for God and for other people. And my organized religion helps me do for God and for others. It organizes us. An array of prayers, services, sacraments, fasts, feasts, and other benefits work to organize our daily lives.
Consider just one of these blessings:
The sacrament of confession. Many outside the Church have criticized the practice of confessing in the presence of a priest. “Why not just confess directly to God?” they ask. Actually we are confessing directly to God, but we are doing so with a witness. And this seemingly unnecessary regulation serves as a brake on our very human inclination to sin. After my first confession at the age of 31, I said what almost every other convert to Orthodox Christianity has said: “If I had known I would have had to say some of those things in front of someone else, I never would have done them.” And to this day, I find myself checking my infamous temper when I remember that I will have to admit my actions in front of someone else. So this inhibition on our human tendency to sin restrains us from harming other persons and keeps us from spiritually damaging ourselves.
Brink Lindsey’s lament about the decline of organized religion is a variation on a theme I have often read in print or heard in conversation, especially in recent years. Basically atheists, agnostics, or others who avoid organized religions are concerned about the loss of faith by other people. While they see religious faith as something irrational for individuals, they see faith as desirable and therefore rational for society. For me as an individual, faith is very rational. For millions more, wouldn’t it be more so?
And Glenn advances an intellectual argument for faith:
C. S. Lewis said, “A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” He is referencing the transcendent religious experience to which all world religions point. Some are simplistic, others sophisticated, but all point to a reality beyond the merely physical.
Twentieth-century secularism dares to seek reason and purpose in the merely physical present. Trying to fully experience meaning from the facts available to us by the hard sciences is like trying to experience Bach or Beethoven by only looking at the sheet music. The notes on the page are a true depiction of the genius of those composers, but hardly a true experience of their creativity––and I would argue, as a devout Christian, of their creator. In fact, music, art, love, etc., are just the sorts of things that expose the threadbare vacuity of our modern and postmodern secular point of view. We hunger for more because there is more. And every form of transcendence requires some mode of faith, not as a component of anti-intellectualism but because faith is the only bridge that we have available for us to escape the mere physicality of the universe.
Do we understand this? Of course not. If such a supreme being exists, we should expect such vagueness rather than certainty. Any “god” small enough to fit neatly in my brain and thought process would be far too small to be the being we are seeking. It would constitute proof that he existed but was not all that we thought or hoped he would be. He transcends our expectations and explanations. We are constantly surprised by the counterintuitive nature of quantum physics; certainly we should expect to be surprised by the artist that created quantum physics, if such a being exists.
He does.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
As a reward for sending so many excellent emails on your variety of religious experiences, you’re off this week so that I can finish up a feature I’m hard at work on, and so that I can run a second installment of your responses on religion this Monday.
The States That Reopened First
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, nearly every U.S. state shut down parts of its economy. Looking back, Nicole Gelinas argues in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal that states that opened up sooner are still reaping economic benefits:
By February 2022, the United States had finally clawed back its lost Covid jobs. But Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas hadn’t just recovered; they were excelling. First, they beat the country’s recovery by nearly a year, gaining back their pre-Covid job totals by the summer of 2021. This early start enabled these states to gain economic strength, even as much of the country lagged. As of October 2022, the nation had just 1.8 percent more private-sector jobs than in October 2019. Yet Florida had 6.8 percent more jobs, Texas 6.7 percent more, North Carolina 6.1 percent, and Georgia 5.2 percent.
Big states that were slower to reopen are still suffering employment stagnation, even more than a year after ending restrictions. Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are all missing between 0.6 percent and 1.8 percent of their pre-Covid jobs. But New York State, with among the nation’s strictest lockdowns, remains the worst performer. The state is still down 2.8 percent of its 2019 jobs, or 228,400 positions. New York City, particularly, has struggled. Quick to recover after the tech bubble burst and after 9/11 and even after the 2008 financial crisis, the city is missing 2.4 percent, or 100,100, of its pre-Covid positions. This experiment shows that states can’t just pause and restart their economies at will, as Cuomo and his peers tried to do. “Paused” jobs become lost jobs, long after extraordinary government aid for the unemployed has expired.
Elephant Versus Mouse
At New York, Jonathan Chait argues that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s attacks on Disney constitute an abuse of power and a portent of intimidation tactics to come should he ascend to federal office:
DeSantis established the principle that he can and will use the power of the state to punish private firms that exercise their First Amendment right to criticize his positions. Now he is promising to continue exerting state power to pressure the firm to produce content that comports with his own ideological agenda … A few things ought to be clear. First, DeSantis’s treatment of Disney is not a one-off but a centerpiece of his legacy in Florida. He has repeatedly invoked the episode in his speeches, and his allies have held it up as evidence of his strength and dominance. The Murdoch media empire, which is functionally an arm of the DeSantis campaign, highlighted the Disney conquest in a New York Post front page and a Fox & Friends segment and DeSantis touted his move in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Second, DeSantis’s authoritarian methods have met with vanishingly little resistance within his party … And third, DeSantis has been very explicit about his belief that he sees his methods in Florida as a blueprint for a national agenda. So there is every reason to believe that, if elected president, DeSantis would use government power to force both public and private institutions to toe his line.
In The New York Times, Damon Linker grants that DeSantis would do many things, if elected president, that Linker would dislike, but nevertheless argues that the Florida governor would be better than Donald Trump, and cautions his fellow liberals against overreaching when making the case against DeSantis.
We Mislead, You Applaud
Some of the most well-compensated people at Fox News misled their viewers about the winner of the 2020 election––and acted as though doing so was a sign of respect, David French argues:
In the emails and texts highlighted in the Dominion filing, you see Fox News figures, including Sean Hannity and Suzanne Scott and Lachlan Murdoch, referring to the need to “respect” the audience. To be clear, by “respect” they didn’t mean “tell the truth”—an act of genuine respect. Instead they meant “represent.”
Representation can have its place. Fox’s deep connection with its conservative audience means that it can be ahead of the rest of the media on stories that affect red states and red culture.
But there is a difference between coming from a community and speaking for a community. In journalism, the former can be valuable, but the latter can be corrupt. It can result in audience capture (writing to please your audience, not challenge it) and in fear and timidity in reporting facts that contradict popular narratives. And in extreme instances—such as what we witnessed from Fox News after the 2020 presidential election—it can result in almost cartoonish villainy.
There are courageous reporters at Fox. We learned some of their names in the Dominion filing. They were the people who had the courage to tell the truth. But then there are the leaders and the prime-time stars. Tough? Courageous? Hardly. When push comes to shove, they embody the possibly apocryphal remark of the French revolutionary Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” And follow them they did, straight into a morass of lies and conspiracy theories that should undermine Fox’s credibility for years to come.
As I see it, no one shows more disrespect to the Fox audience than its pandering hosts.
The Harm of Victimhood Culture
The feminist writer Jill Filipovic recently argued:
I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life—to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean—are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstraps their way into wellbeing. It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off. Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.
Back in 2015 and 2016, I wrote about concept creep around harm and the rise of victimhood culture.
On the Nature of Drummers
Jack Stilgoe deigns to speak on behalf of a tribe to which he belongs:
We drummers tend to be ambivalent about technology. Like most musicians, ours is a craft that is technologically mediated. The affordances of sticks, pedals and things to hit with them enable our sound. We are used to the jokes that suggest we lack the intelligence of our fellow musicians. (What’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine? You only have to punch the information into a drum machine once.)
We worry that our bandmates, presented with technological alternatives, might look on us as a problem to be solved. We are loud; we take up space; our instruments are heavy and slow to assemble; our sounds are harsh and inconsistent, and sometimes we speed up or slow down when we play. Faced with a drum machine that keeps metronomic time, plays no more or less than is asked of it and, once purchased, costs nothing, we can’t help but feel judged: is that all you think of us? Is that thing all it takes to make a drummer redundant?
That’s his jumping off point for a meditation on AI and music.
Feeling Great and Hating It
Marc Andreessen has been teetotaling and feels great, which he considers terrible. As he explains in his new Substack:
Unfortunately, in recent years, it’s become clear that most or all—probably all—of the scientific studies on the benefits of alcohol are fake, the scientists unwitting or witting victims of selection effects. As Michael Crichton says, “wet streets cause rain”, or rather wet streets don’t cause rain. It turns out that sick people often don’t drink, or subjects just lie to researchers about their consumption outright. There go the studies.
It is now pretty definitively clear that no amount of alcohol is good for you. Andrew Huberman recently summed this conclusion up on his podcast; the topic made me so enraged I never listened to the episode, but I did read the notes. Andrew says “the best amount of alcohol to drink is no alcohol”—imagine someone who both hates and loves humanity that much.
Since I stopped drinking, I feel much better. I don’t need as much sleep, but my sleep is better. I’m more alert … cogent and focused at all times. I have more energy when I exercise, and it’s easier to control my diet. It’s great, and I am super mad about it. I feel like the color has drained out of my evenings. Spending time with people is still fun, but now it’s hard to sit still and watch a movie or read a book and unwind at the end of a hard day. I’m more prone to just work until bedtime. Grump grump grump.
Is The Scarlet Letter incomprehensible to today’s Harvard students? I would not have thought so, but I encountered the claim in a New Yorker article about the national decline in English majors:
“Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”
The 19th century was a long time ago––but public shamings carried out by puritanical zealots are so current!
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week, I asked readers for insights into why teenage girls might be struggling, citing CDC data showing that the percentage who have contemplated suicide is up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago.
Marcie has a 20-year-old daughter who didn’t get to play much in school:
Years ago, when my daughter started kindergarten, I was so excited for her to enjoy all the fun and interesting things that I got to do, and so disappointed when I found out that’s not how they do kindergarten anymore. There was less time for free play, less time to interact with peers, and (when we moved to a new city with only half-day kindergarten) no time for recess. It was heartbreaking to watch her slowly lose her natural sense of wonder and joy in learning. The rest of her school experience was similar—too much desk work, too little play, and hardly any self-guided play.
My daughter started developing anxiety and depression as a teenager. I often wonder if a better school experience would have made a difference. What if part of the reason so many teens are in despair is that they were denied the opportunity to be children? What if our children have too few opportunities to experience wonder, joy, or fun? What if we’ve forgotten that child-labor laws exist for a reason and now our children all hold desk jobs? Only they don’t get paid.
K points a finger at social media:
I teach high school. Last year, a very bright, high-achieving student had to take a medical leave. She later told me she had an eating disorder. While she did talk about the issue of control, which I think is a common factor for girls like her who develop eating disorders, she largely attributed her struggles to social media. All day every day she is staring at images of “perfect” bodies on Instagram, and it felt like she couldn’t escape the pressure. This student was never even almost overweight; she went from very thin to dangerously thin.
I wonder if people who aren’t around teenagers all day realize their lives are mediated by their phones and they don’t see boundaries between social media and real life the way some of us do. This isn’t an original thesis, but I believe that accounts for a large part of the mental-health struggles we see.
Claire suggests education might be a solution:
Media-literacy coursework ought to begin in elementary school; kids ought to scrutinize and interpret media and learn about engaging respectfully with others in technological settings. By adolescence, they ought to sense Madison Avenue’s cloying artifices, to regard the self-interested theatrics of influencers with cool (or amused) detachment, and to know when to disengage.
Whereas Tara counsels a more radical solution: no social media until age 18. She writes:
My experience with Facebook shaped our house rules around social media. At its best, it helped me stay in touch with friends and family. But mostly I found it to be a huge time sink. At its worst, it prompted loneliness, isolation, or conflict.
When I gave up Facebook, it felt like I’d been given back time and peace of mind. So our house rule was no social media until age 18. We were always open to talking with both of our kids about our decision, but my husband and I both felt strongly that it was the right choice and we stuck with it.
I got a surprise when my daughter made an impassioned plea to be allowed to use social media at 17. I was wavering, thinking maybe we’d waited long enough, and wanted to avoid conflict. But it was her 20-year-old brother who spoke up and said, “Don’t do it, Mom. It’s not a good place.”
In the end, our daughter agreed to wait another year, albeit grudgingly. What convinced her was a conversation we had about her workload and how easy it is to lose yourself in your phone, even when you’re not on social media. She was able to acknowledge the danger of distraction and waited until she turned 18.
There’s no magic switch flipped at 18, but living without social media as long as she did gave our daughter valuable perspective; the house rule protected both kids from a lot of things they were not mature enough to handle. Parenting is complicated, and I don’t mean to suggest that our decision is the only right one. But it is one of the purest parenting wins I’ve experienced. It was one of the best, most valuable parenting decisions we made for our kids, and I have zero regrets. That’s a rare feeling.
My kids grew up with all the same ups and downs, friendship struggles, and broken hearts. But it could have been so much worse had it all happened in view of a much wider and harsher audience.
But John doesn’t think that individual parents acting alone can defeat social media:
My daughter is reading this, so I’ll try to speak carefully, but I remember trying to draw a line in the sand about phones and social media. I knew, in my heart and my head, that her social-media use was causing many of her problems. Social media was making her life worse, I knew, like I used to know her delightful smile and vivacious personality. But when I moved to limit her usage, it led to animosity all around. One parent cannot stand against the horde; parents have to act collectively to get girls off social media.
Heather is switching from teaching high school to middle school because of various problems teen girls are facing. Among them:
1. Social media and the highly successful bullying it enables. I’m talking about SWATting people’s houses, humiliating TikTok montages, fake Instagram accounts and Snapchats, the works. It’s all happening, all of the time. We’re at peak insecurity, suspicion, and meanness right now, and it’s hitting girls where they live: in their friendships.
2. We’re unintentionally telling girls they’re trash if they don’t love STEM, or if they’re not highly competitive “leaders.” We can’t all be type-A, even with medication! It’s also not their fault that STEM is where the high-paying jobs are. We’re all afraid to tell them it’s okay to skip AP Calculus and Physics and take AP Art, because we’ll be excoriated, often by the girls themselves.
In Nordic countries, more (but not all!) women choose people-focused careers and more men (but not all!) choose to work with stuff. But they have some pay equity and universal health-care coverage. At my former high school, 80 percent of girls in honors courses say they’re going into engineering, and we call it a win for feminism. Being a “good student” has become synonymous with being a science and engineering kid, so they conform to that expectation.
This is not feminism!
3. If we push hard enough, girls will convince themselves that they like or are whatever we value. We shouldn’t take advantage of this people-pleasing tendency in girls, because it’s putting them in the hospital.
4. Speaking of hospitals, we’re ignoring their cries for help, at least until the first suicide attempt. Girls are meeting with their school advocacy team after a stint in psychiatric-emergency services, but we’re primarily discussing how to make up their work so they can still compete for a certain scholarship. We don’t even discuss the teen overscheduling problem, much less how we contribute to it. After all, adults let people with still-developing executive functioning decide how many hard classes to take, then hold them to their decision because “accountability.” What did we think would happen? Then the predictable outcome happens and we all meet to “get them back on track.” Which means the same track that was killing them. Great.
Steve is the father of a college-aged daughter. He writes:
I can’t help but think that some of this stress is an unintended consequence of the otherwise remarkably positive gains women have made over the past 25-plus years. Teen girls now compete head-to-head with boys academically, often filling the majority of the slots at elite colleges. Women’s sports in high school and college are as demanding and competitive as those of their male counterparts. Yet, teen girls still have many of the social and cultural pressures that existed before, and social media only intensified things.
While anti-bullying efforts have made some headway related to physical abuse, we have a long way to go in stopping the difficult-to-see abuse from aptly named “mean girls.” So teen girls now have largely the same pressures as teen boys plus the pressures they historically suffered. Add to this the stresses suffered by working mothers during the pandemic and it could make the future seem bleak for young minds.
This is not to suggest that we turn back the clocks. The gains for girls and women have been long overdue, and frankly, there is still much work to be done. Instead, we have to recognize that progress comes with costs, and look for solutions. Long-term, it is about teaching the skills and providing them with the support they need to develop a healthy response to the pressures (and maybe reducing expectations).
As a grizzled and humbled dad-vet, I would like to make a few short-term suggestions to the fathers out there:
- Spend less time focusing on your daughter’s successes. While congratulating her is fine, constantly (or, worse, publicly) praising your high-achieving daughter creates the feeling that your love is contingent on her continued success. Let her know you love her without condition.
- Can we limit the amount of time we use compliments that focus on how she looks? Instead of calling her beautiful or stunning, tell her she is awesome, incredible, or, even better, perfect.
- Just be there for her, physically present and ready to listen without judgment, meeting her wherever she is at. Eighty percent of the time will not be productive (use that time to read more), but that 20 percent where she turns to you will let her know that her father is there for her (which is super powerful). My wife did this incredibly well, and I wish I had understood its value more when my kids were younger.
An easy way to “just be there”: Start cooking and demand family dinners. You’ll get at least 30 minutes to sit next to your perfect daughter.
Scott blames what he sees as social pressure for girls and women to be warriors:
The pressure to reimagine womanhood as fierce, brave, and strong has left many feeling like failures, as if they’ve failed to be that caricature of power they’re told they should be. It’s no longer sufficient to like what they like, be who they are, do whatever they want to do. They must be better, more important, more powerful, and their failure to live up to the hype has manifested as an insurmountable failure in life.
That pressure is coupled with a lack of human companionship, as girls and women are also told they no longer need men—and that men who are less than perfect are unworthy of their company and attention—there is a gaping hole in their world that seems as if it can never be filled. For men, the pressure is lessened by the social expectation that they aren’t all that worthy, and so the failure to achieve success is bad, but not as bad as a disgrace to their gender. They’re still miserable and hopeless, but at least they are not alone in their misery.
Katie, a high-school teacher in San Diego, offers a generational hypothesis:
I was having a conversation with a colleague who mentioned that her son had been born on September 11, 2001; she was watching the news coverage while in labor. I realized that parents may have started parenting very differently in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, probably without even knowing it.
I think that the fear that anything can happen at any moment bled into this generation of parents and kids. I think post-9/11 parents wanted to shield their kids from that fear, pain, and trauma, but ended up doing exactly the opposite: They fed their kids a steady diet of fear and anxiety without the coping skills to process it. It was all just “shake the keys in the face of the sad child and make them happy, no matter what.” Compounded by a new mass shooting practically daily, honestly how could kids not be stewing in a toxic soup of great existential anxiety? As a teacher who had to teach online during the pandemic, students preferred the online version of school for a lot of reasons, and one of them was not having to be sitting ducks in classrooms.
Also, I can say from my observations this year especially, that girls can inflict a special kind of evil on each other, both in person and through social media. I don’t want to generalize too much, or claim that boys aren’t engaging in similar tactics, but the ways that girls use, interpret, analyze, and leverage a single social-media post is actually astonishing.
I do an activity in my AP classes that involves reviewing a fake set of documents about a fictional high-school couple. It includes mocked-up screenshots of an Instagram post, two text-message conversations, and a calendar schedule for both of the kids in the couple. The conversations I overheard this year as my students answered the assigned questions were stunning: They noticed time stamps, battery levels, and background locations. They were like the damn CIA analyzing this fictional high-school couple, and if they’re putting this kind of energy into kids they don’t know (who aren’t even real!), I just sat there imagining the energy they are putting into analysis of their friends’ posts––and worse, those of their enemies. I can’t imagine being a kid on the business end of a teenage girl who has triangulated an Instagram post, a TikTok, and a couple of text messages into a group chat and decided that I have committed some kind of unforgivable high-school sin.
The othering is swift and cold—it’s chilling to watch.
I work with amazing teens who are truly gifted. They are articulate and write beautifully and are so thoughtful and polite and fashionable and aware of the world; light-years ahead of where I felt like I was at the same age. But that awareness is coming with a terrible price, and we’re not acknowledging it quickly enough.
Jeremy, a high-school teacher, worries that kids are too afraid of saying the wrong thing to talk about their struggles:
I see a lot of young people struggling in silence.
Young women, generally more socially motivated, are more vulnerable to declines in face-to-face social interaction. Depression has been rising among young women for years now.
Young people in general need guidance in dealing with big questions and heavy topics. Far too many of the students I ask tell me they are uncomfortable talking about controversial or difficult things. As someone who openly talks about his own battles with mental illness in class, and who teaches psychology, I was able to get some kids to open up to me, to leave the door open to conversations about how they are doing. But the bitter polarization of our public discourse stifles those exploratory conversations teens and young adults have on difficult, adult topics. You know, of the kind that people wrestle with at that age? With a caring teacher and the right group of students, those conversations are possible in the classroom.
The fear of saying something wrong is too great for some students to talk openly. It’s in those moments of open communication that adults can teach our young people to have those hard conversations. We need to do a better job keeping ideology—from all sides—out of our public schools. If teens can’t say the “wrong” thing in a good classroom, a community of learners and peers, where can they?
S. struggled with mental health for most of her adolescence. She writes:
I could probably list 100 reasons why young women’s mental health is suffering: Social media causing body dysmorphia; adolescence being the age that most girls start to realize that they are different from boys in a way that suddenly attracts inappropriate and unwanted attention from adult men; the realization that your gender, which you cannot control, restricts your ability to dream—you scarcely see yourself among world leaders, great historical figures, even artists and musicians and authors.
Being a teenage girl entails realizing that the world is not built for you, and so you start to wonder how you might change yourself to ease the process: be skinnier so that your appearance is accepted; be smarter so that you may be taken seriously; keep to yourself so that you aren’t bossy or annoying. This process only yields failure and disappointment when losing 10 pounds doesn’t mean boys like you and getting perfect grades doesn’t convince them that women can be good at math. That makes you feel even more hopeless.
There is a theory that mental illnesses may be caused by learned helplessness, where the repeated feeling that one has no control over a situation makes one doubt that one is able to achieve anything. I dislike the term learned helplessness because it implies that you are somehow culpable for your faults—you learned them, after all—but the theory describes what teen girls are experiencing.
Girls don’t seek out help, because they don’t think help will improve anything. Having faith that therapy or medication will work requires you to externalize your mental health to some extent: You have to believe that your depression is an affliction that can be cured. As long as you treat your mental health as an immutable trait, you will not seek out help. But gender itself is an immutable trait, and if being a girl is the source of your helplessness, what is the point of intervention?
And suppose that you do decide to speak to a parent or professional. Society and the medical field have a history of delegitimizing the feelings of women: You’re not sleeping enough; you’re spending too much time on your phone; it’s probably just your period; or maybe you’re simply being dramatic. So now not only do you have to convince yourself that things can improve, but you have to convince everyone else that a problem exists in the first place.
The repeated denigration that teenage girls experience due to their gender can exacerbate other risk factors, like genetics, socioeconomic status, family dynamics, and even teenage experimentation with drugs and alcohol. So maybe the best thing we can do for the mental health of teenage girls is simply take them seriously.
Jaleelah cautions against pigeonholing teen girls:
Women are human beings. They are vulnerable to many of the same societal causes of depression as men: mass unemployment, rising cost of living, and lack of real-life community support. It is dangerous to act as though all forms of mental illness are gendered. All human beings need to eat and laugh and live together in order to be happy. Whether you think it is up to the Church or the state to make that possible, you have to acknowledge that the basics of a healthy life are out of reach for many Americans.
That said, I believe that rising hopelessness about misogyny is one factor among many hurting girls’ mental health. I was a 17-year-old girl when the pandemic hit. In my transition to university and adult society, I have noticed that liberals and conservatives alike make it hard for women to feel recognized for their merits.
Vincent Lloyd is a Black professor at Villanova University, where he directed the Black-studies program, leads workshops on anti-racism and transformative justice, and has published books on anti-Black racism, including Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. Until recently, he was dismissive of criticism of the way that the left talks about race in America. Then he had an unsettling experience while teaching a group of high-school students as part of a highly selective summer program that is convened and sponsored annually by the Telluride Association.
[Read: Why not take a Black studies class?]
The students began the summer excited about the six-week seminar, called “Race and the Limits of Law.” But soon, they moved to expel two of their classmates from the program amid political disagreements. Then, as Lloyd later recounted in an essay for Compact Magazine, the remaining students read a prepared statement about “how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills.”
Before, he had quickly rejected the linguist and social commentator John McWhorter’s argument that anti-racism is a new religion. “Last summer,” Lloyd wrote, “I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult.”
When I read Lloyd’s essay, I valued the distinct ideological perspective that grounds his critique of how anti-racism could improve. I wanted to converse with him about his experience, the lessons he took from it, and ascendant social movements on the left, in the hopes that our very different perspectives might help solve problems that worry us both.
Below is a lightly edited version of our correspondence.
Conor Friedersdorf: Early on, you distinguish your essay from other “laments about ‘woke’ campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues.” Given your academic scholarship and varied work on behalf of social justice, no one can credibly claim that you’re reflexively hostile to efforts that get coded as “woke.” Yet you believe that something went terribly wrong in your seminar. I hope we can drill down on what specifically went wrong and why.
But first, for any readers who come to anything coded as “woke” with skepticism, or who want to understand where you are coming from a bit better, could you explain why you’ve dedicated so much time and effort to Black-studies programs, anti-racism workshops, and transformative-justice workshops?
Vincent Lloyd: In our lives, we all encounter a deeply human problem: domination. Some have the capacity to arbitrarily assert their will over others. We find this in our families, with bosses at work, with politicians, and systemically: Patriarchy, racism, and colonialism are all systems of domination. Anti-Black racism is the closest we get to a paradigm of domination. Even a century and a half after slavery, the master-slave dynamic, dominator and dominated, fuels anti-Black racism, which is now incorporated into laws and institutions as well as personal vices.
I want a world free of domination. I think we all do. That requires working together to root out systems of domination, some on the surface but many deeply ingrained in our world. Black studies aims to root out domination, in the university and in the world. It grew out of Black-student struggles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, themselves born of the civil-rights movement and anti-war protests. It aims to draw attention to the forms of anti-Black racism that infect each of us and the institutions we inhabit, and to catalyze justice movements today. Behind the “woke” label are powerful new visions of justice, new ways of imagining a world free of domination. Instead of politely requesting incorporation into unjust institutions, today’s justice movements rightly demand new institutions that are more responsive to human needs.
Friedersdorf: On a bunch of contested questions, you’ve sketched relatively radical positions: for example, that forms of anti-Blackness “infect each of us”; that anti-Black domination endures in the university; that those who seek justice are called not just to eschew dominating others but to root out domination; and that succeeding requires demanding new institutions, not just reforming old ones. As your radical students saw it, their peers, their teacher, and the format of their seminar were infected with racism, thus the call to end the seminar and demand a new approach.
You reject their radicalism and lovingly defend the seminar format, where “specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation,” even as you grant that it is time-consuming and frustrating, and that participants inevitably get a lot wrong along the way.
“Day by day, one intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another overlooked,” you write, because “the seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence.” Ultimately, you go so far as to liken the format to democratic life itself, insofar as “we each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.”
I’m with you—conserve the seminar! (I would very much like to be a participant in a seminar that you lead.) But how, exactly? To the question “How do we know which institutions and norms to conserve and which are better abolished and replaced?” the conservative answers, “We usually cannot know. To pick and choose is to err in ways that do more harm than good. So change should proceed slowly: better to steadily conserve small gains than risk huge losses.” You are not a conservative. Still, this episode caused you to recall a moment in the 1970s “when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion.” How do you propose that justice seekers best avoid or guard against toxicity, dogmatism, excess, and disillusion?
Lloyd: The students and I agreed about political principles. We disagreed about political judgment and political strategy. How do we get from our world, full of anti-Black racism, full of interlocking systems of domination, to a world free of domination? We need to feel the urgency of this question, but we also need to develop the sensibilities and virtues that can allow us to suitably respond.
The seminar is a training ground. It requires patience, enduring frustration, attending carefully to others, making distinctions, drawing on personal experience and applying it to the world of ideas. The seminar is not a pure space; there are no pure spaces. But, in contrast to the lecture, the seminar demonstrates to students that they already have knowledge and that, collectively, they can produce knowledge.
The seminar format itself is changing in positive ways. When I was an undergraduate two decades ago, we all sat around a table, the professor would say “What did you think of the reading?,” and there would be open discussion. Because of my background (I came to Princeton from a public high school in southern Minnesota) and race, I was not practiced in this format, and I rarely spoke. Today, we start with activities to prime the pump, as it were: For example, we have students talk to their neighbor about a question for a few minutes, or each share a question that sets the seminar’s agenda, or divide the seminar into groups of three for a while. Such practices mitigate the effects of the inequalities that necessarily enter the seminar space.
Even in its updated format, a seminar requires risk. People, and especially institutions, don’t like risk. Presumably to reduce that risk, the Telluride Association inserted teachers’ assistants into seminars in what was effectively a layer of anti-racist managers between teachers and students. But that destroys the political potential of the seminar: It can no longer cultivate the sensibilities and virtues needed to combat systems of domination. In the context I write about, because the seminar is a space where the professor and the students are required to restrain themselves, the only figure who was unrestrained was the charismatic teaching assistant (who also, uniquely in this situation, managed the students’ lives for the 21 hours a day they were not in seminar).
One factor contributing to toxicity on the left today is a failure to recognize that different modes of engagement are appropriate to different sorts of spaces. Some spaces, like seminars and reading groups, are training grounds. Others are sites of political action which require deferring to authority and exercising discipline. Still others are sites of storytelling and imagination.
Right now, there is a deep, understandable suspicion of authority that pervades all left spaces and has the effect of reducing discourse to retweets of charismatic personalities—and charisma is the twin of abuse.
Friedersdorf: Many readers will agree (as I do) that we live in a world of domination; that among the forms it takes is anti-Black racism; that we ought to root out systems of domination; that “different modes of engagement are appropriate to different sorts of spaces”; and that positive change is most likely to succeed when its champions develop certain sensibilities and virtues.
[Ibram X. Kendhi: The book that exposed anti-Black racism in the classroom]
In the experience your essay recounts, I see evidence for some additional propositions.
First, it seems to me that a healthy anti-racism movement cannot simply presume that anti-Black racism is or is not a feature of a given institution or space, or to what degree. Without claims that are particular and falsifiable, and rigorous attempts among people with diverse viewpoints to prove or disprove them, the inevitable result is dogmatism and disillusion––and calls to disrupt and transform things that are no more racist or harmful than your seminar. But in many leftist spaces, rigor of that sort is itself seen as harmful and destructive, rather than a constructive necessity for any movement that seeks to focus its efforts appropriately.
Second, I think too many elite academic institutions treat Black students as if they are fragile, undifferentiated victims so lacking in resilience that even a small, unintentional slight from a white or Asian classmate will result in significant harm, acculturating many students to engage Black classmates not as peers but as pitiable others best patronized as “allies” while walking on eggshells. Students ought to regard one another as equals––they are equals and deserve the equal dignity of being treated that way. The alternative constitutes an implicit white and Asian supremacy and an attendant denial of Black equality as disempowering and dispiriting as any other.
As you wrote:
Saddest of all, for me, was hearing what the black students said. They needed extra help, they were struggling to understand anything from the readings, and they couldn’t even know what questions to ask unless they had guidance—first Keisha said this, then the black students said it, then their “allies” repeated it in solidarity with them. But I witnessed them learning. I heard them ask critical questions about difficult texts. I saw their writing improve. I saw them use complex concepts in thoughtful ways. They just didn’t believe in themselves.
You went on to hypothesize that while the Telluride program has been ahead of its time (in a good sense) in many of the ways it has evolved on race over the years, “perhaps the implosion of my Telluride seminar suggests that this final step, centering blackness, tempts the US elite, and particularly US elite educational institutions, to take a step too far, a step into incoherence—or worse.”
But were your seminar participants centering “Blackness” or false stereotypes of Blackness that reduce it to victimhood? Truly centering Blackness would at least require acknowledging the singular individuality, staggering diversity, and resilience of Black people.
Lloyd: There is, indeed, an important question about how we can sharpen our perception of specific wrongs, especially around racism. But there is a deeper question involved too: whether we are approaching justice with a tragic sensibility—in religious terms, appreciating that the world is fallen. Even if, today, we could come up with a list of wrongs needing attention, we would certainly be missing some and misperceiving others; more generally, there are systems of domination affecting us that we haven’t even noticed yet. In the mid-20th century, there was little awareness of homophobia, for example. Who knows what new forms of domination we will have identified a few decades in the future.
At its best, talk of the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism is pointing toward that tragic sensibility. There are forms of anti-Black racism of which we are not aware circulating around people and institutions. That is why we need to cultivate humility, but we need active humility, not the sort that allows us to wallow. We need spaces where we can practice articulating our commitments, having them challenged, and revising them. We also need spaces where we analyze precisely what wrongs we can identify and respond to here and now, given our imperfect capacities.
The seminar form promises to be a space where we can do both.
In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, and especially since the murder of George Floyd, Blackness has floated so widely and loosely in our discourse that the diversity of Black experience and even the humanity of particular Black folks starts to be lost. Institutions know they have racist habits and know they need to change, but they are very awkward in formulating responses—and they are always looking for shortcuts. In cases like anti-Black racism, we do need policy fixes that are overbroad to correct for past wrongs, but we also need to put particular emphasis on attending to the diversity and complexity of Black experience.
The seminar I wrote about was attempting to do just this: leverage the students’ interest in questions of racial justice to examine how different racial categories change over time and how they are inhabited differently by different people—and how the law struggles to make sense of this complexity. Each week we read one court decision, one literary text (a novel, memoir, or short-story collection), and three pieces of historical and cultural analysis, with each genre adding new layers and complications to our understanding of race in general, and Blackness in particular.
In the U.S. and probably beyond, we are at a turning point in how we understand racial diversity. For a half century, we were comfortably multiculturalists, celebrating the variety of peoples, each with their own tasty food and colorful clothes, each facing their own sorts of struggles which we can support, but ultimately all part of the shared life of a community, institution, or nation. The justice claims coming out of social movements in the last decade reject this framework. Anti-Black racism, they charge, is qualitatively different from other forms of racism (though similar claims are made around Indigeneity and other categories as well). Black justice requires interrupting both habits and institutions, and beginning again in new ways.
I don’t think Telluride and other sorts of institutions know what to do with these claims; adding an extra staff person at the multicultural student office or a diversity manager in a seminar is not genuinely responsive. I can’t predict what new frameworks around racial diversity will come after multiculturalism. I trust the energy and creativity of young people leading social movements to imagine a more just future. But I distrust the efforts of institutions to manage that justice-seeking spirit in ways that are convenient and financially expedient, and those efforts are muddying the waters. Young activists who have the capacity to dream a world without domination are instead, at times, demanding more diversity bureaucrats, more diversity trainings, and more ideological policing.
[Conor Friedersdorf: The paradox of diversity training]
Friedersdorf: I share the hope that young people will imagine and help bring about a future with less domination. But I fear the social movements that you allude to have become more authoritarian in the past decade. I frequently see self-proclaimed adherents of those movements seeking to dominate others. More puzzlingly, I see them denouncing institutions and authority figures as racist one moment, then demanding in the next moment that those same institutions or leaders start marshaling their authority more coercively (much as your students denounced your supposed racism, then insisted that you assert more control over their discussions).
“The students wanted freedom, for themselves and for all,” you wrote, “but they started to say that the only route to freedom is indoctrination: having me tell them what to think.” Are you sure that it’s “freedom for all” that they wanted? As you note, “Young activists who have the capacity to dream a world without domination are instead, at times, demanding more diversity bureaucrats, more diversity trainings, and more ideological policing.” Why are such approaches wrong turns? And by way of wrapping up our back-and-forth, could you suggest a better alternative?
Lloyd: Social movements are messy, and this is especially true for those movements led by youth and those led by people who have suffered a great deal. Social movements are also the best place we can turn to for insights into the nature of justice. Those struggling against domination have unique expertise on domination itself, and how we can free ourselves from it. And that’s the tricky part: We need to take seriously the insights of social movements, but those insights are not self-evident—not to movement participants and not to outsiders. It is difficult and sometimes painful to sort through the varied rhetorics and practices of a movement and to see what hews most closely to the struggle against domination that is a movement’s foundation. Furthermore, no matter our distance from a movement, no matter how closely we attend to it, we have to remind ourselves that we’re going to get some of its insights wrong.
I worry that left political discourse today takes social movements, or even just an individual who has suffered, as conversation stoppers rather than conversation starters. That frustrates me because I firmly believe these movements are the key to our collective liberation. Justice struggles always involve a back-and-forth between movement participants making demands for radical transformation and those in power trying to manage those demands so that they can keep their grip on power. Sometimes that management involves co-opting movements themselves, effectively getting activists to make demands that serve the interests of the status quo. Those of us who care about justice have to be willing to ask critical questions about these dynamics rather than blindly deferring to the activist language.
In an academic context, Black student organizing has long made the claim that interrogating domination is at the heart of the academic mission of the university: domination that starts with the paradigm of the Middle Passage but proceeds to all the forms domination takes, around race, gender, economics, and personal relationships. In other words, the core claim growing out of Black student movements is that the founding principles of educational institutions have to change, and that will call for a radical restructuring of what those institutions look like. I worry about the growth of diversity bureaucracies whose mission is, effectively, to shield institutions from that radical critique, and to redirect activist energy toward goals that entrench the powers that be. There is no tension between the academic mission of a university and the claims being made by student activists: Those activists are demanding more rigor, better history, sharper analysis, because they are demanding that the struggle against domination, a fundamental concern of humanity, ought to be at the root of all intellectual work.
Regarding the current discourse on race, I think we need to appreciate what an important moment we are in, and how much Black organizing has achieved. We are talking about anti-Black racism in a much more sophisticated way today than we were even 10 years ago. We are noticing and responding to anti-Black racism in health care, the economy, real estate, the prison system, policing, and in many other domains. We have broken the hold that the framework of multiculturalism had on discussions of race. Now the forces of white supremacy are realizing they are vulnerable and responding forcefully, and they are attempting to sow discord and defensiveness among justice seekers.
Those of us committed to justice movements need to redouble our commitment to the sensibilities and virtues that are the prerequisite for successful struggles in difficult times: humility, receptivity, charity, faith in the struggle, and hope for a world without domination.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked, “What is the best way forward for Americans who want to improve policing and the criminal-justice system?”
James contends that shootings by police mostly aren’t the products of “bad apple” cops:
Like a plane crash or a nuclear-plant mishap, they are the emergent result of training, hiring, dispatch, supervision, and more, all of which can be improved. An “event review,” not a “performance review” of the cop who pulls the trigger, allows for resident participation and expert input. This is not a substitute for discipline and punishment of violators. It assumes that the discipline of a lone violator is a bad place to stop if prevention is the goal.
Maryanne describes what made her late brother a good cop:
My brother Paul, a police officer for 37 years, died this past Thanksgiving Day. At Paul’s wake, the constant stream of fellow officers and staff demonstrated he was loved by all, but those to whom he was the field-training officer spoke about him in a tone of reverence. Many of your readers will suggest taking a hard look at how officers are trained. I would urge a hard look at who they are trained by. Can they demonstrate not just what to do but also how to be? Here is a story shared on Paul’s memorial website by one of his trainees:
“Paulie taught me the value of words over force. There is one particular incident I’ll never forget involving … a mentally unstable young man … who had real fighting skills. The guy kept repeating he would count to three and ‘kill all of us.’ He would get to two several times, which caused Kline and I to prepare for battle. Paulie, with his hands in his pockets and his calming demeanor, would say just what the kid needed to hear to interrupt his violent thoughts and reset. Eventually, the kid succumbed to Paul’s verbal judo and no force was required to bring the incident to a close. I’ll never forget that, or Paul, for all the other good he did. As a trainer years later, I always remembered that and tried to pass it along thanks to him. RIP Paulie. You touched many lives!”
My eulogy for Paul provided some additional context for how a beloved police field-training officer came to be the person he was and why that served his trainees and the community:
“The quality I’ve heard over and over again about Paul was that he was ‘nice,’ which is not the typical description of a cop; usually you hear good cop or bad cop, and nice cop may seem out of the norm. Often I suspected I was latching onto the word nice because he was my brother and of course I was biased. Yesterday at the wake, my biases were confirmed and I kept hearing story after story of what nice meant to his fellow officers and staff, that what most defined Paul were not the occasional events that resulted in his commendations or awards but instead his ‘thousand small acts of kindness.’”
Between the time Paul was married to his former wife and when he met and married Wei, the true love of his life, he found a very good counselor. Paul was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. As with many recurring adulthood patterns, the counselor saw there were roots in childhood, but a lot of it was fuzzy, and so they encouraged Paul to “go talk to your sister.” During that time we spent hours upon hours piecing together our childhood. Like many families, ours was touched by a depressed and alcoholic parent. The normal ebb and flow went between apparent calm and total chaos that kept us always on guard, not knowing which it would be at any given moment.
Bit by bit, we pieced together all the fractured moments to re-create many of the events we weren’t allowed to talk about and often told to ignore as if they hadn’t happened at all. At certain points, true to Paul’s nature, as all the memories of craziness and chaos began to emerge, he would just get me laughing and laughing, often by inserting the phrase “How in the world did we ever grow up to be fairly normal functioning adults?” The evidence and statistics were clearly not in our favor, and things easily could have gone in another direction.
But we had figured out how to cope. Paul’s role in our family was the “disrupter,” so any of you who marveled at Paul’s particularly skillful and effective methods for diffusing “domestic” calls who think he learned this at the police academy would be only partially correct. The truth is Paul started honing those skills from the time he was about 6. He transformed the coping and challenges of a child into kindness and helpfulness as an adult.
A few of you who had Paul as your field-training officer shared stories of Paul’s ability to use “Words, not force” in his work, and I will be forever proud that “Words, not force” is what you most wanted to share about what you learned from him. But now I’d like to share my favorite story that Paul shared with me … Of course it takes place in the police station.
Near the end of his career, after Paul had transferred from the street to the desk, one day a woman walked in … Paul sensed the signs of an alcoholic and he was sure this would have no small part in why the woman was there. The woman said that her teenage daughter hadn’t come home the prior night and she wanted to report her as a runaway. Paul took all the information and tried to reassure the woman that he thought her daughter was probably okay and just decided to stay over at a friend’s house. All the while, he was thinking to himself that he understood exactly why the daughter didn’t want to be at home.
I can’t recall what the girl’s name was, but she needs a name for this story, so I’ll call her Amy. A while later, a teenage girl came into the station, walked up to Paul at the desk and just said “I need some help.” I suspect she was a little taken aback when Paul said “I bet you are Amy. Your mother has already been here, but you’ve come to the right place, and you’ve come to just the right person.” He took Amy to the back of the station and just sat and listened to her. It was no surprise to Paul that his assumptions were correct: This was a teenager struggling with a parent who was struggling with addiction.
He assured her there were safe places to share her story and get the support she needed. So they went over to the computer, where Paul helped her look up group meetings in the area. With a list in hand, Amy made a promise that she would go to the meetings, and also that she would go home. I think about Amy a lot and hope that she found the support she needed and grew up to be a “fairly normal functioning adult.” I can’t know any of that for sure, but I do know in my heart that when she left the police station that day, she felt a little more empowered and a lot less alone because she met Paul.
Scott is a criminal-defense attorney and longtime critic of flaws in policing and prosecuting:
For those of us who have spent decades trying to figure out and then implement reform, the past few years have been brutal. There was a rare window of opportunity for change, when the public wasn’t screaming for ever more laws, ever harsher punishments, and fewer alternatives to the historical (and failed) belief that we could punish our way out of violence, drugs, and crime. Instead, the activists took the field, indulging their fantasy ideological solutions that would neither work nor be accepted by the majority of Americans as viable solutions requiring trade-offs everyone could live with.
Simplistic solutions such as “defund,” based on ideologically bound understandings of the problem, never stood a chance. As soon as the next “wave” hit, as it surely would, the pendulum would swing and we would be back to the tried-and-failed more crimes, less due process, and harsher punishments. And here we are. We squandered a once-in-a-generation (or more) opportunity for serious reform where all stakeholders reached consensus and the best, if imperfect, fixes were accepted by a majority of Americans and to everyone’s benefit. Instead, we’re back where we started and no one was saved.
Robert urges an emphasis on accountability:
Eliminate qualified immunity, which renders all but the most egregious, outrageous conduct unaccountable. It is a long slog to change attitudes, but by making punishment more likely, we can change behavior. In an ideal world, we would also be able to foster a police culture where misbehavior is seen as an unacceptable stain on police as a whole and something that every effort is made to eliminate. Culture change is difficult to impossible to impose from outside, but it can occur.
I am a retired physician, and I remember the ’70s and early ’80s when physicians circled the wagons to defend malpracticing docs but gradually began to realize that malpractice hurt people and made everyone else look bad. The profession ceased to tolerate physician misbehavior. I can’t say how to make that happen in the police, but it’s where they need to go.
MC recommends more sunlight:
This issue is not about the failure of police departments but of the weak policing of them. I don't think policing can be improved much except by forced transparency and external enforcement of humane standards. Officers have to be more afraid of the consequences of brutality. Mandate body cameras that can't be disabled, monitored by an external office that doesn’t normally work with police officers. Footage becomes publicly available, with identities suppressed.
We’re horrified at police brutality whenever another video shows it. There’s nothing more horrifying than how obvious it is that this behavior is normal for the ones inflicting the violence. We must bring the eyes of the public into all the dark places where that treatment was learned and practiced.
Jay wants police to be more active:
Improved policing begins with actually enforcing the law as written. We’ve deemed law enforcement of smaller crimes such as shoplifting, graffiti, and small theft “optional,” then wondered why larger crimes continue to soar. There’s little justice for criminals nor for victims in a system in which policing is optional, understaffed or harassed and harried into inertia.
C. is a white cop who is married to a Black police dispatcher on a college campus:
This question haunts me because of my job, because of my wife's job, and because any children we may have will have to interact with American police as mixed-race individuals.
One morning, we had a dining-hall employee pull into our department’s parking lot. She had been on her way to work on campus when her ex began following her in his car. She stopped at our department to scare him off, and to make us aware that he might show up at the dining hall to further harass her. We got information on the ex and found out that he had a warrant for misdemeanor assault (on the employee). The employee went on her way to work, and we followed to hang out in the area and keep an eye out.
The ex didn’t wait long, and parked right near the employee before she had even gotten out of her car. My shift partner found him first, and when I got on scene, the ex was outside his vehicle shouting toward the employee in her car. She was having a full-blown panic attack, breathing and crying so loud I could hear her through the closed car windows. And the ex had their child in the car. Couldn’t have been more than 2, and he wasn’t in a proper car seat; he was standing on the backseat looking out the window.
The ex was focused on the employee, ignoring my shift partner, and started freaking out at how much she was freaking out. I was likewise concerned about her, so I went ahead and radioed for medics to be dispatched. I could tell my shift partner was trying to get in a position to handcuff the ex, but he kept sidestepping, trying to keep an eye on the employee and still shouting toward her.
I knew if we went hands-on as the situation stood, it was going to be ugly (the guy was tall, like 6 foot 2, while my shift partner was a paltry 5 foot 5 and I’m an average 5 foot 10). So I got his attention and told him, “Look, I have medics on the way to check on her, but we can only do one thing at a time, and we have information that you have a warrant out. We’re still waiting for confirmation that the warrant is current and valid, but that’s what we know right now. If you would have a seat in our cruiser while we wait for that info, we can have medics check her out.”
The guy just stopped. Then he said, “Yeah, I’m not gonna lie. I got a warrant.’ He turned around and put his hands behind his back. My partner cuffed him and got him in a cruiser. I went to check on the employee, while our sergeant, who arrived during all this, retrieved the child and brought him to his mother. Medics showed up a bit later, and made sure the employee was okay.
Now, standard operating procedure when arresting someone with a warrant for a violent offense is to get them in a position where you can cuff them up real quick before they even know what’s happening, and then explain the situation. It’s supposed to prevent the individual from even trying to fight the arrest. In this situation, though, the guy was already amped way up; we had a woman that legitimately might need medical attention and a 2-year-old toddling around the back seat of a car. If we'd gone hands-on with no explanation, he would have struggled, and we would have had to fight to get him under control while his ex hyperventilated herself into passing out and his son watched from the car. It was going to be a bad day all around. So instead, I treated the guy with respect and explained the situation point-blank. And he let us arrest him.
My shift partner, later, told me he didn’t really like the way I’d handled it, and that we should’ve cuffed him before we told him about the warrant. I got a guy that brought his 2-year-old son with him to harass the mother of said son to let us arrest him for assault of that same mother. And my partner didn’t like the way I’d handled it. If that isn’t an indictment of police standard operating procedures and culture, then I don’t know what is.
Taylor argues that the best way forward is a relentless focus on creating and scaling up alternatives to police:
We should be thinking about crisis-response teams (Denver's STAR program relies on social workers to respond to calls), getting police out of traffic enforcement, and civilian systems for “welfare checks” (that often compose up to 70 percent of a jurisdiction’s 911 dispatches).
These programs take armed police out of the equation, in circumstances that most often escalate into police harassment, intimidation, abuse, and murder. They reduce harm, without any need for police-culture change, effective retraining, or functional internal accountability mechanisms.
But rebalancing public-safety budgets to rely far less on policing has not advanced, in part, because people with legitimate concerns about their safety cannot envision the world where police are not the first responders. "What happens when I call 911 if it’s not the police responding?” Before we will have the political space we need to then limit police to a narrower role, we need to build up these alternatives in a visible way and show they are effective, giving time for them to become a routine part of a multipronged public-safety structure.
Jaleelah urges a more active citizenry:
Monitor the police in your community. Go to city-council meetings and town halls. If police unions are blocking formal oversight, monitor them on the ground. If you see an officer yelling at a civilian, stop and record. If you see a barista threatening to call the police to remove a homeless person sleeping on a bench, try to mediate the disagreement.
Police officers may oppose civilian interference in their work. If that is the case, they should lobby their unions to make policy changes that will engender confidence in their intentions and capabilities. Until that happens, ordinary Americans’ on-the-ground surveillance is the only thing that can keep cops accountable.
D. H. argues that a lack of public understanding of what police work entails is an impediment to better policing:
The George Floyd situation was as close to indisputably wrong as any police-caused deaths in the past decade or so, and captured on videotape. It was clearly outrageous to keep him face down, handcuffed behind his back, and to continue to kneel on his neck while he was experiencing difficulty breathing.
Other situations are not so clearly wrong, thus there is less outrage. Trying to shoehorn every deadly encounter with police into the same category as the George Floyd situation has probably hurt the cause rather than helped it, because people get outrage fatigue. We live in a violent society beset by an upsurge in violent crimes (at least in the Portland area). At this juncture, defunding the police feels more like giving free rein to criminals to prey on society, and encouraging vigilantes and militia to take policing into their own hands. “Defund the police” was one of the worst liberal rallying cries ever. The gun scourge in this country makes it feel very unsafe for officers and the public alike.
With the constant barrage of vitriol expressed toward the police, who would want to become a police officer? Who at retirement age would want to remain on the force? If they do not feel supported by the public, some may not feel highly motivated to protect and serve. How many quiet-quitting police officers are out there, and can you really blame them?
We cannot work up sufficient outrage to take meaningful steps to prevent mass shootings, so why would anyone think a society numb to school and church shootings might remain outraged enough to effect meaningful change to the police organizations that must respond to those?
I can understand how the fear of corrupt and/or brutal police could cause a rational person to resist arrest, as could impaired judgment from mental illness or intoxication. However, if one chooses to resist arrest, that choice will be met by force (police violence) aimed to quickly overcome that resistance and gain control of the situation. Once force is employed, situations become much more volatile and outcomes worse. But, if police do not use force, then noncompliance will be encouraged. Getting the level of force right is more difficult in real time in the field than it may look after the fact.
I am not a police officer, but before retiring, I frequently represented them in civil-rights actions seeking money damages in federal court, and have a pretty good grasp on their perspective. They do have a strong sense that the public does not understand what they are called upon to do, and how they are trained to do it, and why they are trained that way (answer: survival). The way forward is thorny. The public needs to know what is and is not lawful police conduct. There is a lot of misinformation in the press, and the public deserves accurate information about persons armed and authorized to use force against them.
Police should not police themselves; indeed, no group should police itself. Recruiting diverse panels of retired judges, public defenders, prosecutors, academics, and others knowledgeable about the law and police procedures to take testimony, gather evidence about serious police conduct complaints, and issue public reports of their findings might be a start. It could help the poor and ignorant obtain representation in meritorious cases, publicly identify transgressing offices, and discourage frivolous lawsuits where the facts show the conduct was justified. Of course, that would cost money, and panels of experts can be wrong, biased, or even corrupted.
Timothy believes that guns are a big part of the problem:
Improving policing is a tough problem as long as America remains a highly weaponed society. The police can’t respond to a traffic situation, a domestic situation, or even a missing-child situation without fearing for their lives. Hence, they react as if any situation is or will become violent. With the proliferation of drugs, their fears are increased. There are many situations where certain drugs increase a person’s sense of violence while deadening their awareness to pain or injury. That makes it really tough on the police.
Jon concurs, and wants police officers to advocate for more gun control:
An acute manifestation of America’s gun insanity is that police departments, chiefs, sheriffs, and unions are not the most vocal supporters of gun-safety measures and laws to get guns off the streets. Where everyone (including, apparently, 6-year-olds) can possess a deadly weapon, police are not irrational to bring a sense of caution, or worse, fear, to almost every interaction, heightening tensions and leading to faster and deadlier escalations. This has contributed to more militant, violent, confrontational policing.
JD worries about the mental health of police officers:
I believe that the majority of those who undertake careers in law enforcement are motivated by a desire to make a positive difference. Over time, however, the soul-killing impact of repetitively dealing with humanity in its worst moments erodes empathy and altruism and generates resentment, hostility, fear, and an overarching effort to exert control.
While our culture has made great strides in acknowledging the impact of PTSD on our veterans and others who experience trauma, only rarely does such understanding extend to law enforcement. As a former medical educator in a family-practice residency program, I recall the utility of Balint training in assisting medical-school graduates to maintain empathy and professionalism in the context of medical practices requiring them to encounter 15-20 persons a day, each seeking the best of medical care. Balint training created a context where peers could share the best and worst of their days in a judgment-free setting and, in the best of outcomes, permit them to renew their commitment.
Thanks to everyone who sent responses, whether or not I had space to print them––as ever, lots of great ones went unpublished. See you later this week.
Riot police at a 2020 protest
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked, “What do you think of the diversity-training and DEI industries?” Dozens of readers shared their personal experiences, good and bad––so many, in fact, that I’m going to run some additional responses on Wednesday (if you haven’t yet signed up for the newsletter, do so here).
Today, we’ll start with four people who’ve led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in some capacity, and then we’ll hear from people who’ve been on the receiving end of diversity training at work. E. is a cynic about the aims of diversity work in corporate America:
I have worked in HR for Fortune 500 companies for 25 years in diversity, diversity and inclusion, and as an Equal Employment Opportunity officer. The intent of DEI training is for executives to think they are improving the organization for “minorities,” LGBTQ people, women, people with disabilities, etc. Spend a little money without any accountability or significant change. DEI training is to check a box. It is not meant to improve anything, and it doesn’t. Some trainings––the Intercultural Development Inventory, unconscious bias––make things worse. In general, DEI training exists to make executive teams and boards feel good.
M.V. is “enthusiastic about DEI work” and believes the grassroots group he leads at his workplace conducts it better than most outside consultants:
Far too often we trust external experts to bring solutions, which can neglect the critical value of truly centering employees and building culture from the bottom up. I’ve sat in corporate training sessions in which well-intended academics identify behaviors like “avoiding eye contact” as racial microaggressions. These generalities can do more harm than good; what if the person who can’t keep eye contact has social anxiety? Have we propagated that anxiety by encouraging the recipient to assume the worst implication?
The road toward reinforcing separation and the road toward building connection are, in fact, two different roads with different approaches. So how does our group approach DEI?
First, we value personal storytelling, which has been championed by the Moral Courage College founder Irshad Manji. There is a difference between hearing, say, about the importance of pronoun use from a nonbinary employee as compared to a training module. A discussion about labels with a diverse set of employees drives home the message that the “correct” term for a person can’t just be looked up but can only be gleaned through personal connection and the grace that comes with knowing the limitations of words.
Second, we adopt the teachings of Loretta Ross and Loan Tran on “calling in the calling-out culture,” which they offer in a superb online course. Though call-outs have their place, building trust and fostering mutual vulnerability are superior for having challenging conversations.
Third, we promote genuine curiosity and asking questions. The work by Mónica Guzmán of Braver Angels—including her book, I Never Thought of It That Way—teaches us to strive to understand the people we read and hear about but never meet. As she states, “Whoever is underrepresented in your life will be overrepresented in your imagination.”
Personal storytelling, calling people in, and getting genuinely curious: These three sets of tools can transform a culture and really help people be seen for who they actually are, not just the phantoms that fill the gaps in our heads, which are the root of much bias. These approaches that challenge the usual corporate DEI programming are largely championed by women of color (Manji, Ross, Guzmán, Chloé Valdary). For skeptics of DEI alternatives who also believe in centering the thinking of women of color during these times, I can suggest no stronger slate of philosophies to challenge their thinking.
Taisha has worked in the diversity industry for 15 years and believes a shift in its approach is needed: In a crisis-prone world, she writes, we need to organize people around shared goals, not shared identities. If a diverse group focuses on a goal (such as higher wages) that would benefit everyone working toward its, or a goal (such as reducing carbon emissions) that would benefit society in general, diversity goals will be achieved as a by-product of everyone cooperating.
She writes:
A common goal motivates people to handle themselves, so their personalities become less of a hindrance to the group’s purpose; to identify and develop their unique assets to benefit the group; and to recognize and mobilize their peers to do the same for the group’s good. Humans are inherently selfish and self-centered. But when we find something to believe in, we are more willing to set aside our personal likes and dislikes to work alongside others who share our goals. Then we think less of our identity differences. This sameness of purpose achieves inclusion without sacrificing differences.
The success of current unionizing efforts illustrate this new approach to DEI that I call “Purpose not Personalities.” Unions organize a diverse group of people around a centrally compelling purpose (better treatment, higher wages, etc.) that motivates them to set aside whatever issues they might have with one another and dedicate the best of themselves, including their unique perspectives and skills, to help the group achieve success. To solve the many crises facing us, organizations can and should shift their DEI efforts to encourage less focus on personality or identity differences and more on group GOOD, trusting people to work out their differences as they lose sight of themselves.
Now on to the great majority of correspondents who have experienced DEI training sessions as participants. John agrees with the notion that an emphasis on shared goals tends to yield success:
I spent 24 years in the organization that, in my opinion, has done the best job with diversity and inclusion: the U.S. military. The real success happened at a cultural level: We all had a unifying mission. Anyone not in the military was the other, for the kinds of people that need an “other.” And if someone did bring their prejudices and racism to work in the military, they were dealt with quite harshly. In this example, we should see a way forward. It is a shared mission and shared purpose that brings all people together. Anytime you substitute some other word for human, dehumanizing behavior occurs.
Our leaders, DEI educators, and media should all stress our shared culture and humanity. Instead, our leaders and DEI educators emphasize and exacerbate differences. We are doing the opposite of the right thing to bring about less racism and prejudice.
It’s noteworthy, I think, that the military took this approach with race far earlier than with sexual orientation, with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell formally in place until 2011, when the unifying mission (and the justness of equality under the law) was treated as mattering more than the difference in identity.
J., a high-school teacher in Canada, writes:
Diversity training is not about diversity. Diversity training is about providing excuses to institutions that don’t want to tackle poverty and the fundamental inequality of our capitalist system. Instead, they blame “institutional”' racism, an intentionally obscure term. What does it look like? How does one measure it? Who is implicated?
The conceit of these sessions during my 20 years as a teacher: You frontline workers, YOU are the reason these students fail. In my context—high schools—the only “proof” required for this conceit is the fact that some demographic groups do worse than others. We know that outcomes tell an incomplete story when variables like income, family, mental health, etc. are ignored. Diversity training is privileged people (professionals, administrators, politicians, professors, academics, many of whom make a good living as “experts” in this field) advancing a story, a theory. Yet, the literature demonstrates no meaningful successes to this decades-long progressive experiment.
We need viewpoint diversity in our institutions. Our fixation as progressives on dogma, and a narrow, Orwellian definition of what counts as diversity, is as much fuel for the culture wars as the excesses of the right. It’s just that we lefties are, ironically, too blind to our own privilege—educational privilege, class privilege, trauma privilege, etc.—to see it.
S. used to love being a professor:
I am a Bernie Sanders voter. I have spent 25 years working toward countering racism. I have lost friends and family, as I was “too woke.” I had my dream job, teaching mostly underprivileged students. I now almost loathe my job.
Faculty have been subjected to an authoritarian agenda of DEI/social justice since George Floyd was killed. His death had nothing to do with our campus or state, but it’s as if nothing matters anymore but racism, DEI, and payback for his situation. We are constantly peppered with meaningless utopian aspirations toward “equality of outcomes,” which is patently absurd, even within a family, let alone a state, school, nation, or planet. We are forced to listen to meaningless equity language and endure tortuous training and workshops, often required. They are usually run by unimpressive people whose qualifications seem dubious, usually taking the chance to scold the white faculty who have earned master’s and Ph.D.s and are established and renowned teachers who committed their lives to average-to-low pay for the sake of equity and justice.
Nobody dares offer any dissent. I have spoken to high-level administrators, people white and nonwhite, and they will not say anything. Nobody dares counter the social-justice/equity people. All are fearful of cancellation or firing. All have families and bills to pay and err on the side of lethargic caution. Everybody knows none of this is helping students.
I will never vote conservative on any policy, for what it’s worth. I will, however, wonder if I am in the most Orwellian career imaginable. My irritation is endless and my despondency palpable. My friends are tired of hearing about it. I’m a tenured, published, respected professor in California. on the verge of depression for the first time in my life.
Sherri, a gay woman who worked from 1988 to 2017, shared her thoughts on diversity training:
I’m a Ph.D. chemist, meaning I spent my career in a very male-dominated industry at a time when senior-level women were very rare, much less senior-level out LGBTQ people. I was closeted for the first 10 years of my career and then very out. In the ’90s, while I was still fairly junior and still closeted, my company, like many in the chemicals industry, started a Leadership Training protocol that in part focused on diversity awareness. I am convinced it is one of the worst things the company could have done.
They took a gaggle of senior managers off-site, away from day-to-day work pressures for a week; raised their awareness ofn “diversity”––which really just focused on representation––then sent them back with no skills for truly creating change. They all then felt that they “got it” and weren’t the problem. But day to day, they went back to their ingrained behaviors. Only now they felt enlightened and didn’t even try to look in the mirror.
Later, when I was out, I became a popular speaker on the internal circuit of department meetings to discuss what it felt like to be a gay senior woman at the company. I spent a fair amount of time trying to sensitize people to the concept of privilege without calling it that. The analogy I used was a fish versus a scuba diver. Both could survive in the ocean, but the fish did so effortlessly as the environment was built around their needs and capabilities. The scuba diver needed an oxygen tank, wet suit, fins, and had to expend a fair amount of energy to just survive in the ocean, much less thrive. The scuba diver was constantly aware of his difference and how much conscious effort it took to navigate underwater, and it was exhausting. The fish didn’t even know what water was.
We are all fish in some ways and scuba divers in others. Where you are a fish, remember what it feels like when you are a scuba diver. And reach out to the scuba divers and help them survive.
We are so bent out of shape focusing on what we consider a “defining characteristic” that we miss what is most important: seeing each person as an individual human. We generalize and make assumptions based on gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, or what have you. Maybe instead we should follow the Ted Lasso model of being “people curious.” Teach people about unintentional bias that all humans carry and use nontraditional examples like assumptions about how someone dresses or the school they went to or their accent. Then focus on the fact that bias in and of itself isn’t bad; it’s what you do with the knowledge that you carry bias. Don’t focus so much on someone’s speech or behavior as much as on what they should learn from it.
We will all make mistakes; we will all offend; in most cases it is not intentional. We all want to be seen as fully human and treated with respect. Can’t we just focus on that?
Richard is an engineer and describes how the DEI initiatives he’s been exposed to have changed:
In 2000, I moved from the U.K. to the U.S.A.
It was a job-related move, within a large company, working with semiconductors for automotive applications. About three years later, I encountered my first corporate DEI initiative. In the simplest terms, the company informed us that hiring practices were changing to increase profit. The training consisted of a few pages of reading, followed by a discussion during my manager’s weekly group meeting.
My boss provided us with a relevant example, and a nod in my direction. “Imagine a car with a subsystem design flaw that’s only exposed when driving on the left-hand side of the road.” He’d made his point: having a diverse team working on a problem would result in a more robust solution.
By 2018, I was working for a different tech company. I was also living in a much redder state, and DEI had become a divisive issue. Arriving extremely late to the game, my employer started rolling out DEI training. The introductory reading material was reluctant to mention the profit motive for maintaining a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce. DEI was presented as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.
Over the course of a year, a new branch appeared on the org chart, a vice president was hired, corporate goals were set, support groups established, and mailing lists created. Personal DEI goals were defined, refined, and aligned with corporate goals. Employee-development task lists were expected to feature several DEI-related objectives. Progress would need to be demonstrated on a quarterly basis. Mostly, my DEI training consisted of online “unconscious bias” courses provided by an external company.
At first, I was enthusiastic. Engineers like knowing how things work, and I thought I might gain some insight into my biases. But I soon realized that instead of gaining an increased level of self-awareness, I was simply learning the names of a long list of biases. Meanwhile, the continuing stream of emails from the DEI branch of the organization prompted me to set up an email filter, and my enthusiasm for the initiative began to wane. I started to feel like my corporate parents were openly expressing a preference for one of my siblings. It turns out you definitely can have too much of a good thing.
During one of my unconscious-bias courses, I learned that groups who’ve enjoyed an unchallenged, privileged position are the same groups most likely to feel threatened by change. What the courses didn’t mention was that any backlash directed at the intended beneficiaries of DEI initiatives would have been misplaced. I certainly felt exasperated with my employer, though.
The company seemed unwilling to explicitly state that certain new employees provided extra, unquantifiable value. And at no point did the company decide that some of that value should be returned to each new hire in the form of a higher salary. In fact, while the DEI initiative was being rolled out, salary ranges were tightened to prevent perceived discrimination. I’ve become less tolerant of heavy-handed corporate initiatives. A corporation should be able to profit by becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive while maintaining the morale of existing employees. In my experience, hitting the optimum rate of corporate culture change is difficult.
Greg, 61, says diversity training at the large aerospace company where he works has been addressed more intelligently and effectively than he would have anticipated based on media coverage.
He writes:
The training we had was pretty good, even to a skeptical observer. I remember a compelling discussion by one diversity trainer who said that we most frequently associate diversity considerations with gender and race, but that was in part a historical accident because those groupings were particularly important in the 1960s and 1970s when thinking about diversity as a workplace concept emerged. This trainer used an alternative case of employees in today’s workplace with prominent tattoos, a group that may be viscerally disturbing to older employees based on our conditioning when we were young, but tattoos are essentially irrelevant to workplace performance.
After President Donald Trump was elected, about 2,000 of our senior-level employees were on a quarterly phone call with our CEO. One asked: Given the change in administration, were we going to change our diversity policies? Our CEO replied that we would change nothing, because our policies were not to curry political favor. Our diversity strategy was to out-compete our rival companies, because we would expand our access to talent by addressing issues that have historically undervalued certain groups of people.
K. resents the training she was subjected to while doing civic work:
I have volunteered with the City of Madison (Wisconsin) Clerk’s Office every election since the 1990s and in recent years have worked as a special voting deputy helping with voter registration, taking absentee ballots to nursing homes, and the like. The city clerk’s office motto is “We exist to assist,” and most of us there let that be our guiding light in the service of democracy. Because our city is deeply concerned about equity, “diversity training” has been required for city personnel for the past several years. These sessions seem to be aimed at people who have never considered—much less worked to ameliorate—the problem of inequity and have only served to offend and alienate me.
I am an old progressive whose first professional position was bringing support services to migrant farm workers and their families. As a female raised in the 1960s, I know ALL about discrimination; you don’t need to describe it. The condescension implicit in these “woke” puppies presenting the novel idea that some people start off at a disadvantage to others is offensive.
I love my city, deeply respect its staff, and am still fully committed to equality as a cause, but showing me diversity slide shows has not had what I am pretty certain was the desired effect. And, yeah, it’s not about me, but please. I’ve been trying all my life. All. My. Life. I’ve been trying to make a difference.
Megan believes the DEI programming she has seen in higher education doesn’t address academia’s most pressing problems:
Grad school is a toxic environment: Students on assistantships are paid poverty wages, given health care they can barely afford, are overworked by advisers who perpetuate the bad mentorship practices they experienced, and get degrees in fields flooded with people vying for jobs. This is a bad environment for even a cis white male or female with good mental health … and the focus is increasing departmental diversity and pronoun training.
How is any person supposed to thrive here?
T.M. doesn’t fit neatly into any identity box:
I’ve worked as an adjunct professor for over a decade, mostly at a prestigious northeastern university. I’m also of Assyrian descent, with a heavy mix of old-school New England. I sometimes think the reason I wound up in American studies as a discipline is because in 1991, while I was doing a genealogy project for fifth-grade social studies, the teacher told me I couldn’t be an American. Here I was, 11 years old, the United States had gone to war in Iraq, and I didn’t feel comfortable trying to explain who or what Assyrians are. Iraq didn’t exist in 1906 when my father’s family came to America.
I don’t consider myself white-passing, but it’s been obvious since I was young that my grandfather and great-grandfather were of darker complexion than I am. I’m aware that I’ve been privileged by my white complexion, but I am often met with resistance to my belief that DEI is actually reinforcing the arbitrary cultural signifier of whiteness rather than decreasing it. Today, because I don’t fit neatly into one box, I find that the administrators at the university where I teach lack the same nuance as my fifth-grade social-studies teacher. My questions as to the efficacy of trainings are met with vague, bureaucratic language.
Echoing the language of Martin Luther King Jr., we at the university are told we are now a “beloved community,” but unlike MLK, the DEI initiatives ignore economic equity or inclusion. Diversity, instead, is merely a way to fit people into categorical racial boxes. It’s no wonder some people are resentful of being categorized into something that is so ill-defined.
The academy has failed to generate conversations that truly explore the functions of race and class. It’s off-putting to get boilerplate messaging about racial diversity from people who make six-figure salaries when they are the same people who cut my health care last year. I don’t see the equity or inclusion of that decision, but yet we are now “beloved.”
How can we truly be diverse, equitable, and inclusive when over half the faculty who teach in higher education are treated as disposable? We’re denying the very cracks in our foundation the administrators claim to be fixing. DEI isn’t a solution. It’s a corporate orthodoxy that creates problems. I am distrusting of these initiatives.
Caleb scoffs at “equity” efforts that ignore income:
I was an administrative assistant at a law firm in Maine. Through six hours of mandatory DEI trainings, professional and administrative staff alike were educated on the nuanced definitions of equality and equity, complete with visual aids of children standing on different sizes of wooden boxes. Meanwhile, there was an elephant in the room that was never acknowledged: the attorneys sitting in on these Zoom trainings with us were, and are still, paid in the range of five to 20 times what the administrative staff make.
During the pandemic, while we were expected to consume gas and time commuting to the office, masked up and at risk of infection, to sort and scan mail, print checks, etc., the professional staff could work from home, expense meals, and receive compensation for work-related travel. When I asked if I could receive compensation for my 90-minute commute, I was laughed out of the office. The consensus of the administrative staff after our mandatory six hours of preachy DEI trainings: They are a cruel joke so long as they ignore financial inequality. Of course, they could hardly be so popular in the business world if they highlighted the outrageous economic inequality it fosters.
Jaleelah, a student, describes how diversity programs feature in the world of competitive debate in Canada:
Virtually all debate teams and competitions have “equity officers” (a name that would give Ron DeSantis an aneurysm) who are responsible for “making sure participants are comfortable.” In practice, this means that barely trained university students are tasked with a wide range of responsibilities. Here is a list of equity functions I support:
- Arranging subsidies for students who can’t afford to pay for competitions
- Communicating with organizers to ensure disabled debaters are only assigned to rooms they can physically access at tournaments
- Ensuring that there are no conflicts of interest between judges and the teams they are assigned to adjudicate
Here is a list of functions I oppose:
- Mandating that trigger warnings be given before speeches (thankfully, this practice is not ubiquitous)
- Vetoing debate topics on the grounds that they might prompt people to make offensive arguments
And here is a list of functions that I have a neutral or varying opinion on:
- Constantly reminding people not to make sweeping generalizations about groups of people
- Mediating conflicts between students (some equity officers are horrible mediators, but I generally support the approach)
- Providing input on debate topics (when it is clear that students are not permitted to issue vetoes)
That’s a long list, but equity teams usually run pretty smoothly. I suspect that there are three reasons for this. First, equity’s power in debate is sufficiently limited. Judges do not penalize teams for the sole reason that a speaker said something “inequitable.” Equity teams cannot intervene in debate rounds (outside of a situation where one competitor is screaming targeted slurs or physically assaulting another), nor can they alter the results. Their most severe power of removing people from clubs and competitions is almost exclusively reserved for students who have committed crimes against other students (and those people usually resign anyway). When people perceive overreach, they complain loudly. Trigger-warning mandates for speakers have been greatly reduced because a number of people (including me) argued that they are ineffective.
Second, there are social incentives for equity officers to avoid doing stupid things. All equity officers are also debaters. It’s a bad idea to harshly punish someone for accidentally saying something offensive when you know you’ll have to spend an entire weekend with their friends. Equity officers are not above other students. This is sharply different from DEI trainings in the corporate world where a team of outside instructors assume a position of power over a given office or team.
Finally, the debate community assumes that people have good intentions. When conversations about ideological bias arise, conservatives and communists never accuse liberals of intentionally rigging rounds against them—they analyze the ways in which common unconscious biases cause judges to favor certain arguments.
And last in today’s roundup, an anonymous reader shares a diversity-training experience that caused him a lot of anxiety:
After years of teaching history at the college level, I took a job at an elite private high school, drawn in part by their stated goal of investing time, energy, and money in DEI education and initiatives. The school had a contract with a DEI-training company to educate all the faculty and administrators via a three-day retreat on race. My research and teaching has focused on race throughout my career. In a real sense, talking and writing about race is my job. Due to my personal and professional goals, I signed up to go.
We were immediately told by the facilitators that the purpose was not to train us in DEI but instead to have us spend the entire time reflecting on our own racial journeys. It was immediately clear that the space was designed to be a sort of deconstructed learning experience, where we were expressly forbidden from discussing the issue from the standpoint of research or debate. Instead we would discuss it at a personal level. Such ideas and stories, once shared, were subject to attack by the facilitators.
One white, female teacher was talkative and engaged in the first couple sessions, and the facilitators called her out for what they felt was a race-based domination of the space. Certainly, she’d made some “mistakes” in what she said about race, but the goal appeared to extract some kind of mea culpa. She meekly apologized and never spoke again.
Later, we were told with the utmost confidence that none of us talk about race in the classroom and that when the subject comes up we all shy away from it out of fear and cowardice. When a couple of teachers, including me, said that we were required to talk about race as part of the subjects we teach, this was met with a reiteration of the assertion that we do so reluctantly. The white facilitator then sat down cross-legged on the floor and spent an hour telling us how racist she was. I’m not being flip: The gist was that she once thought she wasn’t but then learned that she was and now understood that no matter how much she learned, she’d never escape her racist origin. She asked the whites in the room for their thoughts.
No one said anything for a long time. Then a white teacher started crying and said she'd been picked on for being poor and dark-skinned as a kid. The facilitators made it clear that this was the wrong answer.
On the final day, the most notable activity was one in which the group was split into white and people-of-color affinity groups. Afterward we came back to the main room and reflected. A Black teacher talked about positive stereotyping of Black people being just as reductive as negative stereotyping. I responded that this was something I've taught about in the case of the Middle East, saying that Orientalism not only perpetuates nasty things about Middle Eastern peoples (e.g. “All Muslims are sexist”) but posits supposedly good characteristics as uniform (e.g. “All Muslims are hospitable”). After a break, we came back together and the facilitators said that before we went on they wanted to tackle something.
Facilitators: “In the last session, you used the word ‘Orientalism.’ We want you to know that ‘Oriental’ is a very racist term to describe Asian people. But you put an -ism at the end and we wanted to ask what you meant by that.”
Me: “Um, well, ‘Orientalism’ refers to a group of scholars who called themselves ‘Orientalists’ because they studied the Middle East, and from the 1960s onward, were criticized by other scholars (especially Edward Said) for their reliance on Western biases.”
Facilitators: “Well, that is the scholarly, academic world. Here, in this space, ‘Oriental’ is a racist term. And we want you to reflect on that.”
Me: “I’m, um, sorry if anyone took it that way. In my work, this is a term we use to talk about racism …” [face red, heart racing]
Facilitators [interrupting]: “We’re out here, in this space. That space is academic. In this space, this is a space where ‘Oriental’ shouldn’t be said.”
I was fuming. To me, that exchange totally undermined any authority they had to speak on race, if they didn’t even know the primary word used to describe racism against Middle Eastern people. It doesn’t matter if people who are supposed to be experts in race have never heard of the term “Orientalism,” as if they missed the post-9/11 debates over Western biases against anyone deemed “Eastern”––I could lose my job over being called racist.
Gun homicides and car accidents are the leading causes of youth death. American children confront challenges as varied as bullying, poverty, gangs, sexual abuse, mental illness, and drug addiction. A state legislator hoping to protect kids might reasonably focus on any number of issues. Drag shows, those improbable culture-war flash points, are not among them. Yet Republican legislators in at least seven states are pushing bills to restrict shows where performers may deviate from traditional gender norms.
The most sweeping and objectionable proposals are not mere efforts to deprive drag shows of taxpayer funding or to keep them out of public primary schools. Rather, they would classify drag shows (as the sponsoring legislators variously define them) as akin to pornography. They would redefine any venue hosting such a show as an adult business, or try to shield even teenagers from drag in a society where almost all of them have regular access to the internet. Should any such proposal pass into law––at this early stage, their prospects are uncertain and may vary from state to state—the free speech and association rights of private venues, performers, artists, and willing audiences will all be infringed upon. And for what?
[Read: RuPaul’s Drag Race and the art of self-love]
These proposals are needless, excessive, and unconstitutional––so much so that more than one would belong in a Hall of Fame for legislative overreach that is at odds with freedom of speech.
Parents expose young kids to all sorts of things that strike me as age inappropriate, including the most hypersexualized drag shows that circulate via aggregators such as Libs of TikTok, which are outliers. Meanwhile, mountains of inappropriate movies, TV shows, video games, and internet content exceed the relative molehill of inappropriate drag performances (which would be just as inappropriate if cisgender women performed the same actions), whether measured by the ease of accessibility to kids or how many total kids see them.
Abstractly, the question of how many people need to be harmed to justify a new state law can be a difficult one. But I can find no evidence that any child has been harmed as the result of a drag performance. One suspects that some GOP legislators see drag shows not as especially big problems so much as big opportunities because a faction of their constituents zealously dislike them.
Regardless of motivation, any Constitution-respecting American should reject a law that infringes on free speech or artistic expression if the matter in question has zero proven victims. Some supporters of anti-drag laws maintain that drag shows have the effect of “grooming” kids into LGBTQ activism or an LGBTQ lifestyle. But that claim is speculative and unproven––and even if it were true that drag shows influence how kids think about gender, neither art nor free speech can survive if it is constitutionally unprotected anytime it influences how some of the children who witness it think. Of course, once drag-queen story hours for children weirdly became both progressive acculturation events and culture-war battlegrounds, attempted interventions in statehouses was inevitable. Perhaps it was also inevitable that many proposals would go further than is legal. Neither faction is committed to butting out when private undertakings offend its sensibilities. In this matter the Republicans are in the wrong.
In Nebraska, where the age of majority is 19, a law proposed by State Senator Dave Murman would prohibit anyone 18 or younger from being present at a drag show, which it defines expansively, as follows: First, the performance’s “main aspect” is “a performer which exhibits a gender identity that is different than the performer's gender assigned at birth using clothing, makeup, or other physical markers.” (I’d have thought a conservative would say that one’s sex is recorded at birth, not that one’s gender is assigned, but set that aside.) Second, “the performer sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs before an audience for entertainment.”
By that definition, an 18-year-old would be legally prohibited from attending a performance of the Broadway musical Mrs. Doubtfire, a comedy set by Eddie Izzard, a lecture on being trans by Caitlyn Jenner, or a rock concert by a female-and-costumed Beatles tribute band.
The proposed Nebraska law goes on: “Any person nineteen years of age or older who knowingly brings an individual under nineteen years of age to a drag show shall be guilty of a Class I misdemeanor.” That standard would have made criminals of numerous World War II officers, what with the ubiquity of drag shows performed by and for troops overseas during that era. (Here’s Ronald Reagan introducing a dramatization of one of those shows circa 1943.) I had hoped to question Murman about the breadth of entertainment that his proposal would constrain and the conduct that it would criminalize, but a spokesperson declined an interview invitation while passing along the prepared statement “I will always uphold my promise to enact policies that reflect Judeo-Christian values and defend the innocence of children.”
But what 18-year-old’s innocence would be ruined by Mrs. Doubtfire? A law can prohibit showing some expressive material to minors that would be legal for adults without violating the First Amendment, but it’s hard to imagine Nebraska’s expansive definition passing an obscenity test.
Democratic State Senator Megan Hunt is opposing the bill. A spokesperson in her office said that they intend to fight it but that defeating it may be an uphill battle that requires engagement from the public because Republicans enjoy a supermajority in the state legislature. Neither the bill nor an attempt by Hunt to indefinitely delay it has yet been debated on the floor.
In Arkansas, one bill would amend the definition of adult-oriented businesses to include drag performances. That bill is less egregious than its Nebraska analogue in that only drag shows “intended to appeal to the prurient interest” are affected, but it’s more restrictive in that it doesn’t just affect performances in which drag is “the main element”––even one extra in drag could trigger the law. It is hardly novel for legislators to seek to protect minors from performances that are “prurient,” which is to say, that appeal to a lustful interest in sexual stimulation or gratification, but it’s striking to draft a law that shields kids from ostensibly prurient performances only when the performers are cross-dressing. The approach seems to subject genderqueer people to unequal treatment under the law and suggests animus against them, failing another civil-rights test.
[Genevieve Lakier: The great free-speech reversal]
Similarly speech-infringing and chilling proposals are circulating in a number of other states. In Arizona, S.B. 1030 would classify and regulate establishments that conduct drag shows in the same way as adult arcades, massage parlors, and strip clubs. It defines a drag performer as “a person who dresses in clothing and uses makeup and other physical markers opposite of the person’s gender at birth to exaggerate gender signifiers and roles and engages in singing, dancing, or a monologue or skit in order to entertain an audience.” Under that definition, Rod Stewart’s upcoming concert at the arena where the Phoenix Suns play could conceivably result in its reclassification as an 18-and-up venue––while not generally thought of as a drag act, he has frequently styled himself in ways that incorporate normatively feminine looks.
Texas Monthly reported on an effort by State Representative Jared Patterson to treat venues that host “drag performances” as “sexually oriented businesses,” noting that if the bill passes, “a rock club or a community theater that doesn’t offer sexually explicit performances could find itself governed by the same rules” as strip clubs and porn theaters. “Given the stakes, those venues may well be unlikely to offer trans performers—even if they’re just strumming guitars or sitting behind drum kits—the opportunity to play.”
That analysis seems reasonable to me, and demonstrates how the bill would obviously discourage artistic expression and would presumptively make it disproportionately harder for trans performers to get work.
The Tennessean reported last month that State Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson is sponsoring legislation, S.B. 3, that is written broadly enough to conceivably encompass the actions in a bawdy sketch like the one that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani performed in drag together back in 2000 if it was performed in a place where a child could see it. The effect of that proposal, too, would be to chill all manner of speech and artistic expression for cis and trans performers who depart from the traditional gender norms of their sex.
Similar bills are under consideration in Missouri and Montana. One wonders if more are coming. Even if none passes, it is notable that legislators in so many states are singling out drag, especially in ways that raise significant constitutional problems. And should any bill pass aiming to restrict drag performances anywhere a child might see one, legal challenges will follow. As the UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment expert, told me in a phone interview, the precedent in the 1975 Supreme Court case Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville would be relevant. In that case, a Jacksonville, Florida, ordinance made it a punishable offense for a drive-in movie theater to show films containing nudity when the screen was visible from the street. The Supreme Court struck the ordinance down on First Amendment grounds.
“Much that we encounter offends our esthetic, if not our political and moral, sensibilities,” it ruled. “Nevertheless, the Constitution does not permit government to decide which types of otherwise protected speech are sufficiently offensive to require protection for the unwilling listener or viewer.”
[Read: Don’t use these free-speech arguments ever again]
The Court went on to address concerns about children. “Appellee maintains that even though it cannot prohibit the display of films containing nudity to adults, the present ordinance is a reasonable means of protecting minors from this type of visual influence,” the majority opinion states. The opinion points out that “the ordinance is not directed against sexually explicit nudity, nor is it otherwise limited. Rather, it sweepingly forbids display of all films containing any uncovered buttocks or breasts, irrespective of context or pervasiveness.” The ruling concludes that “speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them. In most circumstances, the values protected by the First Amendment are no less applicable when government seeks to control the flow of information to minors.”
In my own estimation, the state’s ability to control the flow of information to minors should be at its very weakest in cases where parents or guardians are in favor of exposing their children to the art or expression in question. And most young children who attend drag shows of any sort do so because their parents chose to take them. In an essay where the journalist and pioneering proponent of gay equality Andrew Sullivan both celebrates many types of drag performances and laments as regressive progressivism “the idea that a drag queen—rather than, say, a firefighter or a pilot or a tennis player—is somehow an ideal role model for young gay children,” he points out that drag-queen story hour is
a voluntary activity. It’s not compulsory. Parents can choose to take their kids or not. (The introduction of this into public schools where kids cannot opt out and parents aren’t told is another matter entirely.)
Either you believe in parents’ rights, or you don’t. And I’m happy to leave it up to parents—and no one else. The post-liberal right, we have come to understand, only believes in parents’ rights if the parents are social conservatives.
Of course, the legislation discussed above goes far beyond trying to unconstitutionally ban drag-queen story hours, similarly infringing on a wide array of performative events, even though, as the ACLU of Nebraska’s Jane Seu put it in a statement, “Families have a First Amendment right to attend these events and performers and venues have a right to offer them.” Free-speech claims are often denigrated by neo-puritan factions on the right and left these days, but they remain an essential bulwark protecting minority communities from would-be censors. If the GOP improbably succeeds in overcoming those claims, its Pyrrhic crusade against drag will triumph at the expense of individual liberty and expressive rights for everyone.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
What do you think of the diversity-training and DEI industries? Do you have personal experiences with them? I’d love to hear from boosters and critics alike, especially if your commentary is grounded in something you’ve observed at work, school, or elsewhere in your life.
Send your responses to [email protected] or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
“What if diversity trainings are doing more harm than good?”
That’s the headline of a recent New York Times op-ed by Jesse Singal, the writer, podcaster, and author of a 2018 Atlantic cover story, who delves into the multibillion-dollar diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) industry. While its advocates claim that “diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps and so on,” Singal writes, in practice there is “little evidence that many of these initiatives work.” And the type of diversity training “that is currently in vogue—mandatory trainings that blame dominant groups for D.E.I. problems—may well have a net-negative effect.”
I have a theory about why programs of that sort might fail. After Donald Trump was elected, I studied the political-psychology research on authoritarian personality types. I was especially impressed by the work of Karen Stenner, who found in her scholarship that “a good deal of what we call racial intolerance is not even primarily about race, let alone blacks, let alone African Americans and their purported shortcomings” (though anti-Black, ideological racists do of course exist and African Americans are harmed regardless of what drives intolerance). “Ultimately,” Stenner contended, “much of what we think of as racism, likewise political and moral intolerance, is more helpfully understood as ‘difference-ism,’” defined as “a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective order of oneness and sameness.”
As I explained in a 2019 article:
The distinction isn’t merely about word choice. It has critical implications for fighting and easing both racism and other forms of intolerance. For example, in an entirely separate experiment meant to manipulate the way authoritarians viewed “us” and “them,” subjects were told that NASA had verified the existence of alien life––beings “very different from us in ways we are not yet even able to imagine.” After being told that, the measured racial intolerance of authoritarian subjects decreased by half, a result that suggests a general intolerance of difference that varies with perceptions of otherness, not fixed antagonism against a racial group. Their boundaries (and thus their behavior!) can be swiftly altered, Stenner emphasized, just by this simple cognitive device of creating a “superordinate group”: making “black people look more like ‘us’ than ‘them’ when there are green people afoot.” Under these conditions, the authoritarians didn’t only become kinder to black people, Stenner noted; they also became more merciful to criminals—that is, less inclined to want a crackdown on perceived moral deviance.
As I went on to explain:
Stenner’s book reaches a conclusion that cuts against one of the main progressive strategies for fighting racism in American society: the belief that if we have the will, everyone can be socialized to respect and value difference. “All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference … are the surest way to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors,” she wrote.
The appearance of sameness matters, and “apparent variance in beliefs, values, and culture seem to be more provocative of intolerant dispositions than racial and ethnic diversity,” so “parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness” seems wise when possible.
Put more simply, perhaps 15 percent of humans are psychologically ill-suited to dealing with difference—and when DEI-industry programming deliberately raises the salience of race in a given organization with the intention of urging anti-racism, the effect is to exacerbate differentism.
In an article that dovetails nicely with Stenner’s insights, Matthew Yglesias once explained why he believes that raising the salience of race in public-policy debates is frequently bad for anti-racism.
He wrote:
A deep body of scholarship across history, political science, and economics all broadly point toward the conclusion that increasing the salience of race can have harmful results.
One particularly frustrating example I came across years ago at Vox is that Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt found in experimental settings that telling people about racial disparities in the criminal justice system made people less supportive of reform.
And you could react to that by thinking “wow, that sucks, people shouldn’t be so terrible,” but I think most people believe there are tradeoffs between harshness in the criminal justice system and public safety. And while more progressive-minded people would say that’s overstated, there are clearly some margins on which it’s true. So if you tell people a penalty will be applied in a racist way, for many of them, that’s appealing—the system can crack down on dealers and addicts while they personally can rest assured that if their kid happens to be caught doing drugs, he’ll be okay. By the same token, a friend who’s running for office told me that many of the people she speaks to who are most agitated about crime also hate traffic cameras. My guess is that’s precisely because traffic cameras don’t engage in racial discrimination, and nice middle-class white people don’t like the idea of an enforcement system that doesn’t exempt them.
In the specific case of the cameras, I think we should have more of them and that the aim of our criminal justice system more broadly should be to catch a larger share of offenders in a non-discriminatory way and then punish them less harshly. Ideally, everyone who speeds would get caught and fined and the fines wouldn’t necessarily be very high, but people would stop doing speeding because the odds of detection are overwhelming.
And in the general case, I think it’s clear that the goal should be to reduce the salience of race in public debate and focus on the direct objects of reducing poverty, making policing more accountable, improving schools, reducing air pollution, expanding health insurance coverage, and otherwise solving the big problems of American society. All of this would, mechanically, close racial gaps. But highlighting that is genuinely counterproductive.
I mention these writers at such length because many diversity-loving people find it surprising that DEI training could be counterproductive, and Stenner and Yglesias’s work offers plausible explanations for why. But the intersection of politics, psychology, and race is exactly the sort of wildly complicated subject area where epistemic modesty and airing diverse viewpoints is vital for truth-seeking, so I hope that fans of DEI training and members of the industry will stand up for their work.
But to defend the industry in aggregate will require a lot of explaining. As Singal wrote, “Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is ‘disappointing,’ wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, ‘considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.’”
The Harvard Business Review has been publishing articles that cast doubt on the efficacy of mainstream DEI approaches for years. “One reason why I found Jesse’s piece so compelling is that he’s echoing arguments I made more than a year ago,” David French wrote in The Dispatch. “I quoted from a 2018 summary of studies by Harvard University professor Frank Dobbin and and Tel Aviv University professor Alexandra Kalev that said, ‘Hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that anti-bias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.’”
In French’s telling, that scholarship has implications for the culture wars:
We fight a tremendous amount over diversity training—even to the point of violating civil rights laws and the First Amendment—to either mandate or prohibit certain forms of DEI instruction when DEI instruction doesn’t impact hearts and minds much at all. It’s Diet Coke. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that just doesn’t deliver what its advocates hope for, nor does it foster identity politics in the way that many of its opponents fear.
… People just aren’t that malleable. For good and ill, we’re built of sterner, less flexible stuff, and periodic Corporate PowerPoints or group learning sessions can’t really shape peoples’ lives.
For more, see a podcast debate that Jane Coaston hosted on diversity initiatives and my 2021 profile of the entrepreneur and public intellectual Chloé Valdary, who offers an alternative approach to DEI training that she calls the Theory of Enchantment. Finally, for a deep dive into the history of the diversity-training industry, see Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s 2002 book Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.
“There’s No Planet B”
In Aeon, Arwen E. Nicholson and Raphaëlle D. Haywood reject the possibility of humanity moving off of Earth:
Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching an age of interplanetary colonisation. But can we really leave Earth and all our worries behind?
No. All these stories are missing what makes a planet habitable to us. What Earth-like means in astronomy textbooks and what it means to someone considering their survival prospects on a distant world are two vastly different things. We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend completely on the billions of other living organisms that make up Earth’s biosphere.
Without them, we cannot survive. Astronomical observations and Earth’s geological record are clear: the only planet that can support us is the one we evolved with. There is no plan B. There is no planet B. Our future is here, and it doesn’t have to mean we’re doomed.
Gas Stoves and Asthma
Emily Oster attempts to evaluate the data.
Berlin’s Failing Army
Spiegel International argues that even with war raging in Ukraine, and the attendant need for German contributions to European security, the German military is in dire shape. It reports the following:
In June, the Bundestag passed a 100-billion-euro special fund for the German military, and in December the Budget Committee released the first 13 billion from that fund for eight defense projects, including the new F-35 combat aircraft. “It is clear that we must invest much more in the security of our country in order to protect our freedom and our democracy,” the chancellor said in his February address to the nation. Scholz also formulated his political expectations: “The goal is a powerful, cutting-edge, progressive Bundeswehr that can be relied upon to protect us.” The question is: How much progress has been made on fulfilling that pledge. Since then, after all, the Defense Ministry has been producing little in the way of announcements about restructuring and reform, instead landing on the front pages due to gaffes and catastrophic shortcomings.
One example: The commander of the 10th Tank Division reported to his superiors that during an exercise with 18 Puma infantry fighting vehicles, all 18 of them broke down. It was a worrisome incident given that the ultra-modern weapons systems are a key component of the NATO rapid-reaction force. There is a lack of munitions and equipment—and arms deliveries to Ukraine have only worsened the situation. “The cupboards are almost bare,” said Alfons Mais, inspector general of the German army, at the beginning of the war. André Wüstner, head of the German Bundeswehr Association, seconds him: “We continue to be in free fall.” The situation is so bad that the German military has become a favorite punchline of late-night comedy shows … The German military, to be sure, is no stranger to mockery and ridicule, but it hasn’t been this bad in a long time.
Is This Morning in America?
David Brooks argues in The Atlantic that the future is brighter for the country than many now imagine:
If a society is good at unlocking creativity, at nurturing the abilities of its people, then its ills can be surmounted. The economist Tyler Cowen suggests a thought experiment to illustrate this point. Take out a piece of paper. In one column, list all of the major problems this country faces—inequality, political polarization, social distrust, climate change, and so on. In another column, write seven words: “America has more talent than ever before.” Cowen’s point is that column B is more important than column A. Societies don’t decline when they are in the midst of disruption and mess; they decline when they lose energy.
And creative energy is one thing America has in abundance.
Provocation of the Week
At Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Davis, California, some workers are trying to unionize. Faith Bennett reports on their grievances in Jacobin:
Like many other baristas and service workers, Peet’s employees are challenged by schedules that are delivered on short notice, unreliable hours, lean staffing, and difficulty securing coverage. As a result, café positions have high rates of turnover. But members of PWU are invested in making the job more sustainable for themselves and more tenable for those who come next.
In Davis, Peet’s workers report that they are often scheduled for shifts that are deliberately shortened so that they are not afforded breaks. Meanwhile mobile orders exacerbate understaffing issues: the company does not place restrictions on mobile orders, which often leads to a torrent of tickets, not all of which are picked up, and delays of drinks ordered by customers who arrive in person. The current practice around mobile orders exhausts baristas and contributes to frustration of customers, who sometimes direct that frustration toward staff.
Although it is possible to turn off the mobile order system, this can only be accomplished if staff from a given store put in a request to the district manager, who oversees operations at approximately seventeen locations. Having this request granted for even an hour is a rare occurrence … mobile orders, a lack of breaks, and understaffing curtail the ability to chat with regulars who look to baristas for social interaction.
That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.
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